Here’s good news for the hackers: The Hawaii Supreme Court has ruled that golfers are not responsible for mistakenly hitting another golfer with a ball.

I claim Cherokee ancestry. My grandmother was raised on a reservation in Oklahoma, and she enrolled me on the lists when I was a baby (although I don’t know if I have since been purged).

So I was excited to learn of the Native American Cup, a competiton between Native American teams, designed to raise money for scholarships.

It’s a neat idea.

Given the burgeoning Chinese interest in golf, Scottish authorities have begun an effort to attract the Chi-Coms to the home of golf.

In the article, Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell said

he admired China’s growing love of golf, but said “a golfer who never plays in Scotland is a golfer unfulfilled”.

Chinese tourism could be worth about £70m to Scotland over the next four years, it has been estimated. Restrictions on Chinese tourists travelling to the UK were removed last year.

The interest of the Chinese in golf only goes as far as the evil old men who run that totalitarian police state have an interest. They have, in recent years, sponsored several high stakes tournaments and are building numerous luxury resort courses. Given that the majority of the country lives in grinding poverty, it seems that they must have better things to do with their money. I find it even more ironic that in the “people’s paradise”, they have decided to take up the sport of the Captains and the Kings.

In 1949, Mao Tse-tung took time out from murdering his own people to order that all of the country’s golf courses be razed to “banish the millionaire’s game.” The bloodthirsty old tyrant is probably spinning in his grave right now.

Even more interesting: the Chinese sports ministry recently announced that it was starting a drive to catapult Chinese athletes into the top of the golfing world. It’ll surely be an effort like they’ve put forth to get to the top of the Olympic games. The government will identify talent early, take them away from their parents and put them up in government dormitories where they will live, breathe and eat golf.

Hmm. It actually doesn’t sound all that bad.

Of course, they may just be trying to find a place to dump all of those counterfeit clubs that they have been producing. I’ve also read that they have exported millons of fake top-of-the-line golf balls, too. (How can you tell if you have a Chinese Communist knock off ball? It goes left.)

However, given that the Chinese claim to have invented golf themselves, perhaps it is they that should be trying to attact the Scots.

Faced with high unemployment, a sagging currency, environmental worries, and ethnic strife, the European Union has decided to tackle ... sexism in golf.

I’m reading about this sort of tragedy with depressingly increasing frequency.

In this case, a 16-year-old girl in Sydney was killed when she was struck in the temple by a golf ball. She had been playing in a golfing competition.

As crowded as courses are these days, I think that we have to be extra careful when we take a swing to be sure that people are out of the line of fire—especially people within a hundred yards—which is too close for anyone to react with a “fore.”

It also makes it increasingly unfunny to hit into a group ahead ... something that I’ve seen people do for yucks.