My beloved new Subaru has a big dent in it.

As I was returning from the golf show last night, rolling at about 70 mph in the right hand lane of the expressway, I was suddenly sideswiped by a silver sedan, who was weaving in and out of the traffic at an extraordinary speed.  He bounced off the front of my Subaru, spun around, skidded off the right hand side of the road, flying over the ditch, down the embankment and ending up in the trees beyond.

Hitting the brakes, I quickly pulled off to the side. The idiot had been traveling so fast that his final resting place was about a six iron shot in front of me. Thinking he had to be badly injured, I immediately called 911. Another car stopped and a good Samaritan jumped out and went running toward the crash in the woods. But while I was on the phone with the State Police, the sedan backed out of the trees, pulled up the embankment and drove off at high speed.

I didn’t get a license plate.

The State Trooper who showed up about twenty minutes later said that he likely was drunk as a skunk and knew that if he had stayed, he’d end up in handcuffs. At this point, I regretted calling 911 first. I should have gone with my initial instinct and gotten out my camera to photograph the car and license plate.

The remarkable thing about the whole incident is that I’m apparently uninjured, and the Subaru seems to have suffered relatively minor damage. The Forester never swerved; the steering wheel required no correction; I stayed on-line in my lane and pulled off as if nothing had happened. In fact, until I saw the guy spinning out in front of me, my first thought was that I’d run over a dead raccoon in the road—all I felt was a little thump.

The other car literally bounced off me.

But I’m really annoyed. This is going to cost me time and money. I haven’t checked with my insurance company, and I don’t know what the deductable is going to be. It’s also going to mean that I’ll be out my vehicle for several days. Yes, I’ll get a rental, but those really suck.

The drunk was leaking something from his car. I hope it catches fire and burns his garage down.

Paul Harvey has died and I’m going to miss him.

I’ve been listening to “Paul Harvey News and Comment” since the 1970s. He was pushing sixty at that time, but his message spoke spoke to me as a youth. Harvey loved his country, was optimistic about the future and advocated a can-do spirit. Coming from anyone else, his act would have seemed corny. But Paul Harvey was sincere. You could tell he truly believed what he was saying.

And that meant a lot in that time. The 1970s were a period of great unrest, economic upheaval and uncertainty. Paul Harvey was my link to a more stable, more reasonable past. He was confident that things would be better. I am certain that Paul Harvey and Jimmy Carter are the twin reasons I grew to become a conservative.

In all honesty, I think Paul Harvey’s show suffered in recent years. He had taken an interest in what I would call “junk science,” and and perhaps moved a bit away from his more conservative roots. But he was still sincere and I looked forward to that daily “Good Morning, Americans. This is Paul Harvey”

Paul Harvey has had a lot of substitutes over the last few years—including Michigan’s own Paul W. Smith—but none will be able to replace him. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve lost a national treasure.

The other house cat.

Taken with my new Canon Rebel and a macro lens.

A photo of the house cat taken with the macro lens on my new Canon Rebel Xsi.

There’s no golf connection, but I liked the photo.

On Saturday I took Thing One and Thing Two out for nine holes at the local dirt track. Thing Two ran from shot to shot, shouting “WooHoo” along the way. This irritated Thing One, who was sure that his little brother’s distraction was the cause for his missed shots.

I made it another year (not that there was ever any real doubt.) Pretty soon I’ll be old enough to play golf on the Senior Tour. All I have to do is work on my driving ... and my irons ... and my woods ... and my short game.

Putting I have figured out.

It hit seventy degrees here today in Michigan (isn’t Global Warming a wonderful thing) and I went to play at a course in mid-south Michigan called Concord Hills. It’s a wonderfully friendly course, with wide fairways and small, but well conditioned greens. Surprisingly, it also has some real elevation changes. There were a couple of holes where the shot to the green was plus-two or three clubs. Of course, on the other side of the coin, it’s a lot of fun to hit a tee shot off a mountaintop like this one. I think my shot went 300 yards here.