The Itinerant Golfer is trying to play the top 100 courses in America. He’s got a blog about his efforts.

Sky Clock, which I wrote about in a previous post, has released a free iPhone app, Sky Clock lite.

I’ll say it again. I think this is a terrific app—amazingly useful for anyone who needs to know twilight and dawn: fishermen, hunters, photographers and of course, golfers. The app—desktop or smartphone—offers a graphical representation of your geographically targeted sunrise, sunset and twilight times.

The company also has a YouTube channel which explains it further.

City Golf Tour is an online golf league where you can regularly compete against players from across the country without ever actually meeting them in person. Using USGA handicaps and scores recorded from your local course, City Golf Tour lets you compete for prizes against 156 other hackers. The press release follows.

CityGolfTour.com Celebrates the Hacker in Us All

Not since greenskeeper, Carl Spackler, fired the shot from the Mum bed heard around the world of Bushwood C.C., has the amateur golfer been more celebrated.

Until now.

I’m proud to bring you, now on the first tee, playing out of Seattle, Washington, CityGolfTour.com.

Today, we launch a revolution in fantasy sports. CityGolfTour.com provides ANY golfer the opportunity to compete in national tournaments that you can play from your favorite home course. All you need is a USGA handicap and a City Golf Tour membership in this new concept in tournament golf.

Play begins in the inaugural tournament on July 12, 2010.

CityGolfTour.com is the brainchild of husband and wife team, Jack Hutt and Wendy Anderson. They have been running a Seattle golf league for amateurs by the same name for around ten years, when they decided to expand their vision online.

Golfers at every skill level are invited to compete.

CityGolfTour.com uses a combination of the player’s USGA handicap, the slope rating of the course they’re playing, and some secret sauce algorithm to level the playing field for fair competition. This way a 15+ handicap hack like me can compete with the Eubank phenoms of the world.

A total of $500 in cash prizes are awarded to the top 20 players, while 10% of all tournament entry fees goes to charity. Really, though, I think it’s going to be more about bragging rights than bucks. There’s still that competitive streak in all of us, even if it’s just with ourselves.

So tee one up for charity and make CityGolfTour.com a part of your game.

In the words of Carl, “It’s a Cinderella story.”

They’ve got rules to help prevent cheating, but since so many will cheat on their own handicaps with nothing on the line but pride, I’m not sure how they’ll avoid cheaters in the league. Maybe that “secret sauce algorithm” will compensate for that.

At any rate, it sounds like a neat idea.

The Pink Diva Golf Blog covers the sport from a woman’s perspective. They also sell a nice selection of Swarovski embedded shirts and towels. Give it a visit.

The best time to play golf in Michigan—in my not-so-humble opinion—is at twilight. The morning and afternoon crowds are gone, the air is cooling and at most courses, the prices drop. It’s important, however, to schedule your tee time just right so that you can finish your nine or eighteen before it gets too dark to see the ball. Up North, at GolfBlogger Summer Headquarters, that’s sometimes as late as 10 pm. In southeastern Michigan, it’s somewhat earlier.

SkyClock is a neat looking desktop app that helps you visually track the twilight hours. As you can see from the screen capture, it’s geographically targeted and shows on an analog face the sunrise, sunset and twilight times. Of course, you could find the actual times on any weather site, but this compacts it all into a visually appealing package. Edward Tufte would be proud.

It’d be cool if a java version of this app were running on the front page of every golf course website in America. Then you could always tell just how much time you had before jumping into the car.

My student teacher recently glommed me onto a free ESPN betting game called Streak For The Cash.

It’s a lot of fun. The goal is to put together a string of winning bets from a constantly changing selection. Today, for example, you could have chosen to “bet” (among other items) on either Michael Bradley or Carl Petterson for the lowest round scores at the Puerto Rico Open; whether the combined scores of the Michigan-Iowa game would total 117 or more; or whether West Virginia will win by double or single digits tonight against Cincinnati. As soon as one event is over, you can place a “bet” on another.

If you win your bet, that extends the streak. Losing a bet starts you over at zero, but your longest streak is recorded. At the end of the month, the player who managed to put together the longest streak for the month wins $100,000. Right now, the longest streak is 16.

Lets give a warm welcome to the blogosphere to the Houston Golf Nut. He’s originally form Michigan, so he has to be a good guy I love his logo.