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.

EA is running a beta of the Tiger Woods golf game online, and you can sign up for free. I did, and played the Torrey Pines course. It’s amazing—exactly as I remember it on my round.

Uglies Golf is a new site that aggregates golf news stories, offering links to what the editors think are the best of the day. Not sure why it’s “Uglies Golf”, though. Give it a visit.

Update: The nice folk at Uglies Golf inform me that:

For the record, the technical definition of “uglies” is “Uglies can be a side bet in any group of golfers. Determine the value of each “ugly” before the round begins. Uglies are automatically won by any golfer holing a shot from off the green. Also decide before the round if chip-ins from the fringe will count.”

Golf Bookie is an interesting idea. It’s a free website that helps you to track your individual, team, skins and nines bets. Nothing for a Nassau or Calcuttas, though, which are the most common I’ve seen.

Press release follows:

I just spotted a new (to me; it’s been around since 2006) golf blog: Eye On Golf. It’s well done. I especially like his recent post on Britt Hume’s comments on Tiger, and the media’s reaction.

Give it a read.