Just when you think you’ve seen it all ...

Hobbyist woodcarvers have discovered that the materials in the core of various brands of golf balls make excellent carving materials. They strip the covers off of half the ball, and the work the rubber cores with woodcarving tools. As you can see in the photo, some of them can be quite cute.

There are more photos of carved golf balls here.

If you want to get started, you could begin with some golf ball carving patterns as found here. Woodcarvers.Org has some basic instructions on getting started with golf ball carving.

The Viking Woodcarvers Group’s Newsletter has some instructions on golf ball carving.

Instructions for converting a PVC pipe cutter to a golf ball cover remover.

Amazon has a book on the subject: The Carving Range - A Guide To Carving Golf Balls Or, if you don’t already have the tools, you can get this
golf Ball Carving Kit, (shown at right) which contains everything you’ll need.

For the entrepreneurs among you, I think that there’s a market out there for pre-cut balls. Amazon is selling a BOX OF 3 CUT GOLF BALLS for $10. I’ll also bet that the finished ones would sell to pro shops like hot cakes.

If you just want to buy some carved golf balls, you can find them on EBay:

Scary stuff here. A runaway golf cart plows through a group of football staff.

But here’s the really strange thing. It takes off in another directions, turns, and then heads straight toward the crowd. I wonder if its name is Christine

Weird Golf Story

Two wild boar piglets met their bloody demise on Tuesday after a Värmland golf club finally tired of their foraging in the rough, nosing across the greens and snuffling along the fairways.
”We hope that we are rid of them now, that the others were scared off for good,” said Malte Ottosson, chairman of the Dömle Golf Club, to The Local.

The wild boar family, a sow and eight piglets, has been terrorising the fairways for about a week, Ottosson said. In local media it has been speculated on whether they have been placed in the area by hunters, hoping to increase the brood.

All Ottosson knows for sure is that they appeared suddenly and started to cause havoc on the greens.

”They just came out of nowhere and started ruining our fairways,” he said.

More here.

There’s a fair bit of research out there that shows that the difference between an dilettante and a top pro in any endeavor is about 10,000 hours of practice. Based on this idea, one man has committed himself to putting in 10,000 hours of practice to go from novice to pro.

As much as I love golf, I don’t think I could do it.

When I was young, my father used to claim that boys needed to do the bulk of the yard work because there was a critter out there called a “land shark” which ate middle aged men. The only preventative was beer and a lounge chair. Boys, it seems, don’t taste good to the sharks.

I was disappointed when I visited a Disney Golf Course in Florida and didn’t see a single alligator. But now, it seems that one Queensland course, has one-upped the alligators in Florida with a shark in a pond. Now that’s a hazard:

A pair of Fresno, California ATM thieves have been making their getaways in a golf cart.

A sign of the times, I suppose. Or perhaps a sign of the end-times.

Another sign of the apocalypse: police in Monterey County said they found an explosive device at the foot of the forty foot cliff on Pebble Beach’s ninth.

I can only speculate that the madman intended to bring down the cliff, and with it, the hole.