The New York Times reports that golf balls are among the materials BP is trying to plug the leak from Deepwater Explorer.

From CNN:

For the last few months, a large raven has been stalking Greencastle Golf Club in Donegal before swooping and flying off with people’s balls.
Several players have witnessed the burglar at work while others have struck what they thought was an accurate shot only to arrive on the green to find no sign of their ball.

Billy McCaul, the golf club’s office manager, says players are reporting stolen balls on a weekly basis.

“It started to happen about four months ago, when you had the odd comment about a ball being taken by a bird,” McCaul told CNN.

“Because we are a seaside course, birds have picked balls up in the air so we took it to be something like that, but then it became consistent and persistent.
“At first I took it as a bit of fun, as did most members, but it has got to the extent where it is having an effect on prizes and competitions and various other things.”

I’m going to start using Ravens as an excuse for any lost balls.

South Carolina legislators apparently are considering whether to allow golf carts on highways.

Dumb. People will get killed unnecessarily.

In one of the strangest golf stories I’ve seen yet, Dublin morticians preparing a body found a golf ball lodged in the deceased man’s throat—after a post-mortem ruled out foul play. Police apparently are looking into the incident.

I’m absolutely certain that having a golf ball lodged in your throat would induce death. The only question is whether the ball was shoved in before, or after the man died. And if it was after, that begs the question of why.

There’s a golf mystery novel in this one.

Don’t look now, but the environmentalists are going after our beloved sport:

Research teams at the Danish Golf Union have discovered it takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally. A startling fact when it is also estimated 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States alone, every year. It seems the simple plastic golf ball is increasingly becoming a major litter problem.

The scale of the dilemma was underlined recently in Scotland, where scientists—who scoured the watery depths in a submarine hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster—were surprised to find hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch.

In addition to worrying about the millennium-long decomposition, there apparently is concern about levels of zinc in the cores.

A UK lawmaker said “From the moon to the bottom of Loch Ness, golf balls are humanity’s signature litter in the most inaccessible locations.”

You can see the Loch Ness golf balls in the video below.

Given all this, I can see a real future in biodegradable golf balls. Once the Congress gets ahold of this one ....