July Miscellany

Tasting notes for Buckfast Tonic Wine: a treacly tipple. Rarely have I opened a bottle of wine with so much anticipation, for the reputation of this wine certainly precedes it. It is fine, taken in small doses, although when in the South of England in the summer I still prefer a . . .

 . . . Pimm’s. Your Party Needs You, as they say. 

My favorite golf magazine is Golf Course Seminar, published by the Golf Digest Japan Co. You will have seen and perhaps read, or tried to read, as have I, the various articles I have written for that publication over the past few years. Their publication in Japanese makes it quite difficult to understand the rather technical content.

So it was a pleasant surprise to discover a magazine that I can decipher, at least from what I saw of the August issue. This is Golf Today. And their insightful analysis of the skirt length of lady golfers was one of the most interesting pieces I’ve read all year. Although I would complain that their representation of the measurements and ratios in pie charts (not shown) was less than ideal. 

I’m not a big fan of pie charts, but I’ve been doing a lot of work with scatter plots, bubble charts, motion charts, etc. since my sabbatical in Phuket two months ago. Now I’m having a bit of a sabbatical at Japan, and I’m doing some work with heatmaps. I think I’ll be able to make completely incomprehensible heatmaps, but I haven’t succeeded yet. Stay tuned for those. Oh, and not to foreshadow another undefeated month, but stay tuned for the July golf report as well.