God Takes Care of Winos and Children-They're on Hole 16 at Shadow Ridge!

My biggest regret of the weekend is that I didn't take a picture of the guy slumped against a tree at the 16th hole of Shadow Ridge on Sunday.

As I, HT, Yak Herder and Father of Yak came barreling out of the tunnel from hole 15 (which I dubbed '101 Damnations' in real-time right here via my blackberry) and pulled up to the tee, I thought we'd been transported into the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It appeared that an actual cartoon wino was practically passed out in the tee box. (On a side note, just now when I was looking for an image to go with 'cartoon wino,' about half the search results mentioned Amy Winehouse. Just saying.)

My first thought was, "Couldn't we have been transported to the world of a BETTER movie?"

My second thought was that as cartoony as this guy might be, he was in fact real and nothing more than a hotel guest who had sauced up and decided to hit the links. With his face.

By the time we got there, he was leaning against a tree, but listing to starboard quite a bit, with a mostly finished glass of red wine in his hand.

"I guess I'll have to move now," he said, as he made a truly token gesture to try to get up.

"No, no, just stay where you are," Father of Yak said. If he had tried to stand up and failed, we figured he'd be our responsibility, legally speaking and so we just wanted him to stay down.

"Ok, then, I'll take some notes from you guys then," he said. No notebook was in evidence of course.

This was the second day in a row shenanigans had been afoot on the 16th hole. The previous day an organized band of 9 year old ruffians had decided to form a human chain in the middle of the 16th hole. My pleas of "Hey, you guys, it's dangerous. You have to get off the course," were completely ignored on the grounds that I was so far away they couldn't hear me and on the grounds of being a gang of kids on the giantest green lawn in the world with awesome sandboxes and who cares what this crazy group of old men waving sticks at them was saying anyway.

This all changed when Father of Yak fired a ball down the fairway (at a safe distance from the children, naturally) and one of the kids proceeded to pick it up and run with.

This triggered the natural affection a son has for his father (and his father's pretty decent tee shot), so Yak Herder shouts "Put down that frakkin' ball!" Except he didn't say 'frakkin'.' In fact, I don't think he used any Battlestar Galactica lingo at all.

That earned us the scorn of concerned citizens in other rooms of the hotel who were standing on their balconies staring out at the course and judging both our golf and our manners.

After absorbing their derision for a few minutes, we quietly hit our tee shots and motored on. We promised to never speak of it again, but that turns out to have been a lie, at least where I'm concerned.

Anyway, back to the wino. He graciously accepted our invitation to remain seated, but he didn't stop talking.

"You're on video camera! You're on video camera!" he kept saying. No video camera was in evidence either. Perhaps he meant the video camera of his mind, or maybe he was warning us more generally about the slow encroachment of the Police State on our precious privacy. Good point, Drunky. Eternal vigilance being the price of freedom and all that.

Shockingly, he kept his mouth shut as we teed off and no children spirited away our (undoubtedly awesome) tee shots once they hit the ground. We bid him farewell and tried to get the hell off the 16th tee as quickly as possible. As we rounded the corner, his balance finally gave way and he fell over on the ground like an overstuffed tall sack of flour.

And here is a gratuitous picture of me driving a golf cart with no hands, followed by a contest:















And now the contest...be the first person to tell me the name of a restaurant on or adjacent to the street where the entrance to the Altadena Golf Course is (not including the grill at the course itself) and I will personally deliver (or send) you a birthday cake even though it's not your birthday.

Ready, set, go!