You heard me.  So go see this handsome fella here.  Yep, that’s Chuck Cook, and he has joined the instruction team out at UT Golf Club.  I watched him give some tips to the boys there on how to use all that technology they have out there, and it was a sublime combination of technology, experience, hard work, intelligence and simplicity.  I wanted to put down the Nikon and get strapped in.  But I prefer to play the game instead of study the nuances of my golf swing.  At least right now.  The minute I make a bunch of putts and shoot 80 is when I head out Quinlan Park Road and hang on to Chuck’s pantsleg until he agrees to diagnose me.

I never even knew this was a contest, but evidently, at The Shady Grove down there on Barton Springs Road, you can sit in (and tweet from) the first ever “Tweet Seat Champion Chair.” Evidently, Twitter’s GPS functionality can identify from exactly where the most tweets have been sent, and to think our own little Shady Grove is such a hotspot for the twitterazzi, having broadcast over 71 million tweets in 2009 alone.  Congratulations, Shady Grove, and thanks to Twitter’s media people for the use of this shot.

Professional photographers would never shoot with a D80, yet I did for about a year and made some significant revenue with it.  It’s now the camera I take on vacation and to kids’ parties and such.  I shot this one with my old D80, a cheap Tamron zoom lens attached, through a commercial airliner window, behind the wing, through the thrust of the engine.  So the next time the asshole at the camera store starts telling you about image quality, restrain the urge to thank him with your middle finger.

From a consumer marketing standpoint, here’s a good reason to avoid aerial photography of golf courses, at least in the Hill Country.  I don’t care who you are.  You can’t tell me that this shot does anything for anyone (except maybe a developer or a homebuilder.)  I hate the word “standpoint.”

Southwest knew what it was doing when it selected its ticker symbol.  I’m sure it was because of its home base there in Dallas at Love Field, but I luv that company.  Strange that they seem to be able to operate so well, so safely, so happily and so profitably when others cannot.  People sure bitch about Southwest, and I think there was even a TV show based on travelers’ complaints, but if there’s a choice, I fly Southwest every time.  This here’s a shot of them bringing me back from Vegas, with money in my pocket and no hangover.  The three guys behind me who were celebrating a buddy’s return from Iraq?  Not sure if they had any money left, but they were not feeling so well.

I stopped by the 8th green at Lakecliff Country Club on the way home from my D-Crain shoot on Tuesday and got this one.

My six year old lost his first pet today.  A fish he originally named “Repto-Slicer” but later renamed as “Chip.”  Personally, I thought Repto-Slicer was a better name, but Chip seemed to stick in his later days.  Chip died while his owner was at school today, and I buried him in the back yard.  When he got home, Chip’s owner and his little sister made a headstone and complete shrine around Chip’s grave, complete with a popsicle stick cross and some toys and leaves and a fake pumpkin because it’s almost Halloween.  The genuine sincerity and sadness of it all was very poignant.

So just down the road from where I shot ol’ Larry Trader lies another piece of landscape artistry from Dylan Robertson and his team at D-Crain.  I still haven’t been able to get my brain around what I like about their work, at least in terms of a tangible explanation, but I love what they do to a canvas of dirt.  I shot this home last year, before all the plants were in the ground, and there was a real power to the stark beauty of it.  Now I love it even more.  The textures, the encroachments, the colors, and the hard edges of the hardscapes combined with the ethereal flow of the grasses and the plush zoysiagrass lawn.

I’m not sure if he was ever in the PGA of America, but the late Larry Trader managed Willie’s golf course for years, doing all the stuff that golf pros do.  I ran across this shot of him I got back in 2004, a few years before he died, and it remains my favorite portrait. Probably because I knew Larry, and we’d spent a couple of hours together on this day talking about Willie and Evel Knievel and Ray Benson and Ear Campbell and Coach Royal and all the things that happened out there at Pedernales and on the road.  And because I know that he bummed that very cigarette there off my friend Mopar, who today will give a few golf lessons at Ascarate Park in El Paso.  I never asked Larry what happened to that finger.