The FedEx Cup golf playoffs start this week, and Jordan Spieth has to be the favorite.
Spieth has won two major championships this year and finished in the top five of the other two. He has become only the second pro golfer to earn $10 million in prize money in a season. (Tiger Woods, of course, is the other and he has done it multiple times.)
Spieth, who struggled this week, still has a chance to win the $10 million that comes with the FedEx Cup and set a money mark that would be difficult to top.
Speaking of winning money on the golf course, President Obama claims he was hustled on the course by Derek Jeter recently.
Obama claims Jeter was shanking balls on the range and the president offered to give him 30 shots. First, no wonder we are in the global mess we are in if the president is going to give a Hall of Fame athlete 30 shots. Heck, Tiger Woods in his prime couldn’t beat most good amateur golfers if he gave them 30 shots, never mind a world-class athlete with amazing hand-eye coordination.
Yes, Jeter may have hoodwinked the hacker-in-chief a bit by saying he had started playing a couple of weeks ago. But still. Thirty shots?
Granted the president has been playing a lot of golf lately. Like a ton – getting in rounds recently with NBA all-stars like Steph Curry and former President Bill Clinton.
Side question: Should the rest of us be worried that Obama’s working on his short game while the global economy is more erratic than a teenager trying to drive and text at the same time? Hey, we don’t begrudge anyone getting out and playing a round or three, but Obama has played 248 rounds of golf in his seven years in office.
Wow.
Obama even took a photo of paying Jeter his winnings. Hmmm, Obama feels like someone sold him a bill of goods and sneakily got into his wallet, huh?
Now he knows how the rest of us feel.
Gender bender
The University of Tennessee apparently has an Office for Diversity and Inclusion, and that office this week apparently floated the idea of gender-neutral language in formal communication.
On the school’s website, the university asked students and teachers to use pronouns “ze, hir, hirs, and xe, xem, xyr” rather than he or she or his and hers.
Dear Lord.
That gobbledygook looks like a Scrabble nightmare met a confused New York Times crossword puzzle.
Seriously.
And this comes from a university that spent the better part of a year and who knows how many dollars and how much goodwill trying to figure out what to call its women’s sports teams.
Somehow XYR Vols simply does not roll off the tongue.
Trio of goodness
The Ashley Madison website scandal that took the nation by storm and sent cheating husbands scrambling to the Internet missed three ZIP codes in our country.
Three.
The three ZIP codes that did not have a registered email account on the Ashley Madison site in which married people try to secretly connect have a combined 476 citizens, according to the 2010 U.S. Census.
An Ashley Madison Korean website is shown on a computer screen in Seoul, South Korea.That’s right, the three bastions of marital loyalty are Alaska’s Nikolai (population 94) and Perryville (113) and New Mexico’s Polvadera, according to a Gawker.com report.
And to make it even more pronounced, one Perryville woman told the website that only 10 houses have Internet access. An employee at the county clerk’s office in Polvadera said no one in the four square miles of the town can get access online.
Until next week.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6343. Follow him on Twitter @jgreesontfp.