Tues | Jan 22 Rumors of rain.

Wed | Jan 23 Dear God! Is that . . . WETNESS!?

Thurs | Jan 24 A tornado warning. In Long Beach. How gauche. Look, we’re earthquake people, so much more primal and old money. Ditto mudslides and brush fires with their spectacular images of destroyed multimillion-dollar homes. Tornadoes? So low rent, so “We’ve lost everything: the couch and the bird feeder.” Please. One thing the tornado has alerted people to is the fact that when something bad happens there is no way of alerting people. Everyone assumes we have one of those giant speaker systems that blasts out a warning to everyone. Nope. Whatta we got? One man. One pot. One pan.

Fri | Jan 25 Where does one purchase these . . . umbrellas I’ve been hearing so much about?

Sat | Jan 26 The performance group Midnight Insanity finds out it’s being kicked off of the Queen Mary where it’s performed The Rocky Horror Picture Show the last few years (20 over all). Apparently, the Queen Mary doesn’t think the Rocky Horror crowd is good for business, which I get—dudes dressed as transvestite ghouls tend not to do brunch. What I don’t get is that the Queen Mary is throwing away any business since, well, it’s the Queen Mary . . . And speaking of transvestite ghouls, Indonesian dictator Suharto dies. They say the good die young. Suharto was 86.

Sun | Jan 27 So Tiger Woods won a golf tournament today—the Buick Invitational, for the fourth straight year—and off we go. The win figures to launch the interminable golf season back into its comfort zone of discussing whether Woods will win the Grand Slam as well as what he really thinks of that loudmouth Rory Sabbatini. And that means not talking anymore, however grudgingly, about the lynching comment made by the Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman a few weeks ago. The Buick, held in San Diego, was the media’s first, perhaps last, opportunity to ask Tiger in person about Tilghman’s  comment—she said, during a broadcast, that the only way younger players were going to be able to win with Woods around would be to “lynch him in a back alley.” Not that Woods ever said much about it. Employing what many see as a Michael Jordanesque abhorrence of anything too real and/or not easily packaged, Woods said as little to nothing as he could about the incident, dismissing it as  a regrettable slip of the tongue. It’s not, of course. The word “lynch” means something, and for someone to use it in such a flip manner, in reference to winning golf tournaments, shows a dangerous, and one fears pervasive, level of ignorance, like using “holocaust” to describe a soccer defeat. “Lynch” is not some museum piece, like looking back at the Spanish Inquisition—nooses have once again become the symbol du jour of intimidation, not only in the Deep South, but here in our own Port of Long Beach, where workers have complained they’ve seen nooses displayed in and on trucks as well as on T-shirts. Woods—born in Long Beach and who played much of his early golf in and around Long Beach—has said that he doesn’t have to comment on societal issues, he is doing his best to change things for the better through his kids’ foundation. That’s great and all, except that every reserve quarterback and designated hitter has a kids’ foundation. So it appears we just have another sheltered athlete who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the real world. Yeah, no. I was just re-reading Gary Smith’s outstanding 1996 Sports Illustrated piece about Woods—“The Chosen One”— in which his father, Earl, choking back tears of pride, says that Tiger will “transcend this game . . . and bring to the world . . . a humanitarianism . . . which has never been known before.” Later in the piece, Tiger himself talks about having his mind enlightened about race, not only from stares on the golf course, but from taking classes on race at Stanford: “What I realized is that even though I’m mathematically Asian—if anything—if you have one drop of black blood in the United States, you’re black. And how important it is for this country to talk about this subject . . . You can’t say something like that in a polite way. Golf has shied away from this for too long.” You know, I do think you can say something like that in a polite way. Tiger seems like an exceedingly decent and nice fellow. All he’d have to say is something like: “A friend of mine used an unfortunate choice of words out of ignorance. The fact is that word carries with it a weight and history of violence, death and intimidation that has been used to keep a segment of American citizens afraid for decades. While I know my friend didn’t mean to hurt anyone, the fact that she, like so many Americans, is unaware of what that word means, what it connotes, tells us how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. I invite you to look up lynching and talk about it with your kids. And, for the record, Rory Sabbatini is a tool.”

Mon | Jan 28 Midnight Insanity announces it has found a new home at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro. Their first show is Feb. 16. Toast!

Tags: golf, lynching, midnight insanity, Queen Mary, race, rain, rocky horror, San Pedro, Tiger Woods