MONDAY, JUNE 20, 2011
HEIR LOOMS
Win has McIlroy primed to take over for Woods — and maybe Nicklaus
BY DAN WOLKEN
BETHESDA, Md. — They built the 10th hole at Congressional Country Club like a fishbowl for this U.S. Open, a theater of angles to stand and look some 218 yards across a pond at the tee up above or the green down below. By 5 p.m. yesterday, when hundreds gathered to wait there for Rory McIlroy to walk across that stage, this was no longer about watching a golf tournament.
Somewhere between McIlroy’s back nine on Saturday and the start of the final round, every swing had become a must-see event, every fairway a pep rally that would have rivaled the way fans used to gather for you-know-who.
Delivered into that moment with a cocksure stride and as smooth a golf swing as you’ll ever see, McIlroy made the 40-yard walk to the 10th tee, acknowledging calls with a half-smile and a little wave. Then he put his tee in the ground, swung crisply and listened, as the ball settled inches from the cup, to the loudest roar he’s ever heard.
“That was pretty cool,” McIlroy said.
All of 22 years old, the shaggy-haired McIlroy was a rock star at the 111th U.S. Open. He led from start to finish and shattered all kinds of tournament records, posting an unthinkable 16-under par. He played the game with both power and charisma, turning his eight-shot victory into a compelling masterpiece. Most of all, he gave golf a reason to hope there is a worthy heir to Tiger Woods.
But now comes the toughest part for McIlroy. After making good on the promise so many saw in him as a teenager in Northern Ireland, he must find a way to keep doing what the world will now demand.
Everything is different for McIlroy after this. It’s not just that he’s now a major champion; that much was expected sooner or later. But the way he made a mockery of this course and this field has reset the bar for his career. McIlroy came to Congressional answering questions about his collapse two months ago at The Masters. By the time he left, his peers were putting him alongside Woods as potentially one of the greats of all-time.
“My impression is that he hasn’t even primed yet,” said Y.E. Yang, who tied for third. “It’s scary to think about.”
Here’s how crazy it got. Saturday night, Padraig Harrington said it was McIlroy, not Woods, who could surpass Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 majors — never mind that the count is now 14-1. And yesterday, NBC brought in Nicklaus live by telephone, which isn’t the kind of thing you’d do as, say, Louis Oosthuizen is cruising to his first major title.
“Nothing this kid does ever surprises me,” countryman and last year’s U.S. Open champion, Graeme McDowell, said. “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.”
Those are heavy words for someone who just won his third tournament as a professional, but it was impossible to watch McIlroy here and not think that something historic was happening.
Because he broke Woods’ U.S. Open previous record of 12-under par, there was a lot of talk this week about 2000 at Pebble Beach when Woods was dominating at levels the game hasn’t seen before or since. The more appropriate comparison, though, was the 1997 Masters when a 21-year-old Woods lapped the field by 12 shots.
After that performance, it didn’t take long for people to buy into Woods as a threat to break Nicklaus’ record, and they weren’t wrong. Circumstances of life and health have interrupted that pursuit for now, as Woods nurses Achilles and knee injuries, but it was very real when he won his 14th at the U.S. Open in 2008.
That is now the standard McIlroy will be measured against, and it’s completely and utterly unfair. But it may not be wrong, either.
“He’s 22 years of age, and this is indeed his destiny,” Harrington said. “It’s amazing how comfortable that he’s lapping the field, and it’s not like he’s holing (a ton of) putts. Sometimes you see a guy run away with a tournament and they’re draining putts from all angles and everything is going their way. From what I’ve seen, he’s been very comfortable and it’s been well within him.”
Said Masters champion Charl Schwartzel: “It looks like he’s playing a different course.”
Let’s hope McIlroy really is good enough and strong enough to deal with all this. For a dozen years, Woods was a freak of nature, impervious to the expectations that came with his dual role as best golfer on the planet and cultural icon. It’s hard to imagine McIlroy having that kind of impact on the game, but he can certainly be to Tiger what the Rolling Stones were to The Beatles.
“I think when you win a major quite early in your career, everyone’s going to draw comparisons. It’s natural,” McIlroy said. “It’s nice that people say that he could be this or he could be that or he could win 20 majors, but at the end of the day I’ve won one, and I obviously want to add to that. But you can’t let what other people think of you influence what you do.”
But this will all come fast and furious now, and the fishbowl won’t be the 10th hole at Congressional but all of sports. McIlroy took his first steps into it last night, typing on his cell phone as he took his seat in the interview room. It turned out to be a text message to the world, a picture of the silver trophy he had just won posted on Twitter. Just like that, the Rory era begins.
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@Discographies x-rays Brad Paisley
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Neurofeedback Brain Therapy May Cure PTSD
Military doctors have added a new technique to their arsenal of treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Neurofeedback, a therapy that practitioners claim can reboot the brain's neural networks, has been introduced at several bases, VA clinics and even in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite heartening success stories, some experts question whether the approach has undergone adequate study to prove that it's more than just a potent placebo.
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Pictured: Miss California Alyssa Campanella (right) reacts as she is announced as the winner of Miss USA 2011, during the June 19 pageant at Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Campanella, a 21-year-old model and resident of Los Angeles, beat out 49 other women — including first runner-up Miss Tennessee Ashley Elizabeth Durham (left) — to take the crown.
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Wrap party
New scanning methods shed light on the lives of ancient mummies
BY AARON ROWE
Several centuries ago, wealthy collectors would buy mummies, throw a party and then unwrap them in front of their enthralled friends. Things have changed. Today’s anthropologists are obsessive about protecting their specimens. If they want to peek inside, they call a doctor and ask for an appointment with a high-end medical imaging system. At first glance, it seems like the gentlest way to learn more about fragile remains.
In the mind of a mummy researcher, every shriveled body raises a thousand questions: How did this person die? What did they look like? What did they do for a living? How was their body preserved? Now a new method of digital tomography holds the key to providing answers.
“Computerized tomography scans can help answer some of those questions, letting scientists and the public see under the wrappings and learn more about mummies and the cultures that prepared them,” said historian Samuel Redman. In one instance, dents in the skull of a female mummy suggest she carried heavy objects on her head. And voids in the jaw of a boy prince may indicate that he had a huge dental abscess.
Since it can answer so many questions, mummy researchers have been using X-rays since 1896, only nine months after the first imaging machines were invented, according to Frank Rühli, a mummy expert at the University of Zurich. At a meeting of mummy researchers, held in San Diego last week, he led a series of lectures on state-of-the art techniques for examining preserved remains.
Computerized tomography scans produce the best images; they also give a hefty dose of radiation. The problem is, in the past few years, scientists have started reading the genetic codes of mummies which radiation can damage. So, what seemed like a perfectly nondestructive means of studying the ancient world might not be so harmless after all. Still, the findings from have unearthed some jolting revelations about life and death in the ancient world.
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Ryan Dunn’s Last Tumblr Photo
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ALBUM OF THE DAY
Bon Iver, ‘Bon Iver’ (Jagjaguwar)
BY ZACH BARON
Many rock records have been written after bitter breakups, but few have been as exhaustively chronicled as Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” the 2008 debut LP from the songwriter Justin Vernon. The details are the normal ones, give or take, involving a Wisconsin hunting cabin, a woman, a laptop and the end of a mildly experimental folk act Vernon formed in 2002 with some college pals.
The stubborn persistence of Vernon’s story, which has since been told and retold with ritualistic, near-biblical frequency, might be explained by the fact that he’s more willing to talk about it than most. But Vernon’s music and lyrics have grown, over the course of two albums and an EP, consistently more inscrutable and opaque. On “Bon Iver,” his newest, there are times when he barely seems to be writing in English. Consider this verse from “Perth,” the lush, swelling bit of chiming complaint that opens the record: “In a mother, out a moth / furling forests for the soft / gotta know been lead aloft / so I’m ridding all your stories / what I know, what it is, is pouring — wire it up.”
It is a testament to the power of Vernon’s voice that he is frequently told by fans how much his music helped them heal or triumph over loss. “For Emma,” at least, contained moments of lucidity delivered in Vernon’s falsetto — “Who will love you?” he asked on “Skinny Love.” (The song is currently enjoying a new vogue in the U.K., thanks to a solemn cover from a 15-year-old piano player named Birdy.)
“Bon Iver” complicates Vernon’s penchant for being indirect with newly elaborate arrangements, courtesy of veteran studio musicians like saxophonist Colin Stetson and guitarist Greg Leisz. Vernon’s voice, always a textured and complex sound, is now playing counterpoint to a full band. For every moment that slices through, like “Holocene” (with wonderfully specific-yet-still-gnomic lines like “3rd and Lake it burnt away, the hallway was where we learned to celebrate”), there is a moment, as on the beginning of “Michicant,” where Vernon employs his voice just to toy with cadence and rhythm: “I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age / melic in the naked, knew a lake, and drew the lofts for page.” The words are likely unimportant — it’s the punctuation that dictates the sound.
Lately, the story people like to tell about Vernon has undergone an upgrade. “Woods,” a meditative, Auto-Tuned bit of self-reflection from Vernon’s 2009 EP “Blood Bank,” so entranced Kanye West that he sampled it on last year’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” West flew Vernon to Hawaii for writing sessions that have now become legendary, thanks in part to the nature of the process which included putting Vernon, the Miami rapper Rick Ross, and an unspecified quantity of marijuana in a room together and recording the results.
Both Vernon and West have the rare ability to transcend their own halting words and to provide vivid glimpses of emotional viscera. But where “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was among West’s most articulate (if self-castigating) moments, “Bon Iver” is Vernon’s least transparent creation, a blinking constellation of words like “hawser,” “arboretic” and “fane” set to free-flowing and largely undefined musical gestures. It is a tribute, then, to Vernon that, despite his avoiding transparent words, he makes a work so emotionally transparent that we all end up in the same unnameable place.
Download from iTunes
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Forbidden-fruit frenzy
Public health fearmongers have set their sights on apples and spinach
BY TREVOR BUTTERWORTH
Collectively, our diets are a disaster movie in slow motion: Evolution has wired us to eat as much sweet and fatty food as possible while expending as little energy as possible, and history has managed to deliver the best of all possible environments to encourage both.
The prognostications as to what all of this is going to do to our health (and the cost of health care) in the next 40 years are grim. The fatter we get, the more we will suffer cancer and heart attacks and the more we will have to spend to keep ourselves alive. And yet, what should we be worried about, according to the latest scare from the Environmental Working Group (EWG), an activist group? Apples, spinach, potatoes and blueberries.
The group issued a study that found that tiny traces of pesticide residue on one-third of 1 percent of fruit and vegetables sampled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were above tolerance levels set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while 2.7 percent of residues (mostly on cilantro) were not from pesticides that were approved by the agency. (The tolerance level is the level of residue that is allowed to remain in or on a harvested crop. These levels are, according to the EPA, set “well below the point where these compounds might be harmful to consumers.”)
I happened to be at two different food safety conferences when this story broke, and the reaction among scientists and regulators was incredulity, despair and, in some cases, anger.
Here’s why. Virtually all the fruits and vegetables had residues well within the safety tolerances, and the fact that 0.3 percent weren’t didn’t mean that anyone was going to get cancer. There is still a huge margin of safety built into the tolerance levels. In the case of thiabendazole, the pesticide residue on apples, the EPA’s fact-sheet shows that the lowest dose given to rats that caused no adverse effects was 13,000 times greater than the potential exposure to humans.
More importantly, the risks from not eating the EWG’s “dirty dozen” list of fruits and vegetables are much greater than the risk from eating them. A recent study involving 300,000 people has shown that those who eat more fruits and vegetables are significantly less likely to die of the most common form of heart disease than those who eat fewer fruits and vegetables. Recent studies show a small reduction in cancer too. (Although, people who eat lots of fruit and vegetables tend to lead healthier lifestyles in general).
Finally, calling some fruits and vegetables “dirty” and others “clean” is a confusing and misleading health message for the public. The EWG fails to note that all plants produce their own pesticides to protect themselves from predators — and that 99.99 percent of the pesticides we end up consuming are naturally occurring. As Bruce Ames, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California has tirelessly pointed out, when these chemicals are tested in the same way as synthetic pesticides, they turn out to be just as likely to cause cancer. Of course, this is only at levels of exposure that are impossible to replicate on your dinner plate.
So, if you look at the fruits and vegetables on the Environmental Working Group’s “clean” list, such as cabbage, cantaloupe, mushrooms and pineapples, they turn out — surprise! — to contain naturally occurring carcinogens, but at levels that tend to be much higher than synthetic pesticides, according to Ames. Either trace amounts of possible carcinogens are risky in all fruits and vegetables, or they’re not a risk at all. The idea that synthetic pesticides are bad and naturally occurring ones are good is an illusion.
This, of course, is not the first time that the Environmental Working Group has hyped up hypothetical risks at the expense of public health. Back in 2003, it warned about the cancer and health risks from PCBs in farmed salmon, which were then taken up by a major study that appeared to confirm the risk. But what were one’s actual chances of getting cancer? Strangely, for a scare that shot around the world, activists, scientists and journalists seemed reluctant to quantify this new terror; but, using the EPA risk methodology, it turned out you had a 1 in 100,000 chance of cancer if you ate 8 ounces of raw salmon with the skin on every month for 70 years. Cook the fish, and the risk dropped by a third. Forgo the skin, and it disappeared into a number close to nothing. In other words, the risk was hypothetical to the point of being meaningless.
It wasn’t until 2006 that researchers at Harvard School of Public Health announced that the cardiovascular benefits of eating salmon were greater than the cancer risks by a factor of at least 300:1. As Erich Rimm, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, put it: “Unfortunately, the media and others may have contributed to this confusion by greatly exaggerating the unsubstantiated claim of a health risk from fish.” The current apple scare shows that we never learn.
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Huge parts of China have been affected by some of the worst drought conditions in decades. Fishermen, farmers, and wildlife have been enduring hardships for months now. In an effort to alleviate the crisis, China’s Three Gorges Dam has been discharging water to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River. However, since early June, a series of torrential rainstorms has been pounding southern China, overwhelming parched farmlands and triggering some of the worst flooding since 1955. So far, 175 have been reported dead and 86 missing. Chinese officials say they plan to double investments in water conservation projects, as the country deals with a shortage of 40 billion cubic meters of water each year. (Reuters/China Daily)
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Cruise control
TomKat and Suri ride the waves during a break from ‘Rock of Ages’
BY HASANI GITTENS
It was a Cruise cruise for Father’s Day.
Katie Holmes and little Suri Cruise took to the waves over the weekend and enjoyed some time with very busy dad Tom Cruise.
The Father’s Day yacht trip launched from Miami Beach, where Tom is currently filming “Rock of Ages” — a Hollywood adaptation of the Broadway hit about ’80s rock.
Mr. Top Gun looks more J. Crew than Mötley Crüe in these preppy pics.
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Ripped from real life
Billy Joel’s ex-wife’s novel draws heavily from marriage to Piano Man
As the saying goes, you write what you know.
In her debut novel, “Groundswell” — on sale tomorrow — Billy Joel’s ex-wife, celebrity chef Katie Lee, appears to draw on her real-life experience as a small-town Southern girl who gets wrapped up in a failed celebrity marriage and the inevitable major-league divorce.
Her protagonist, for example, is a Kentucky-bred “country bumpkin” who falls for a big movie star 16 years her senior. Lee — who divorced the Piano Man in 2009 — is a West Virginia native and married Joel when he was 55 and she was just 23.
While Lee admits to Flash that “there are some parallels,” she says she also borrows from “situations I’ve witnessed with friends.”
At least one plot point is straight out of Lee’s union with Joel: The fictional couple’s $1 million wedding lands on the cover of People magazine. Back in 2004, after dating for just a year, Lee’s and Joel’s wedding pics ended up — you guessed it — on the cover of People.
“Garrett’s seen-it-all publicist … decided that we should give exclusive wedding pictures in exchange for the cover, a six-page spread and a tidy sum of money donated to charity,” Lee writes in “Groundswell.”
Soon Lee’s fictional high-powered hubby is exposed as an adulterer and promptly writes his wife a letter urging her to lawyer up.
“You will now need to be represented by an independent attorney ... I hope that any statement regarding our impending breakup will be mutually approved and simultaneously released by our respective publicists,” the character says. “We are now in different camps.”
Lee and Joel, of course, announced their split in 2009 via joint statement, saying “Billy and Katie remain caring friends, with admiration and respect for each other.”
The two apparently remain on such good terms that Lee even gives her ex a shout-out in the acknowledgments.
“Billy Joel, the best ex-husband a girl could ever ask for,” Lee writes.
Or is she just thanking him for the material?
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CIVIL WAR HISTORY SERIES: Meeting his Appomattox
Confederate supporter lands in pivotal place in history — twice
BY ROB OGDEN
A cannonball doesn’t interrupt breakfast every day. Yet on July 21, 1861, as Wilmer McLean, a wholesale grocer in Manassas, Va., ate with his family and a guest, a shell crashed through his roof and destroyed his kitchen fireplace. Union troops had been aiming for Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. This was the beginning of the Battle of Bull Run, the first major conflict of the Civil War.
Beauregard, who had set up his military headquarters in the McLeans’ house and dined with them that morning, described the incident as “comical.” Perhaps McLean thought otherwise.
The first cannon-shot of the battle ruined his meal, but McLean encountered a far stranger coincidence four years later.
Well educated, fastidious and good at math, McLean was drawn to the grocery trade. At the outset of the Civil War, the Manassas native was 46 — too old to enlist as an infantryman. Although it’s unclear why, he never obtained a commission to become a Confederate officer. Nevertheless, his sympathy lay with the South, and when the war began, McLean sacrificed his farm and some of his barns so that Confederate troops could build a hospital.
At the war’s start, Union General Irvin McDowell figured he would swiftly crush the Southern secession by attacking the Confederate capital of Richmond. In anticipation of an assault, Beauregard chose McLean’s Manassas house for his headquarters because it lay directly in the path of the Union Army. A creek, Bull Run, ran through the property. Union troops would have to cross the creek on their way to Richmond, so Beauregard set up infantry and artillery in the shallow areas where horses could traverse. McLean, a life-long Southerner, was happy to contribute to the Confederate cause. But the first important battle of the Civil War left Beauregard, who won the battle, feeling smug and McLean feeling glum.
After Bull Run, the war got under way. But McLean had seen enough. After the cannonball incident, he realized members of his family were in danger and moved them around rural Virginia for two years before settling on an obscure, out-of-the-way town called Appomattox Court House, now known as Appomattox. In the antebellum South, not every town had courthouses; those that did sometimes took their name from them.
McLean aided the Confederates by providing them goods from his grocery but quickly grew less involved. During the years between Bull Run and the war’s final surrender, he decided to try trading commodities, mostly sugar, and succeeded. He traveled around the South and spent time with members of his family when he could. They found a comfortable two-story brick house and lived peacefully. His wife, Virginia, gave birth to two children during the war years. McLean accumulated $40,000 in Confederate money and enjoyed an easy life, unconcerned with the conflict.
By April 1865, rumors of defeat began drifting through Appomattox. Starving, shoeless soldiers who had deserted the ranks of Confederate General Robert E. Lee wandered through the town like wraiths. Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s army had pushed back Lee constantly that spring. Finally Lee abandoned Richmond, driving his forces west in the hope of joining the Confederate army of North Carolina. Grant and General Philip Sheridan prevented this at the Battle of Five Forks on April 1. On April 9, after several smaller skirmishes, the ragged armies clashed a final time in an unlikely little town: Appomattox. Lee could not break through Grant’s ranks, so he sent Grant a note telling him he had given up.
After the battle, Lee dispatched Colonel Charles Marshall to find a place for the generals to sign the final surrender. The first person that Marshall encountered was none other than Wilmer McLean. Marshall inquired about where to go, and McLean, doubtlessly stupefied, blurted, “Maybe my house will do!”
While the exhausted generals talked in the parlor, Union soldiers, knowing souvenirs from the site of the surrender would be valuable, ransacked McLean’s house. They took furniture, fence posts, pots and pans, even a rag doll of McLean’s 8-year-old daughter, Lula. Colonel George Custer, later of Little Big Horn fame, is said to have made off with a table. McLean was “a courteous gentleman,” though “not a little annoyed” at the soldiers’ behavior, according to E. P. Alexander, a historian and Confederate officer present at Manassas and Appomattox.
“The Civil War began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor,” McLean is rumored to have said. The same civilian hosted both the start and finish of the greatest American conflict. The war was full of strange coincidences but this was the very strangest.
The years following the war were not kind to the McLeans. After the Confederacy crumbled, its currency, including McLean’s considerable holdings, became worthless. McLean had to borrow money to feed his family. To capitalize on the unlikely coincidence, he asked Lee to come back and pose for portraits of the house that he could sell. Lee denied him. McLean finally sold the Appomattox house in 1867 and moved back to Manassas. He wrote Grant, who in 1868 was elected president, asking for employment in the Treasury. He hoped Grant would remember him from Appomattox. He did but did not come through with the job. Eventually, McLean landed work as an inspector for the Bureau of Customs in Alexandria, Va., which paid $3 a day, roughly $43 in today’s dollars. He held this position until his death in 1882.
McLean’s story is full of the bitter irony and loss that enveloped many Confederate sympathizers after the war. His devotion to the cause seemed to have been all a waste. Despite his bizarre luck, McLean ended up with nothing: an apt symbol of the plight of the postwar South.
Perhaps McLean’s words to the historian Alexander sum it up. Spotting McLean in his yard the day after the surrender, Alexander said, “Hello! McLean, why what are you doing here?” Seeing his barnyard again filled with soldiers’ tents and campfires, McLean replied, “Alexander, what in the hell are you fellows doing here?”
Rob Ogden is a writer living in Des Moines, Iowa.
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Misrata, Libya: A boy flashes a victory sign as he mourns his relative, a Libyan rebel fighter killed during clashes with forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.
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“I also Dougie”
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Bruins go to Foxwoods, drink from a $100,000 bottle of champagne
Posted by Gary Dzen, Boston.com Staff
Courtesy of Brian Spinelli
Bruins Tim Thomas, Zdeno Chara, Patrice Bergeron, Milan Lucic, Brad Marchand, and Shawn Thornton took a trip down to the casino following Saturday's rolling rally in Boston. The players brought the Stanley Cup with them to a party at the Foxwood's club "Shrine", where they proceeded to pour some of a $100,000 bottle of champagne into to bowl of the trophy, as Thornton (left) and Chara did above.
A press release describes the action:
"[Shrine] Owners Ed Kane, Joe Kane and Randy Greenstein hand delivered a 30 liter bottle of Ace of Spades “Midas” champagne, costing more than $100,000. The bottle, which is one of six in existence, was double the size of the 15 liter Ace of Spades brut that Mavericks owner Mark Cuban purchased for his team after their NBA Championship victory just one week ago. The bottle, which was signed by every Bruins team member in attendance, will be on display at High Rollers and will be raffled off at a later date to benefit the Bruins foundation."
So there you have it. Bruins players were back in Boston in plenty of time to be honored by the Red Sox at Fenway Park Sunday afternoon.
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In plane sight
Photographer captures an airport at night
BY CHAVIE LIEBER
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Americana: Coney Island's Mermaid Parade
Nothing says summer in Coney Island in New York like the bacchanal known as the Mermaid Parade. —Video by Elizabeth Saab, Hector Batista and Shelby Pollack
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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