Sometimes the harder you try the dumber you look.

The driving range is to golf as __________ is to life.

I went to the range this afternoon and pondered that question on the way home. I decided there's no way to complete that sentence. On the driving range if you miss-hit a ball, as I did several times, you just pull another one over and hit it, hopefully better. On the golf course, as I was reminded last Sunday, if you miss-hit a ball you've created more problems for yourself because you're now hitting from the rough, or from behind a tree, or a bunker, or... and that increases the likelihood that the next shot will be even worse.
In life there are no driving ranges, no bad swings without any real consequences. Screw something up and you've created more problems for yourself, and like the golf course it usually just gets progressively worse.
We need driving ranges for life!

This may be as bad as the movie:
Indiana Jones and the Song of Theme

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.

Two little boys walk into a drug store and after disappearing down one of the aisles come to the register. The older boy puts a box of Tampax on the counter.
The druggist asks him, "How old are you?"
"I'm eight years old" the boy answers.
"Do you know what these are for?" the man asks him.
"Not exactly, but they're not for me. They're for him. He's my little brother and he's four. We saw on TV that if you use these you can swim and ride a bike, and right now he can't do either one."

Because of an illustration I'll be using in my sermon tomorrow I've been thinking about the neighborhood in which I grew up. Though Ballard, a community in northwest Seattle, has changed over the last few decades, it used to be one of those ethnic neighborhoods that makes America unique, in this case a community of Swedes and Norwegians. I grew up with kids named Sven, Bjorn and Kjell. Our High School yell ended, "Ya sure, you betcha!" The Swedish Bakery over on 15th sold cardamom bread and krum-kaka, and pickled herring was a holiday treat. I remember my pastor and his wife singing Tryggare kan Ingen Vara (More Secure Is No One Ever) in Swedish and seniors from the old country speaking with thick accents.
I don't think it was as unique, as distinctive as what I've heard about Italian or Irish neighborhoods in places like Chicago. And I didn't appreciate Ballard's distinctiveness when I was growing up; it was all I knew. But looking back on it, the neighborhood had it's own character. It was different from Freemont or Magnolia, and we knew it. We had a sense of community pride.

Segregation is a bad thing. Diversity is good for all of us. But it's too bad we can't have the benefits of diversity and ethnic neighborhoods at the same time. I look back fondly on the eccentricities of a community full of Scandinavians. The homogenization of American comes at a price.