“There is no such thing as a good tax.”

–Winston Churchill

 Starting Five

1. Let’s Give Them Something To Talk About

Boston Marathon. Patriots’ Day.  The finish line clock read 4:09:44 when presumably a bomb was detonated less than 100 yards or so short of the finish line, just outside of the Marathon Sports store. The explosion occurred just to the left of the course and you’ve probably already seen the video. But this is THE VIDEO, at least thus far. A second explosion occurred about 150 yards up Boylston Street, in that same final .2 mile of the famed 26.2-mile race.

 

This iconic photo shows Boston P.D. reacting with the strongest sense of purpose, and looming over the runner who fell to the pavement in the immediate aftermath of the concussive blast. It will probably win a Pulitzer Prize.

 

There are deaths. And there is dismemberment. Precisely how many of each are unknown at this moment. One eyewitness reported that “Somebody’s leg flew by my head.”

 

Deaths. Lost limbs. Horrific, of course. “Thoughts and prayers”, isn’t that what we are supposed to tweet? Another April day and another descent into madness. Waco. Oklahoma City. The Virginia Tech shooting, which took place simultaneously with the 2007 Boston Marathon (a male victim’s female sibling was actually running Boston at the time he was murdered.

 

Such events no longer occur in a vacuum. They occur and, whether by design of the perpetrators or not, they seize command of Twitter, cable news and even network news. We tweet out “thoughts and prayers” because it’s happening in our living room, via computer or television. And because they’re either American or on our side. Twenty bombs and 37 dead in Iraq today, too, but we’re all kind of over that.

 

It’s almost as if whoever commits the heinous crime takes a line from that Bonnie Raitt song, as if a bored and stagnant nation needed something to be horrified or indignant about. But then nobody detonates a bomb when the LIBOR scandal happens, now do they?
You cannot commit a crime such as the one committed on Boylston Street today without gaining both fame and infamy, even if it is only in Warhol-ian time increments. And we should be wondering just how much that truth plays into the motivation to commit the crime in the first place.

 

2. Tiger Woods Improves His Lie

It’s not complicated. Here are the salient points worth making over Tiger Woods’ 2nd-round visit to Amen Corner last Friday:

1.) Nothing about Tiger’s past, on or off the golf course, is relevant in terms of discussing this issue.

2.) Golf rules may be arcane and silly and redolent of a time when Ward sat down the Beaver and explained to him that sometimes the difficult thing to do is the best thing to do. And, yes, it’s 2013. But the rules of golf are the rules of golf and no one altered them between Friday morning and Saturday afternoon. If you don’t believe me, ask Guan Tianlang.

3) Tiger Woods hit, fittingly for him, too perfect an approach shot on 15. His ball actually struck the stick, and then ricocheted backward onto the slanted green before rolling into the pond. Tiger essentially has two choices here. He can draw a line between the hole and the point that the ball went into the pond and place his ball anywhere BEHIND the point the ball entered the pond extending as far back as he wants, OR… he can drop a ball “as near as possible” to the place where he struck the approach shot. Since that shot left a divot, it’s not too difficult for Tiger to locate that spot.

4.) Tiger chose option No. 2, which is fine. Except that he placed the ball about two yards, or six feet, or the body length of a slightly taller than average adult male, behind his previous shot. We not only know that Tiger did this but why he did it: to improve his lie. And how do we know this? Because Tiger said so himself in his post-round press conference: “I went back to where I played it from, but I went 2 yards further back and I took, tried to take 2 yards off the shot of what I felt I hit.”

5). At this point, if it were a trial and Aaron Sorkin were writing the script, a blue-eyed Lt. Daniel Kaffee would have stepped in and exposed the fatal flaw of Tiger’s syllogism: If men follow your orders and you ordered them not to touch Private Santiago, then why would you have him moved because you felt he was in danger? If moving the ball — no matter in what direction — to improve your lie is a violation that results in a disqualification, and if the rules of golf attest that you must self-report any transgressions, and if as you just stated, you “went two yards further back” in order to gain a competitive advantage, what are you still doing in this tournament?

6) You like watching Tiger play Augusta. I like watching Tiger play Augusta. CBS and the Masters LOVE seeing Tiger play the Masters. None of that should have mattered. By allowing Tiger Woods to continue — the ticky-tackiness of the foul, again, is irrelevant here; this is the business that golf has chosen — all golf did was become the latest institution (standing proudly with the Justice Dept.) to demonstrate that money trumps justice. That, as George Orwell put it so bluntly in “Animal Farm”, “Some animals are more equal than others.”

Here’s what Dave Kindred thought and here’s what Cameron Morfit offered. For a contrary opinion –and a surprisingly weak argument from a gifted writer –here’s what SI’s Michael Rosenberg wrote.

Is it the death of golf? No. The lowest moment of Woods’ career? Hardly. But it is another step down a treacherous path for this nation, this generation, one that values convenient short-term solutions to hard-won principles. When you start placing the importance of certain individuals (those with money, power and/or celebrity) over ideas and principles, look out.

Remember one of the very first scenes from the first episode in the first season of “Game of Thrones”? When Ned Stark, as the Lord of Winterfell,  beheads the deserter even though he does not want to do it, even though he can see the deserter may have had a valid reason to desert the Night’s Watch? Ned beheads the criminal and tells his son, “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

Am I overreacting? It was just a golf shot. Maybe. Then again, maybe winter is coming.

3. Speaking of Game of Thrones, here’s the update on Jaime Lannister: He’s gone from handsome to handless. At least one of them (then again, as Elaine Benes might say, “Not the face. Anywhere but the face.”) There was some important right-hand symbolism taking place last night on GoT. Lannister lost his after, oddly enough, coming to the rescue of Lady Brienne. Meanwhile, sister/co-parent Cersei made a prolonged and quite overt demonstration at a council meeting, showing the trio of wise men that both literally and symbolically she sits at the right hand of the father, Tywin Lassiter.

The theme of the show: Money isn’t everything — unless you are the Master of Coin. All of his daddy’s money cannot save Jaime Lannister’s hand –taking the swash out of his buckle — and in fact it probably incited his captor to chop it off. And Kaleesi finds that no amount of money will purchase 8,000 castrated warriors –but one dragon will.

Simply put, GoT is excellent. There’s fantasy and swords, etc, but there’s also realism in the shape of Tyrion Lannister discovering that his nephew’s kingdom is in fabulous, grand debt — and no one in Westeros has ever heard of collateralized derivatives or credit-default swaps.

4. Through 13 career starts Met pitcher Matt Harvey has a 2.21 ERA and a nearly three-to-one strikeouts-to-walks ratio (70 to 26). Last Saturday the New Jersey native took a no hitter into the seventh inning at Minnesota. Harvey, 24, struck out 11 in just 5 1/3 innings in his Major League debut at Arizona last July. He is 3-0 this season with a 0.82 ERA and an MLB-best WHIP of 0.545.

5. Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant both have two games remaining, but we don’t expect to see Carmelo, whose Knicks clinched the second spot in the Eastern Conference, in uniform again until New York hosts Boston in the first round. If Carmelo enters a game, that goes against his points-per-game average and currently Melo leads KD in the scoring race, 28.7 to 28.1. Here’s what you should be watching: Durant needs 99 points in two games, versus Sacramento and Milwaukee (both games are in OKC), to surpass Melo. The bet here is that KD gets there.