Writing Boots

A fundraiser at Scout's school caused me to get my Huff on.

I am here to say it is an exquisite pleasure to be (with the exception of your playing partner and seven deer) the only mammal on a golf course in Chicago in middle November.

Eighteen holes takes three hours to play. When it's 36 degrees, you keep your ass moving.

• "Team of rivals." Good lord, has a lamer colloquial novelty than this ever spread like such wildfire? Doris Kearns Goodwin is the nicest talking head you'll never meet, but I have to say I hated this term when her book of the same title came out two years ago. How can you use the word "team" to describe a group of 19th century guys in muttonchops who lived 40 years before the sports took over United States culture and sports analogies took over our rhetoric. All this is is a new term for a very, very, very, very, very conventional idea: Don't surround yourself with mindless sycophants. Well, of course.

• This "no drama Obama" business we keep hearing about. Yet another new-sounding term for a nonsensical idea. The only way I know of ensuring no drama in an organization is to forbid conflict, and the only way to do that is through a dictatorship. Which doesn't exactly lend itself to a "team of rivals," now does it?

I am sure that in the Obama administration, there will be rivals. To the extent there are rivals, the operation won't always behave like a "team." And when that happens, there will be drama.

You know it, girl.