Writing Boots

Tomorrow at Davos Richard Edelman is sharing the 2009 results of his Edelman Public Relation's Trust Barometer. Today he previews the results on his blog, writing that "trust in business has collapsed in the United States, with American attitudes toward the private sector now comparable to France and Germany, which are historically the lowest among all nations surveyed."

I don't normally take much stock in polls done by PR firms, but this one seems pretty well connected to reality, does it not?

John Updike is one of the men who gave me permission to like golf and still call myself an intelligent person.

"I think I have been asked to write about golf as a hobby," he once wrote. "But of course, golf is not a hobby. Hobbies take place
in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. Nor is golf, though some men turn it into such, meant to be a
profession or a pleasure. Indeed, few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up
foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the
landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's
eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass,
the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves."

From New York City to Martinez, Calif.: American mayors give state-of-the-city addresses that grope for hope in the grip of reality. See here.