Fall arrived in the Valley of the Sun as quiet as a mouse. The temperatures are still in the triple digits, but the heat god is ready to swip the flitch in two weeks and we’ll begin that joyful period known as “Arizona winter”. You can get all the stores and residents are gearing up for the first arrivals of the snowbirds from Canada and the Midwest – with the booming economy folks have more money in their pockets to spend.

Funny how you don’t hear much about that in the mainstream media…

A big congratulations to Tiger Woods for winning the Tour Championship (though not the FedEx Cup, won by Justin Rose). Like him or not, you have to respect the way he has come back from whatever injury he has come back from. (Supposedly he had discs fused together in his back, but I long ago learned to distrust and reject anything Woods’s management team ever announced publicly.) You have to tip your hat to the guy and the way he played this past weekend. Greatest comeback ever? I’m not ready to commit to that. I still believe the guy is a walking time bomb physically, and besides, while winning tournaments at this stage of his life and career has to be rewarding, they aren’t majors. Let’s see what happens 6 1/2 months from now at Augusta.

Now why am I not surprised?

A comprehensive new study on cholesterol, based on results from more than a million patients, could help upend decades of government advice about diet, nutrition, health, prevention, and medication. Just don’t hold your breath.

The study, published in the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, centers on statins, a class of drugs used to lower levels of LDL-C, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, in the human body. According to the study, statins are pointless for most people.

“No evidence exists to prove that having high levels of bad cholesterol causes heart disease, leading physicians have claimed” in the study, reports the Daily Mail. The Express likewise says the new study finds “no evidence that high levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol cause heart disease.”

The study also reports that “heart attack patients were shown to have lower than normal cholesterol levels of LDL-C” and that older people with higher levels of bad cholesterol tend to live longer than those with lower levels.

This is probably news to many in government. But it’s not news to everyone.

Damned straight on that. I’ve been saying all along it’s all in the genes, baby.

My take on the whole David Kavanaugh / sexual abuse thing: unlike those freaking out on the various blogs I frequent, I’m confident Charles Grassley knows what he’s doing. I’m guessing his fellow GOP sens Flake, Murkowski, and Collins are insisting Christine Ford given a legitimate chance to tell her story before they’ll commit to voting in Kavanaugh’s favor. I’m in the same boat with them. Grassley has given her the opportunity on Thursday. If she appears she can tell her story and Kavanaugh can give his. If she doesn’t show, or (what I think will happen) her lawyers ask for another extension, it will be clear by then that they don’t have anything to testify to, and Grassley can then state he gave them every chance possible.

But she’s not going to show, and you know why? Because her lawyers knew that additional women with even shadier stories were going to come forward over the weekend. And because Grassley is going to consider these new women and their stories one step above bullshit – I mean, how obvious is the Democrats’ game plan right now? – they can say that they’re not being respected as victims, etc. etc. etc. and they’ll never get a fair hearing so of course they’ll decline to show.

You might ask yourself why the Democrats would stoop to such a thing, but you have to understand that abortion and the killing of the unborn is at the heart of their religion and the god they worship; therefore, any threat to that religion has to be confronted in any way, manner, shape or form possible. What is happening to Kavanaugh here is nothing more than a 21st century, high-tech lynching. And it is guaranteed to blow up in the Democrats’ faces. Because, in the end, this is all they have.

The European Tour always posts such cool videos. Here you’ve got a few of their stars playing with 1930s equipment.