Blowing it

Why Obama has taken to golf

What are we to make of Barack Obama's obsession with golf? Before he became president he had barely applied a nine iron to a ball, as Jim White noted in The Daily Telegraph. Now he's always out on the course.

His golfing partner is usually Joe Biden, the vice-president, and the two men play for a dollar a hole. The president says he pops his winnings into a White House envelope, a "little savings scheme" for his daughters' education fund. So far, he's won $2. We're not told how much he's lost. More than that, I imagine, as Joe Biden is a decent player with a 12 handicap.

But I doubt we need worry about him becoming one of golf's serious gamblers. I imagine he's taken up the game, as White says, with an eye on the opinion polls. Before being elected, he made much of his prowess at basketball, but now he seems keen to reassure middle-class Middle America that there's nothing "too edgy or urban" about him. And he's undoubtedly absorbed the old truth that to be a successful American president, you have to believe in God – and golf.

At any rate, Golf Digest now puts him at eighth on its list of all-time First Golfers. John Kennedy, a good player who often shot rounds in the mid-eighties, comes top, with Dwight Eisenhower, who wasn't as talented as JFK but, playing 100 rounds a year, coming second.

The floating car park

The world's largest cruise ship passed through the Solent this week before setting off on its first voyage across the Atlantic. At 225,282 tons, the Oasis of the Seas is five times bigger than the Titanic and three times the size of the QE2. And it cost £800m to build.

What an extraordinary way to spend £800m, was my first thought on looking at a picture of her. She can accommodate 6,360 passengers, and presumably her owners, Royal Caribbean, think they can tempt enough people to splash out a minimum of £1,300 for a two-week cruise to justify their investment.

The ship is so vast that it is divided into themed "neighbourhoods", one of which, Central Park, has a square with boutiques, restaurants and bars. The trouble is, Oasis looks more like a floating multi-storey car park than a ship. I don't think I'll be signing up for a cabin.

Bring back video rental

The FT's jet-setting columnist, Tyler Brule, bemoans the decline of the video and DVD rental shop. Downloading films from the internet is just not the same, he says. Visiting his old branch of Prime Time video on Wigmore Street in London may have been "a dreadful retail experience", with titles so poorly displayed it was usually impossible to find anything worth renting, but at least it was there, and you could enjoy looking.

Now, most rental outlets seem to have gone. Nor is there much in the way of shops open late at night. "Paris, New York, Tokyo and Milan have shops of the cultural kind to stimulate customers after they've finished dinner, walked out of a cinema, left the theatre or are en route to a late-night bar crawl." What a shame there aren't in London, says Brule. I agree.

Tabloid money... Cheryl Cole's £10,000 teeth

• "Cheryl Cole has the most wanted smile in Britain," says the Daily Express. But it may have cost her £10,000. Up to that amount may have had to be spent on having porcelain veneers fitted to her teeth, says Dr Mervyn Drulan, a leading cosmetic dentist.

The 26-year-old Cole used to wear invisible braces on her teeth, but these alone wouldn't have given her the pearly white effect. "Porcelain veneers fitted to each of the most visible teeth would have given this look," says Dr Drulan. And as a rule, these cost "around £700 per tooth".

• Former Labour minister Tony McNulty is being forced to grovel for claiming £72,000 in expenses on a house for his parents, says The Sun. He must repay £13,837 of public money he pocketed for a second home just nine miles from Westminster.

However, after apologising to the Commons, Mr McNulty airily declared that it was "time to move on" – as if nothing had happened. "Not so fast." The Sun suspects the public will draw two conclusions. Firstly, McNulty is lucky not to have received a harsher penalty for an outrageous scam. And secondly, he is not an appropriate person to be a member of parliament.

• "Europe decided it didn't want Tony Blair as president after all," says Frankie Boyle in The Sun. "They realised that just to pay for his inauguration speech they'd have to sell Belgium."