Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe MEN BUILD GOLF COURSE PARTLY BY HAND Four men in the Buffalo, N.Y., area turned a hayfield into a golf course using a broken down bulldozer and often digging rocks out of the soil by hand. Advertisement Arcade's Spruce Ridge Country Club opens in June but in 1998 it was just a dream of Tom Coffey, Bob Farleo, Stan Gidnan and Mark Scrimshaw, the Buffalo News reports. In an age when it often takes years and millions of dollars to design and build a golf course, the four bought 200 acres for $90,000 in 1999 and later got a $250,000 bank loan to make their dream a reality. All contributed to the design of the 6,520-yard par-72 course, with inspiration from Irish and Scottish landscapes. The four agree, building a gold course is harder than it looks. YOU TOO CAN BE HUGH HEFNER Microsoft says "Playboy: The Mansion" will be available on the Xbox video game system during the 2004 holiday season. The player steps into the virtual slippers of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner as he builds Playboy Magazine and the Playboy mansion. Advertisement Gamers live a virtual lifestyle, rubbing elbows with stunning women and celebrities; hosting extravagant parties, as well as assigning celebrity interviews and arranging photo shoots. The player is also able to take control of the camera taking photographs of models for magazine covers. WEB DATING FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS Some may think college students who meet unmarried people at every turn are the least likely to use Internet dating, but Net dating is all the rage. Twenty-something's can be pretty picky about what they want in the opposite sex and Web sites help narrow the search. For example, Wesley College student Dan Stillman was telling fellow student Matt Eaton he wanted a girl who was a vegan, someone who was into folk music, but who didn't smoke pot. To help him find her, the two wrote WesMatch.com using an elaborate questionnaire and soon 2,474 of the campus's 2,700 students had applied, the New York Times reports. EIGER NORTH FACE MELTING One of the most difficult mountain climbs, the Eiger in Switzerland, may become impossible because the North Face is melting. According to Swiss mountain climbing guides, last summer's heat wave and this winter's poor snowfall has caused a loosening of the permafrost that holds the rock face, the Daily Telegraph reports. Advertisement Guides say along the North Face of the 13,000-foot mountain, rock and ice have been falling that could injure climbers. The North Face is considered the ultimate challenge -- a vertical mile of shattered limestone rock and polished ice fields. It was featured in the movie "The Eiger Sanction," in which Clint Eastwood played a rock-climbing assassin hired to kill another mountaineer.
