Putt Putt Mini Golf Near Shoppers World in Framingham, Mass.

Not all retro memories of things to do in the Boston area provided joy.

Putt Putt Mini Golf, near the older version of Shoppers World shopping center in Framingham, Mass., successfully gave me that misery.

This miniature golf course offered no opportunity to hit the ball through or around a talking whale, barber shop pole, lighthouse, windmill, covered bridge, koi pond or historic Massachusetts building. Putt Putt, on the other hand, just featured stretches of angled greens designed to frustrate and simultaneously bore us. It was no fun scoring a 140 with no tacky structures.

Plus, the par was two for every hole. That would have been the recreational equivalent of taking a physics course in elementary school. I don't think even Pythagoras could have figured out this course!

I suppose the challenging greens at Putt Putt could have helped my real golf game but I was only eight. The closest thing I came to real golf was wearing a Johnny Miller golf shirt from Sears. What a downer to have a mini golf hole right in front of you and take five shots to get it done!

As Dean Wormer once said in Animal House, "There will be no fun of any kind." That's the way I felt at Putt Putt.

Disclaimer: You will see on the score card that we all did pretty well in this round of Putt Putt Mini Golf. Believe me, that was an unexplainable abberation that I should have alerted Ripley's Believe It Or Not! to -- that is, the exception to the rule of generally playing horribly at this mini golf course!