Yeah, I follow horse racing pretty passionately - I'm not a handicapper and haven't placed a bet in years although watching Barbaro go off at 6-1 in the Derby was a sore temptation.

I have the 'horse gene'. I am helpless smitten by them and always have been.

I'd rather be flayed than watch some pitiful lame 8 year old 'maiden' (regardless of gender - a horse which has never won a race) $1500 claimer limp around the saddling enclosure and sent out with less than week's rest. That, not elite graded stakes runners like Barbaro or Smartly Jones, is the daily bread and butter of most tracks and it's sad.

There's much that's wrong with racing.

The fixation on 'gracile' speed horses is only part of the story. The vast sums of money from places like Dubai flooding the yearling sales is another. It's seriously depleting the gene pool and forcing some studs to be put at risk (Sunday Silence, Jules and others have died at least partly as a result) by being continually shuttled from Northern Hemisphere to Southern Hemisphere (the breeding seasons are reversed) because that's where the 'real money' is.

There's nothing whatsoever preventing people from crossing TB's with Arabs or any other bloodline. It's done all the time in the other equestrian sports where TB-Arabs are fairly common. You just can't register the result of such crosses as a TB.

AI cannot be allowed in thoroughbred registry because there's immediately going to be the issue of foals supposedly inseminated by somebody's home bred (Brazilian or Chilean maybe) nobody stud actually being the product of say Empire Maker - a direct male line descendent of Man o'War and thus of the Goldolphin Arabian (though there's doubt that he was an Arab).

See the potential for ringers there?

The conditions facing the modern race horse are nothing to what they used to be. 'Man o' War' by Dorothy Ours is particularly enlightening. I'd also recommend "Horse of a Different Color' by Jim Squires (the breeder of Derby winner Monarchos) for an highly informative (and funny) tour of the modern horse industry. (He's a friend of the (responsible owner/breeders) Jacksons and a neighbor of (Pulitzer Prize winner) Jane Smiley - 'Horse Heaven').

CynS

"But there is a part of me that thinks that some value could come from a deep recession or depression."

Assuming, of course, that you don't lose your job. Let them eat cake, eh?

But, yeah, in point of fact J. K. Galbraith pointed out 30 years ago in 'The Affluent Society' that the majority of people do in fact benefit from recessions, at least in the short term, in that they do tend, again, at least over the short term, to depress inflationary stuff like other less fortunate people buying bread, paying rent and such which helps those who don't lose their liveihood.

But we don't care about 'other people' do we?

It's a recession if your neighbor loses his job (and house and car and family) a depression if you lose yours.

"Thirty years ago, the richest 1 percent owned less than a fifth of America's wealth. Now, according to a recent report by the Fed Reserve Board, they own more than a third. Not since the days of the robber barons of the 19th century have we seen this much wealth concentrated in so few hands." - Robert B. Reich: 'Estate tax pyramid scheme'

there's a chilling word: 'Reunification' 'We yearn for reunification.'

That American trade policy, foreign policy, immigration and even our elections have been violently distorted by a tiny (500,000/300,000,000 = .00167) rabidly irrational, right-wing (sorry for the redundancy) Miami Cuban community for 50 years is bad enough.

Now we're apparently also to annex Cuba to satisfy these lunatics?

Where's Janet Reno when you really need her?

Metro New Orleans - an area which included 8 Parishes (St. Tammany, St. Charles, Jefferson and so forth) had a pre-Katrina population of around 1.2M.

New Orleans proper, that is to say Orleans Parish, had, as of August 2005, a population hoving around 490,000 and had been steadily losing population for 40 years.

if terrorists wanted to get the most, er, bang for their (sadly depreciated) buck they'd be smart enought to blast some of those obscenely wealthy CEO's, shop-aholic oil heiresses, venture capitalists, deposed dictators and assorted other international malefactors smugly jetting around the planet on their ozone destroying Gulf Streams and LearJets.

I understand the propaganda benefit of threatening to blow up Great Aunt Maude and all but Great Aunt Maude doesn't sit at the levers which control our nifty take-this-job-and-ship-it globalized economy does she?

Ahem: "the scion of a British brewery dynasty who had managed to parlay their wealth into class"

It's either 'scion - his wealth' or 'dynasty which'.

Choose one.

Please. Where have all the proofreaders gone? Don't editors any longer actually read the material they publish?

I'd take either.

You seem to have missed the point that the writer couldn't decide between two subordinate phrases and so chose the least correct of her alternatives.

BTW: I'm actually rather proud of the fact that I'm the reason your local Safeway has a line labeled '20 items and fewer' instead of '20 items or less'.

Punctilious? No shit.