Tag: ek Holiday

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

A story about smoking.

The big place to watch fireworks is down on the beach and one year my friends and I decided to make an event of it so we packed up a couple of cases and our portable stereo- a car battery, 250 watt car equalizer/amp, a Colecovision power supply and voltage inverter, 2 Walkman CD players, mixer board, and 4 Minimus 7s.

And a blanket.

We got there early so we’d get good seats and were only 3 or 4 rows behind the Police tape and had a fun early evening waiting for the dusk to gather amusing ourselves, scaring little children, and annoying our neighbors.

Nothing like playing the feedback.

As it got darker we switched to more mellow fare, Holst’s The Planets and Pink Floyd as I recall and soon enough the show started and we were right underneath it.

Underneath as in the shells were exploding pretty much directly overhead and showering flaming debris all around us.  A blanket a couple of rows ahead caught fire causing several moments of excitement until somebody remembered that if you just shovel sand on top these things go out.

I personally was put in mind of an old Buck Rodgers comic strip where the villain, in preparation for a duel with Buck, lies down in a field and has his flunkies howitzer him with spikey mace balls to demonstrate his courage until his chief toady right next to him gets kind of, well, squished.  Think chunks of facade landing next to the Orc captain at the siege of Minas Tirith if you’re not getting the 1930s image.

Harmless good times for the most part and it seemed only fitting that when a lit fragment landed close enough to reach without straining I fished out a Kool and kindled it off the chunk.

The difficult thing was the three hours getting out of the parking lot.

Next to the failure of last year’s rapture I have to say the discovery of a new Mayan calendar that doesn’t end December 21, 2012 is nearly the most disappointing development so far this year as I once again have to try and find something interesting to say about Pimlico.

Preakness Trivia

• Actually 2 years older than the Kentucky Derby.
• Shortest in distance (1/16th shorter than the Derby).
• Only the Derby has a larger attendance.
• No Black Eyed Susan has ever been used, currently it’s painted Chysthanthemums.

There have been 33 winners of both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes including the 11 Triple Crown winners.

Preakness Traditions

Winners don’t get the real Woodlawn Cup to keep, but a half size replica (oh, and the Woodlawn Racing Club is defunct).  Black Eyed Susans don’t bloom until 2 months after the Preakness.  The Old Clubhouse was destroyed in a fire in 1966.  They paint the winner’s racing silks on the weathervane.  No one on the internet knows why it’s called the Alibi Breakfast.

Official Website

The shortness is one reason Bodemeister is the pick of some handicappers.

As so often happens in my coverage of the odd and bizarre world of sports there is some actual interaction with what I like to call reality to report.

2012 Preakness Stakes: I’ll Have Another trainer Doug O’Neill enjoying the spotlight

By Liz Clarke, Washington Post

Published: May 18

The forecast for the 137th running of the Preakness Stakes calls for clear, sunny skies. But there’s a cloud hanging over O’Neill that could result in a 180-day suspension and $15,000 fine as a result of a failed test for elevated levels of carbon dioxide in one of his horses.

It was O’Neill’s fourth such failed test since 2006, and a ruling could come next week, when the California Horse Racing Board meets behind closed doors (though no penalty would take effect until after June’s Belmont Stakes).

It’s difficult to imagine a more dissonant note – the apparent pattern of rules-breaking clashing sharply with O’Neill’s easy warmth and charisma.

O’Neill has professed his innocence and filed suit over the most recent failed test, which suggests the banned practice known as “milkshaking,” in which a mixture of bicarbonate of soda, sugar and electrolytes are pumped into a horse’s nostrils to delay the sensation of fatigue and, in turn, boost performance down the stretch.

…

“Milkshaking” – or bicarbonate loading, in more sophisticated terms – gives racehorses an extra buffer against the buildup of lactic acid in the muscles, which causes the sensation of fatigue, according to Rick M. Arthur, equine medical director for the California Horse Racing Board.

It poses little, if any, danger to the horse, Arthur added – assuming the mixture doesn’t seep into a horse’s lungs or isn’t administered in exceedingly high dosages.

But it is banned because it creates an unfair advantage.

And besides, you can’t believe anything you read at the Daily Kaplan anyway.

I need a drink-

Post time 6:05 pm ET, coverage starts at 4:30 pm on NBC.

A DocuDharma Tradition

I tease my mother by calling her Emily after Emily Gilmore both because overall my family reminds me very much of the Gilmores and because she’s never met a brand name she didn’t like whereas I’m perfectly content to buy generic.

I thank her among many things for a thorough grounding in the domestic and other arts.

Mom teaches first grade and is actually famous in a quiet sort of way.  The kind parents brag about and angle their kids for though she’s won national awards too.  Of course I owe everything I know about educating to her and among my own peers I’m considered an asskicking trainer.

She also insisted we learn to perform routine self maintenance, little things like laundry and ironing, machine and hand mending. basic cooking.  Of course she always indulged us with trips to museums and zoos, made sure we got library cards, did the usual bus driver thing to swim practice, had this huge second career as a Brownie/Girl Scout Leader for my sister.

At one point when I was old enough for it to make an impression she took her Masters of Fine Arts in Art of all things, so I know a little Art History with Far Eastern.  I understand how to bang out a copper pot and make silver rings because she took me to class once or twice.  She liked stained glass so much that she and dad made several pieces (you use a soldering iron and can cut yourself pretty bad so it’s a macho thing too).  They also did silk screening which taught me a lot about layout and graphic arts.

But she always liked fabric arts and in addition to a framed three dimensional piece in the living room, there are Afghans and rugs and scarves and pot holders and wash cloths and hats and quilts and dolls.

And the training kits and manuals for her mentorship programs, and the adaptations and costumes for the annual first and fifth grade play.  Did I mention she plays 3 instruments, though mostly piano?

She touch types too.

So to Emily, a woman of accomplishment and refinement, Happy Mother’s Day.

This was no ordinary homecoming.  This was a do-or-die attempt to lay the ghost of years of rejection from the horse-rearing elite and the literati who sat in those privileged boxes overlooking the track and those unprivileged craven hordes who grovelled around the centre-field where he had suffered as a boy.

The clubhouse as I remember was worse, much worse than I had expected.  It was a mess.  This was supposed to be a smart, horsey clubhouse, oozing with money and gentry, but what I saw had me skulking in corners.  It was worse than the night I spent on Skid Row a month later, back in New York.  My feet crunched broken glass on the floor.  There seemed no difference between a telephone booth and a urinal; both were used for the same purpose.  Foul messages were scrawled in human excrement on the walls and bull-necked men, in what had once been white, but were smeared and stained, seersucker suits, were doing awful things to younger but equally depraved men around every corner.  The place reminded me of a cowshed that hadn’t been cleaned in fifteen years.  Somehow I knew I had to look and observe.  It was my job.  What was I being paid for?  I was lucky to be here.  Lots of people would give their drawing arm to be able to see the actual Kentucky Derby which was now hardly an hour away.  Hunter understood and was watching me as much as he was watching the scene before us.

Something splattered the page I was drawing on and, as I moved to wipe it away, I realized too late it was somebody’s vomit.  During the worst days of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler was rising faster than a bull on heat, George Grosz, the savage satirical painter, had used human shit as a violent method of colouring his drawings.  It is a shade of brown like no other and its use makes an ultimate statement about the subject.

‘Seen enough?’, asked Hunter, pushing me hastily towards an exit that led out to the club enclosure.  I needed a drink.  ‘Er… one more trip to the inner-field Ralph I think,’ I heard Hunter say nervously.  ‘Only another half-hour to the big race.  If we don’t catch the inner-field now, we’ll miss it.’  So we went.

While the scene was as wild here as it had been in the clubhouse, it had a warmer, more human face, more colour and happiness and gay abandon – the difference in atmosphere between Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Beer Street.  One harrowed and death-like the other bloated with booze but animal-healthy.

Who would have thought I was after the gristle, the blood-throbbing veins, poisoned exquisitely by endless self-indulgence, mint juleps, and bourbon.  Hide, anyway, behind the dark shades you predatory piece of raw blubber.

The race was now getting a frenzied response as Dust Commander began to make the running.  Bangles and jewels rattled on suntanned, wobbling flesh and even the pillar men in suits were now on tip-toe, creased skin under double-chins stretched to the limit into long furrows that curved down into tight collars.

Mouths opened and closed and veins pulsed in unison as the frenzy reached its climax.  One or two slumped back as their horses failed, but the mass hysteria rose to a final orgasmic shriek, at last bubbling over into whoops of joy, hugging and back slapping.  I turned to face the track again, but it was all over.  That was it.  The 1970 Kentucky Derby won by Dust Commander with a lead of five lengths – the biggest winning margin since 1946 when Triple Crown Champion, Assault, won the Derby by eight lengths.

‘I think it’s time I was thinking of getting back to New York.  Let’s have a meal somewhere and I can phone the airline for plane times.  What day is it, we seem to have lost a weekend.  I need a drink.’

‘You need a lynching.  You’ve upset my friends and I haven’t written a goddamn word.  I’ve been too busy looking after you.  Your work here is done.  I can never come back here again.  This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer.  I have no story.’

‘Well I know we got a bit pissed and let things slip a bit but there’s lots of colour.  Lots happened.’

‘Holy Shit!  You scumbag!  This is Kentucky, not Skid Row.  I love these people.  They are my friends and you treated them like scum.’

Ralph Steadman- The Joke’s Over

The Kentucky Derby and the Slow Death of Horse Racing

By Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic

May 3 2012, 12:31 PM ET

This dark and stormy Derby week, there is no other way to put it. These are dismal days for horse racing in North America. We once said, in the grandstands and along the backstretches, that all horse racing needed to reassert itself onto the American sporting scene was a Triple Crown winner. But the last 3-year-old colt to accomplish that task was Affirmed in 1978. And that means that a third of a century, an entire generation, has come and gone without such a champion. In the meantime, chaos. The great gaming monopoly that once was horse racing has devolved into a rudderless mess.

All across the continent, from Ontario to Kentucky, from Maryland to California, the industry and the sport are under siege. From venal legislators, who have raided gaming coffers to cover their own budgetary failures. From the politically connected gaming industry, which sees horse racing as a mere nuisance. From underfunded and lazy regulators, who are more concerned about securing their own patronage than they are about enforcing the rules. And from cheating owners, trainers, jockeys, and drivers, who are laughing at the rest of us as they deposit their ill-gotten gains.

…

No matter who wins, every racing fan everywhere mostly prays that none of these beautiful animals (or any others) get hurt on Saturday. Remember Eight Belles? She was the filly who raced a brave second to Big Brown in the Derby in 2008 before breaking down on the track. I hosted a Derby party that year and there were maybe half a dozen children watching that race. They were rightly horrified by Eight Belles’ on-track death and I daresay that none are likely to ever want to see a horse race ever again. That’s why horse racing has to do much more to better protect the horses.

That protection begins and ends with the vices and failings of the human connections who surround every racehorse. Although there is a healthy and continuous debate within racing about the efficacy of the drugs that are lawfully given to horses, the fact is that the pervasive use of such drugs (not to mention the illegal blood-doping ones) has had a devastating long-term impact upon the horses. We breed them for speed, we push them to race early, and then we have the nerve to pump them full of drugs to hide their ailments or to make them run faster.

…

There is no excuse for this, on any level. The owners are to blame for permitting their trainers and veterinarians to give drugs to their horses on such a scale. The trainers are to blame for putting their financial interest above the interests of their horses’ welfare. The veterinarians are to blame for allowing themselves to be used as instruments of the horses’ destruction. Track officials are to blame for not taking seriously their obligations to ensure the safety of the horses. And regulators are to blame for not punishing even the obvious offenders.

The reason all these people so often don’t do right by their horses is because the horses are perceived as fungible property rather than as the irreplaceable centerpieces of the sport. Insiders lament the breakdowns but perceive them to be exceptions to the rule. The problem is, the public doesn’t see it that way. To the lay person, each and every breakdown is proof that racing is a brutal and violent sport and, just as importantly, that the humans in charge of it aren’t doing enough to protect the horses. The cumulative effect of that perception has severely damaged the sport’s reputation and the industry’s ability to attract new fans.

There is no carrot and no stick-no economic incentive to play fair and no fear of swift and severe punishment for transgressors. It’s a system where integrity is talked about more than it is practiced, where everyone blames everyone else. Track officials blame the regulators for not enforcing the rules. Regulators blame legislators for not giving them enough statutory power. Defense attorneys hired by the alleged transgressors are allowed by state judges to make a mockery of the justice system-often delaying suspensions until their clients are ready to take their vacations.

…

No one wants to be regulated. No one wants to give up what little power and control they have over their corner of the industry. And too few, clearly, are willing to spend the money it would take to increase the pace of drug testing and enforcement or to aggressively market and lobby for the sport in bold new ways. Folks will pay millions for a nice colt. But they won’t pay millions to save the sport. The industry talks and talks and talks. And its leaders ponder incremental changes when great strides are desperately needed. In the meantime, too many of the fans, owners, and bettors have gone.

…

It’s not rocket science. It just takes will. And sacrifice. And humility. And money. All it would take for the sport to give itself a fighting chance for the future would be for stakeholders to hold each other, and themselves, more accountable. You can’t grow horse racing today without ensuring the safety of the horses. You can’t ensure the safety of the horses without limiting the drugs in the sport and punishing the cheaters.  And you can’t market any of it until potential fans realize that the industry takes its responsibilities seriously.

Hmm… remind you of anything?

If you want to you can watch Kentucky Derby coverage from 11 am ET (on Vs. where it actually started on Wednesday) until 7 pm (on NBC, where they spare you the pre-race hype until 4).

I suppose this is good thing since you can hardly be expected to follow Horse Racing unless you’re a tout or plunger in one of the few forms of gambling deemed socially acceptable (as opposed to Poker, which is not gambling at all) and 2 year olds don’t have much of a record to handicap.

Ice Cream.  Get your Tutsi Frootsie Ice Cream.

It’s really mostly an excuse to wear hats that would be rejected from a 5th Avenue Easter Parade or Royal Wedding and get tanked up on Bourbon that is best sipped with a soda chaser and not muddled up with mint.

Mint Julep

Ingredients

• 4 cups bourbon
• 2 bunches fresh spearmint
• 1 cup distilled water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• Powdered sugar

Directions

Post Time is 6:24 pm ET.

The name simply means “The Fifth of May” and it’s an oddly U.S. American holiday.

Except in the State of Puebla they don’t much celebrate the victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in Mexico which makes it much more like Patriot’s Day that we here in New England get to celebrate almost every year as an extra filing day (I understand there’s also a foot race in Boston).

Interestingly enough it was a stand up fight against the banksters which they lost (those who do not remember history…).  Some people say that the French intervention was intended to establish a supply line to aid the Slave Owner’s Rebellion (or as the more charitable put it, The War of the Rebellion).

Not Congressionally recognized until 2005, celebrations started in California as early as the mid 1860s and for over 100 years were most common in Southwestern States with a large population of people of Mexican descent.  Now of course it’s just another excuse to over consume the cheap crappy Tequila and Beer that Mexico exports (don’t get me wrong, there are good Mexican Beers and Tequila but Corona, Dos Equis, and Jose Cuervo are not them) and ignore real, actual factual Mexican history because we’re so fucking exceptional that understanding and caring about the countries we border is as beneath us as even knowing which ones they are.

Just don’t mistake it for Grito de Dolores.

A DocuDharma tradition.

Steve Martin and The Steep Canyon Rangers

(h/t Bluegal aka Fran)

Audio

With Thursday’s 1-0 win by Ramirez over the Atlanta Braves I can say, for what is probably the last time this season, that they have a share of the lead in the National League East.

It’s been a bad few seasons with team ownership caught up in the Madoff scandal, a situation that is not yet fully resolved, despite what The Guardian says (you’ll note they still owe in excess of $425 Million).  With the loss of Jose Reyes to free agency any objective observer can only call the team weaker.  They’ve moved in the fences by as much as 12 feet and lowered them by 8 for no good reason I can think of.  It’s not like they’re going to sell the extra 102 seats in what, with tons of luck, will be a .500 season.  Perhaps they will not finish at the bottom of the Division and there are worse teams, though not many of them.

It’s the 50th year for the Club and they usually get off to a good Opening Day start, winning in 33 of the past 43 seasons.  Only one other time have they done it 1-0.

But Santana is healthy for now, and spring is a time for hope and renewal.

Let’s go Mets!

Update: Still undefeated, next game at 1 pm today. – ek hornbeck

Happy Bloggiversary to Me.

kos seems to think I joined on April 5, 2005 and while my memory is different (I contend it was April Fools Day) I can’t prove it.

That’s a total of 2557 days or 61,368 hours or 3,682,080 minutes or 220,924,800 seconds of my life I’ll never get back.

Including 629 days of unexpected absence, because I didn’t just sit on my ass feeling sorry for myself.

My character is static and fictional (diary #4, but who’s counting?).  I haven’t changed a bit or grown any more than Jerry, George, Elaine, or Kramer, my level of obnoxiousness has remained constant.  I’ve never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.  I do hateful things for which people love me, and I do loveable things for which they hate me.  I’m admired for my detestability.

Nor am I likely to learn hugging in the future.  I’m over 120 years old and they’re still trying to ban evolution in Tennessee where the trees of knowledge are almost extinct and ignorance bushes thick.  I don’t miss Hillsboro, a mélange of Moorish and Methodist, it must have been designed by a congressman.

Since I’ve only ever been in love with the sound of my own voice I’ll spare you the trouble of actual research and direct you to some milestones-

• My First Comment
• My First Diary

When you’re as old as I am you pile up some numbers-

Daily Kos

• 4/5/05 (2,557 days)
• 46,147 comments (18 a day)
• 426 diaries (1 every 6 days)

DocuDharma

• 8/20/07 (1,690 days)
• 8,033 comments (4.75 a day)
• 1,974 essays (1+ a day)

The Stars Hollow Gazette

• 6/12/10 (663 days)
• 10,611 comments (16 a day)
• 1,797 diaries (2.7 a day)

Overall (2,557 days)

• 64,791 comments (25 a day)
• 4,197 diaries (1.64 a day)

I had never blogged before I came to Daily Kos, but I’ve always been a writer (and a critic, NOT a reporter Jim) even when it was just poetry for machines.  While I remain timeless I have taken my craft in different directions and I’m much more involved with the sites I manage and edit- The Stars Hollow Gazette and DocuDharma than I am concerned about minutia at the moment.  Still I’ve not forgotten where I got my start and should I happen on topics of mutual interest I don’t hesitate to share.

I hope all of you enjoy your time online as much as I do mine.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

His father Giuseppe was an inspector of slaughter houses until he was arrested in 1796 for French Revolutionary sympathies by the Austrians.  While he was imprisoned his wife and son moved to Bologna were she made a living singing in theaters and upon Giuseppe’s release he joined her as a horn player in the bands where she sang.

Because his grandmother couldn’t handle him while his mom and dad were on the road, Rossini was apprenticed to a pork butcher and received his first musical instruction, which was not of very high quality.  After about 3 years he switched to a blacksmith and found some better teachers.  He had composed 6 String Sonatas by the age of twelve.

By the time he was 14 he had already composed his first Opera (though it would not be staged until he was 20) and he also gained admission to the Bologna Conservatory where he studied for 4 years before the debut of his first commercial production.

Italian music is all about the Opera and it’s hard to find a composer of note who hasn’t written a dozen or two.  Rossini’s rise to fame was meteoric and by 21 he had already retired and had to be coaxed out of it at 23 when he received an offer from a Naples theater impresario he couldn’t refuse.  In return for one Opera a year, 200 ducats a month and a cut from the tables in the theater Casino.

The Barber of Seville, while one of Rossini’s most famous, premiered to some controversy.  Giovanni Paisiello had already written a fairly popular Opera with the same name and subject 25 years earlier and his supporters protested the opening with boos and cat-calls.

After his return to the stage Rossini produced about 20 Operas by 1823, some of the librettos of which were highly bowdlerized to appeal to the tastes of his audience.  In 1822 he married one of his leading ladies and made a trip to Vienna where he was highly celebrated.  After that he went to London where George IV gave him 7000 pounds for 5 months work, and then to Paris where he made 800 pounds a year as the Director of the Theatre des Italiens plus a contract from Charles X for 5 Operas a year.

He stayed there for 5 years before returning to Bologna in 1829.  After that he composed but sporadically.  His first wife died in 1845, he remarried in 1846.  After leaving Bologna in 1848 due to the political unrest he eventually took up permanent residence in Paris where he devoted himself to the life of a foodie.  At the time of his death in 1868 he was acclaimed as the greatest composer of Opera ever known.

The piece I have selected tonight is one of his Sins of Old Age, Salon Music he composed at his home in Paris after his retirement.  This particular one, La Regata Veneziana, is a three song cycle posted by GermanOperaSinger and featuring Renata Tebaldi.  She was born in Pesaro, the very same town as Rossini.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Pirates of Penzance was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the United States. At the time, American law offered no copyright protection to foreigners. After their previous opera, H.M.S. Pinafore, was a hit in London, over a hundred American companies quickly mounted unauthorised productions, often taking considerable liberties with the text and paying no royalties to the creators. Gilbert and Sullivan hoped to forestall further “copyright piracy” by mounting the first production of their next opera in America, before others could copy it, and by delaying publication of the score and libretto. They succeeded in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the first production of the opera by opening the production themselves on Broadway, prior to the London production. They also operated U.S. touring companies. However, Gilbert, Sullivan, and their producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, failed in their efforts over the next decade, to control the American performance copyrights over their operas.

Libretto a la Boise State.

Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here!

The “stage business” is not properly conveyed by mere reading or listening but is faithfully transmitted by our modern minstrels from the debut on New Year’s Eve 1879.