Horses and obsessive courses

[captainsblog]

Day 28 - First TV show obsession


Watched a few of the episodes during original run? Check.

Watched, even more regularly, quasi-canonical animated series during its original run? Check.

Bought books. Quite a few books. Still have at least a few of them.

Edited fanfic in high school, possibly before it was generally even called that.

Saw all movies based on original, most of them on the day of their premiere, the first of them (for the second time) at Grauman's Chinese.

Attended cons devoted primarily to series.

Tried each of the successor tv series and the films based on them, wound up watching most of those for most of their runs. The Pine-Quinto reboot, likewise.

Wrote and edited fanfic for a webseries which debuted, quite deliberately, on the 30th anniversary of the first aired episode of TOS.

Risked the wrath of the evil Zark, computer lab manager in the cellar of Cornell's Uris Hall, for playing a woefully non-graphical video game version of the show on DECwriter computer terminals in the late 70s, only to find resurrected DOS-based versions of the game in the 80s that have been played on this computer as recently as earlier this year. (It's on an external drive that's mostly dead, but someday, someday, I'll find it again.)

Oh look, there it is.

::running out of ideas here::

Has purchased airline tickets on Priceline.

Still discusses fear of mechanical rice pickers in therapy.

Rest your case, Ray.

Done.

----

Not sure if this will warm the hearts of the OMGCuteAnimals crowd, but it's a love story that I relate to as much as the pure unadulterated adorable. I heard it on the way to a fairly rare night court appearance for me last night, listening to a long-running sports talk show out of Rochester that I used to listen to every night, much to Eleanor's less-than-glee. (We referred to it as "The Rant and Rave Show" after the host's opinionating, and I wound up just taping it most nights before trips to Rochester and listening to it on the car deck.)



Bob's an old-school columnist, one of the few who still writes regularly about playing the ponies at Finger Lakes Race Track, about as low in the horse racing minor leagues as you can get and still be considered a thoroughbred. He came across this story on the back stretch recently, and is planning a column on it. Some of the story has already been posted here, in the paper from the filly's original home town:

Lisa's Booby Trap, bred by Ocala Stud Farm, was an early bust.

“She was a good-looking filly, but she didn't show us much early and when she didn't look like she was going to do anything, we gave her away,” said David O'Farrell, Ocala Stud assistant manager.

She was given to John Shaw, who has taken on similar horses from Ocala Stud.

“He had her for six weeks and didn't impress him very much either, so he gave her away,” O'Farrell said.

Lisa's Booby Trap ended up in upstate New York at Finger Lakes Racetrack with Timothy Snyder. The 3-year-old filly finally made her racing debut in May under Snyder and pummeled the field with a 17 3/4-length win. She quickly rattled off two more victories and remains undefeated with a combined winning margin of more than 36 lengths.

Now a 36-length finish at Finger Lakes doesn't mean you're Seabiscuit- the rest of the field is pretty slow- but the heartwarming part of the tale isn't reported there. It's what Bob told us about the other night.

The filly was burdened with genetic defects in both of her front feet. Wearing horseshoes designed for ordinary horses, she wound up kicking herself in the flank as she tried to run through a workout. "A fat man could outrun her," reported one of her critics.

Her new owner from upstate, who had lost his wife (not-so-coincidentally also named Lisa) to cancer and had virtually no money, made a $2,000-ish down payment on the horse and spent most of the rest of his funds getting her home. That's when he began experimenting. By re-fitting her with hind-leg shoes on those damaged front feet, she stopped kicking herself- and just as suddenly started kicking equine ass on the workout oval.

Observers were literally checking their stopwatches in amazement when they saw slowpoke's sudden new times, fractions of their former selves. She blew the doors off her first three races at the low-level track where she's her owner's only horse, and was scheduled to hit the big time at Saratoga earlier this month before bad weather there resulted in her being scratched.  He's already won dozens of times more than what he paid, and has turned down even more lucrative sale proposals from racing syndicates. Because she's his, and is named for his late wife, and he's the one who figured her out.  Not for sale at any price- at least until it's time to breed her.

Rabbi Katz's book orders to the contrary, sometimes good things happen to good people, and it's a damn nice thing to witness.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

OMFSM! I used to sneak into the Tufts University Computer Center on Sunday mornings when I was in high school, just to play Star Trek on a teletype terminal. The computer - I think it was a PDP-11 - was time-shared, and Sunday morning was the only time I could get the 60-odd kilobytes required to run TREK.

Thanks for the links!