JC / Railbird

Miscellany Archive

Links for 2009-10-07

• Sea The Stars is a glorious reminder racing is more than an excuse for a punt and a pint
  "In his lathered coat and refusal to settle early in the race, there were the faintest signs that the wonder horse's internal machinery was starting to clank and groan. But it was hard to defend that suspicion when he burst from the pack, arrow-like, and passed the lollipop two lengths in front. This was not a bloodstock deal, a betting coup or a prize-money grab. It was flesh and blood and beauty."
  (tags: horseracing sea-the-stars prix-de-l'arc great-horses)
• Stars' quality throws handicappers
  "Handicappers admittedly offer the one objective gauge against which new champions can be measured against the great names of the past. But they can make no allowance for the fact that different horses have different ways of showing scorn for their inferiors." The limitations of formulas and figures when it comes to quantifying greatness.
  (tags: horseracing sea-the-stars prix-de-l'arc handicapping great-horses)
• The strange case of Google News and its “(blog)” label
  An odd move that doesn't make much sense. "On both technical and philosophical levels, there’s no meaningful difference between blogs that publish news and news sites that aren’t published as blogs."
  (tags: media journalism google google-news blogging)
• Media Tech Summit: "Twitter is a pulse — but it’s a biased one"
  "In preliminary results still being vetted, based on all tweets of 300,000 random users up to May 2009 (gender tracking excludes bots and ambiguous names), women make up 54 percent of Twitter users but are more likely to follow men (44 percent compared to 56 percent). Men are more likely to follow men, too (35 percent compared to 65 percent). But genders tend to tweet at the same rate."
  (tags: twitter social-media)

Posted in Miscellany on October 7, 2009

Links for 2009-09-21

• Sea The Stars, wonder horse
  "Here, as all of racing knows, is the distillation of everything breeders and owners and trainers have searched for over centuries."
  (tags: horseracing international sea-the-stars breeders-cup)
• Riotous Genius
  Marking the first anniversary of David Foster Wallace's death. "You don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to recognize the power of Wallace’s work. You just need a set of healthy nerve endings."
  (tags: writing literature david-foster-wallace essays)

Posted in Miscellany on September 21, 2009

Favorites for 2009-08-30

Each day, I browse Flickr for interesting racing images. Here are a few photos recently saved as favorites …

Posted in Miscellany on August 30, 2009