Links for 2009-03-22
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Profile and photos of Barbara Jo Rubin, the first female jockey to win a race, and the first to ride in New York (headline from March 11, 1969 NYT: "Girl Jockeys Are Invading the Big A"). Rubin won seven of her first 10 races.
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Every handicapper knows this — "Seed: So you can overanalyze a situation? JL: Definitely. I talk in the book about a study involving strawberry jam, where the more people think about which jam they prefer, the less accurate their preferences become."
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Fussy. Fusty. Too concerned with balance. Still valuable.
Links for 2009-03-20
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And if it is, what then for Thoroughbreds? Maybe it's time for a dedicated show circuit. [Always interesting to get an outsider’s perspective.]
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Executive summary: Cajoling visitors into memberships is hard work, long-form content doesn't pay for itself with traffic, advertisers are cheap and like sponsorships, significant start-up funding is essential.
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Sample entry: "E’LFLOCK. n.s. [elf and lock.] Knots of hair twisted by
elves." See: Manes done up in Steve Asmussen barn style. -
On friendship and writing. That this thoughtful essay happens to feature turf writer William Nack seems cosmically right.
Links for 2009-03-19
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Numbers deemed unspectacular, but good enough: "The show averaged 594,000 viewers, an increase of 11% compared with the year-ago time slot average." Also noted: Resemblance to MTV docu-soaps not coincidental — production team used some of the techniques pioneered on "Laguna Beach."
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Nerd nirvana: "His voice echoed throughout the chamber growing louder until — I kid you not — he was yelling, 'So Say We All,' and the crowd answered right back. Hell, even I yelled it, I was in the fraking United Nations with Adama, the gods themselves could not have stopped this moment. It was surreal …"
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Another source of worry for publishers online: "Now that the Semantic Web is no longer just a research project, if someone owns the taxonomy you're using and changes it up on you, what rights do you have in the matter?"
Links for 2009-03-18
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Frank Deford on how the Kentucky Derby became Americana.
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Time for a new line.
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A taste of what will happen with mainstream Twitter adoption.
Links for 2009-03-16
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Telegraph review of recently published Eclipse biography by Nicholas Clee makes the work sound as though it's a bit of modern Trollope, centered around a great horse, who was, even towards the end of his life, hard used: "In the end, even the mighty Eclipse became what can only be described as shagged out, and in the declining months of his 24-year-life was conveyed from mare to mare in what was almost certainly the first ever horsebox."
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Writers, editors, social media; what might be lost.
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Jessica Chapel is a writer, editor, and web producer living in Cambridge, MA. Railbird is a thoroughbred horse racing blog published continuously since June 2004. More ›
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