Links for 2009-05-28
-
An odd story about Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, human rights activists, lenient licensing, and a globe-trotting horse.
-
Your chance to do spec work for Equibase.
-
Disturbing. Or is that just my old media training?
-
The challenge, from niche to national: "News companies today straddle a difficult line between pure content creators and pure technology companies…. We have to constantly create content for our audience and evolve the way we deliver it and will probably have to continue to do so …"
“I Was Jack Lewis”
More on Jack Kerouac’s elaborate sports fantasy play and writing:
Apparently Kerouac, also a little nuts about horse races, created a system of fantasy horse racing using marbles. He actually describes a version of this game in Doctor Sax:
“I was Jack Lewis and I owned the greatest horse, Repulsion, solid ballbearing a half inch thick, it rolled off the Parchesi board and into the linoleum as smooth, and soundless but as heavy as a rumbling ball of steel all tooled smooth, sometimes kicked poor aluminum-marbles out of sight and off the track at the hump bump of the rampbottom—”
This sentence, with its haphazard commas that barely dent the momentum of the writer’s thinking, reminds me of what can be so appealing about Kerouac’s prose. First and foremost, there’s his manic confidence—a sense that every aspect of experience is worth describing. This style can make Kerouac seem like a wise man trapped in the body of a child who’s eaten a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans. But at its digressive best the style matches Kerouac’s ambition to uncover the rhythms of a certain uppity male consciousness.
That last bit captures exactly why I’m not a Kerouac fan, but I do find his obsessive (and apparently secretive) fantasy sports life fascinating, particularly what has emerged of his racing games.
Links for 2009-05-23
-
"Rachel Alexandra figured to be the favorite off her spectacular record-setting 20 1/4-length win in the Kentucky Oaks (G1), but for most of the early betting she was barely above even money. The public could not bet her enough and she certainly qualified as the kind of overbet favorite that we always tell you to avoid." I guess I'm alone in this — I thought 9-5 on a much-the-best horse who looked like even money or a tick better was a pretty good price.
-
"On a cool spring morning in May of 1836 Isaac Michael Dyckman possibly took leave from his family home in Inwood, on the Northern tip of Manhattan, mounted his steed, and rode the muddy trail to the Union Race Course in far off Long Island for what would prove to be one of the most celebrated horse races of the 19th Century …"
-
Key point, expanded: "When Gawker started, there was a surfeit of information and not nearly enough context — so we provided that, in the form of links and occasionally snarky commentary. But now the balance has shifted…. If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much…. The content market is finding its new balance."
About
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 ›
Elsewhere
Find Jessica on Pinboard and Instagram, Railbird on LibraryThing and Twitter.
Etc.
Links
Search
Boston Racing
Spreadsheets/Data
← Home
Copyright © 2000-2023 by Jessica Chapel. All rights reserved.