The KY Derby and slaughtering funeral goers

The Kentucky Derby: Call to the Derby Post... one of my favorite non-fiction works.

   For those of you who care about which rich guy owns the world's fastest three year old horse, the Kentucky Derby comes your way tomorrow.

   The Kentucky Derby is part of American horse racing's Triple crown, along with the Belmont and Preakness Stakes. Most of America's better horse breeders are based in Kentucky. Winning the Triple Crown makes the owner a millionaire, and gets the horse laid (more on this later).

   Horse racing is right up there among our oldest sports. The Roman chariot races were just one example of speed horsing. Modern horse racing began after the Crusades, where Saladin and his army had just whipped a lot of European ass on these speedy horses... which were more than a match for the armored war horses that the Euros brought down to the Holy Land. Knights came back from the Crusades with swift Arabian horses. Bred to English mares, the resulting progeny grew to be the horses you see today.

   They were racing horses in colonial Virginia, and some of the first laws established on the frontier were put down to regulate the racing of horses. The first American horse track was laid out in Long Island in 1665. While it didn't get big time til after the Civil War, they were racing horses in America before, say, King Phillip's War. Before that, I guess they used to bet on things like who'd starve to death first.

   It's big money. Selling out Churchill Downs makes some cash, but the real dollars are made through betting and breeding. You could find a horse somewhere, train him/her (I think KY Derby horses are fillies, but I may be mistaken) to run really fast, and make a fortune off of it. Winning the race is one way to score, but selling the horse to a breeder (called "putting it out to stud") also makes you das capital.

   The sport has ups and downs- especially when they figured out that people will bet just as heavily on easier-to-maintain greyhound dogs, or in the anti-gambling movement in America in the early 1900s. There's a pretty heavy mob influence, which led to the formation of the American Jockey Club. Beyond that... I don't really care.

   A few fun things to know about racing horses:

- Unlike baseball players, horses who are injured during the race are usually put down right on the track. I'm told it is near-impossible to fix a broken leg on a horse, and it's actually less cruel to just straight blast it in the head with a rifle than it is to let the sucker die slow.

   I can recall- when I was real, real young- a local horse named Timely Writer making a big stir. I think he may have almost won the Triple Crown, but he/she took a wrong step in one race... Boo Ya.

- Seabiscuit  made a fortune depicting a sort of Rocky Balboa of horses. National Velvet  may or may not have been a race horse- I don't have time to watch any movie that doesn't have karate, sex, car crashes, or dinosaurs. I don't think Mr. Ed did any racing.

- Rick Pitino owns a horse stable, called Celtic Pride.

- The horse-driven culture of the American South led to the Confederacy having a much stronger cavalry than the Union (who were the city boys). Bobby Lee's horse was Traveller, and Richard Ewell rode a notoriously slow horse named Tangent.

- Always bet on a horse/dog if you see it defecating before the race.

- I'm working from memory, here... but a guy once died in the saddle at the Derby. He managed to stay mounted, and his horse won somehow.  

In non-horse news... I got this clip from Cruel.com:

SO WE PWNED THIS FUNERAL TODAY: SERENITY-NOW.ORG - Google Video

   Most of us don't play World of Warcraft, an online DnD-style game where geeks assume the mantle of clerics, rogues, wizards, etc... still, this is funny/awful.

   I guess one of the players died in IRL, and her friends decided to hold an online funeral for her... in the game itself, in an "open combat area." They were counting on no one being mean enough to disturb it... a bad idea in the PvP realm.

   A "guild" called Serenity Now decided to crash the funeral, and kill everyone at the service. Immoral, yes... but perfectly legal in the game culture. That link above is the video of it- set to the tune of "Yesterday" and "Where Eagles Dare."

   The message board quotes of outrage are funny, too... "I hope your father dies, and someone shows up at the funeral naked, knocks the casket over, runs around slapping people while yelling "Owned," and someone releases a video of it."