I’m sure it wasn’t the first time this exercise was attempted, and it certainly hasn’t been the last.  I sure would like to see it on TV again, though.

I was thinking about a table of eight for dinner.  That many egos around a table, though, it would be impossible to get anything meaningful out of any of them. 

So I’m changing the construct, and am imagining a week’s retreat.   At the beach. 

Two of the reservations are, umm, reserved, for me and my buddy Woody, ’cause we were talking about it and it’s my blog.  So that leaves six. 

This type of exercise can use anyone who ever lived, fictional people can be included or excluded, dead or alive.   For this first exercise I want to only include live, non-fictional people.

It can’t be all politicians or all musicians or all anything else, so we need to come up with six representatives of different vocations and or avocations.

So here are the (a)vocations:  1)   religion/philosophy   2)   politics/military  3)   comedian/comic  4)   physical/theoretical scientist  5)   actor/writer  6)   athlete/coach

For starters, I’m gonna go ahead and present my initial list off of the top of my head:

1)   Dalai Lama   2)   Donna Brasile  3)   George Carlin  4)   James Watson  5)   Doris Kearns Goodwin  6)   Tiger Woods (although John Daly would certainly be entertaining)

A paper came out today suggesting that the gods’ gift of the grape can be better enjoyed with the right background music.

Give me a box of red and some Willie.

…Nelson.  Willie Nelson.

Finally some good news on the global warming front.

We always hear of potentially catastrophic special (as in species, not “he’s special”) failure as a result of the recent Gaian fever.  It’s nice to see a success story come from this epic change.

I’d like to see a story about thrushes making such a comeback.  I like thrushes almost as much as I like great tits.

Really.  I love me a thrush. 

This story tells of a possible new tool for the funeral industry.  Lye.   If it were as clean as the story tries to suggest, I’d be all for it.  

  “because of its environmental advantages, some in the funeral industry say it could someday rival burial and cremation.”

Personally, I couldn’t care less what happens to me if and when I die.  I’d like there to be a big wake, because I like being responsible for big ol’ parties, but that’s not about me. Funerals and wakes and things are about the survivors, their loss and their sudden reminder of their mortality.  George Carlin said he’d like to be “blown up”.  There’s an idea – the biggest roman candle of all time… hmmm…

That’s not entirely true, what I said about not caring what happens to my body – I don’t not want it buried whole.  What an incredible waste of space.  I worked in the cemetery/funeral home business for seven years.  Our company owned over thirty cemeteries.  Thousands of beautiful acres that can never be used for anything but recherche du temps perdu. 

Back to the article, it suggests that, because the Mayo Clinic and the University of Florida let the effluence spill into the rivers, it must be okay – them guys are smart. 

I was going to do a mess of research about this and that to come up with some reasoning behind why this just seemed odd – but it turned out common logic is all I need to start this argument.

A)   It’s a bad thing to throw dead human bodies into rivers that aren’t in New Jersey. 

B)   It’s a worse thing to throw lye into rivers, even after that body you threw in.

In a fight between lye and a body, the lye kicks ass, leaving none of the body to do any harm – but unless there’s a chemical interaction that I’m not aware of that turns that lye into river roses (I would call that hypothetical interaction the “KarlRove synthesis”)  that can’t possibly be environmentally friendly. 

I’d like to see a little less of the new funeral processes and a little more questioning of the Mayo Clinic and U. of Florida.

http://www.space.com/technology/top10_weapons_history.html

They are:

10.  Atlatl

9.   Vickers Gunbus

8.   Gunpowder

7.   Crossbow

6.   Maxim gun

5.   U-boats

4.   Radar

3.   Nuclear bomb

2.   ICBMs

1.   M1 Abrams tank

Not a bad list, although the placement of the M1 above nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles might be questionable.  And the atlatl was developed long before “history”.  And gunpowder is not strictly a weapon, but a recipe from which a weapon, among other things, may be made.

I want to offer my own here.  My top ten weapons since man’s emergence as habilis.:

10.   The held stick/rock.   Using an object as an offensive, defensive or food gathering weapon is unheard of outside of the Great Apes.

9.     The thrown stick/rock.  Even more rare.

8.     The compound tool.  A rock tied to a stick.  A bow and arrow. An atlatl.

7.     Animal husbandry.  Cavalry allowed for speed and field knowledge (scouts)

6.     The stirrup.  Allows the full weight of horse and rider to be thrown into battle.

5.     Crossbow.  Initially outlawed by “civilized nations” for it’s barbarous efficiency, quickly made de rigeur for the same reason.

4.     Guns, muskets, cannons.  This revolutionary advance made castles and, eventually, feudalism obsolete.

3.     Mechanized warfare.  Tanks, armored personnel carriers, riflery, machine guns, NBC weapons.

2.     Prolonged, sustained, controlled flight.  (not technically a weapon, as I alluded to above, but the first use of this technology was WWI, immediately upon it’s invention.  Without PSC flight, no WWI, as we know it.)

1.     Atomic/nuclear weaponry.  The bane of and director of history since before 1940.

This seemed like too much, so I did some searching and found out a number of things:

“Because horse racing lacks a national governing body, death and injury data on a broader scale is notoriously scant, although studies estimate that horses suffer lethal breakdowns an average of 1.5 times in every 1,000 starts.”                        -   Brian Hiro, North County Times, Escondido CA.

“Last year, 57,495 races were run in the United States and Canada for a total of 469,644 starts, according to statistics compiled by the Jockey Club. Using Nunamaker’s figure, that means about 704 horses died while racing in 2005 in the United States and Canada, about 1.93 fatalities per day.”                                                  -   AP June 10, 2006

And the danger isn’t only to the fragile, beautiful thoroughbreds.  Jockeys place themselves in serious danger compared to other sports:

“There are many dangers in horse racing for both horse and jockey: a horse can stumble and fall, or fall when jumping an obstacle, exposing both jockey and horse to the danger of being trampled and injured.

In 1984, R.J. McCunney and P.K. Russo published a study entitled Brain Injuries in Boxing. The study demonstrated that the U.S. sport with the highest number of deaths per 100,000 participants was horse racing:

Fatality rates per 100,000 participants

1. Horse racing: 128
2. Sky diving: 123
3. Hang gliding: 56
4. Mountaineering: 51
5. Scuba Diving: 11
6. Motorcycle racing: 7
7. College Football: 3
8. Boxing: 1.3

                                              -from Wikipedia “Horse Racing

Having said and shown that, horses are just fragile critters.  Nearly a ton of strong, handsome meat on four small, relatively delicate wrists makes for an accident waiting to happen when thrown in with twenty high-strung, equally athletic, type-A racers from a gene pool European monarchs would envy.

Throw in Jacobin jockeys and it’s a bit of a surprise so many survive.

 Finally, here is a link to a rant-blog with discussion that presents arguments about what is happening with racing:

http://fuglyhorseoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-one-bites-dust.html

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080503&content_id=2632033&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

   Done.  Whatever else he does or doesn’t do this year, that was a successful trade.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14368/1/

The Pony Express, for all it’s cultural fame, only lasted about 18 months. For five cents an ounce, a string of wiry riders would ride an even longer string of wiry ponies across the country, delivering mail from St Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California.  Each horse would travel about 10-15 miles, each rider maybe 100 miles at a stretch.  The whole trip took 10 or 11 days, thus dramatically reducing the time it took to get messages to the burgeoning California territory.  In October 1861 the Transcontinental Telegraph caused the iconic Pony Express to fold, reducing the time to send messages across the continent to virtually nil.

In 1875 the first Kentucky Derby was run.  Fifteen horses ran 1.5 miles (the distance was changed to 1.25 miles in 1896).  African American Oliver Lewis won the race aboard Aristides.  NPR’s sports pundit Frank Deford was recently kvetching about the Triple Crown taking place in a brief five week period, but on Sportsfilter.com – a sports blog I enjoy on a daily basis – Owlhouse notes that

“Having the Triple Crown over 5 weeks is probably a good thing – racehorses are trained with a schedule in mind. They can’t race fast all the time, and tend to peak over a period of a few weeks. Once their performance drops off they are spelled.”

With all of my horsey experience (I somersaulted off of one when I was six years old.  I didn’t let go of the reins when it got peckish.  Thus ends my horsey experience.)  I think Owlhouse makes better sense than NPR-Boy.
   So. Now you know what I know about horsies. 

p.s.   They don’t taste like chicken

p.p.s.   Don’t get excited, that’s just an educated guess…

Nah, nobody would say that.