by kara on April 26, 2012
The card in England’s Plumpton Racecourse includes a ten-strong Shetland Pony Champion Hurdle, on which the Tote runs a special pool as part of their between-races entertainment. There’s the Shetland Grand National – only the most nauseatingly adorable thing I’ve seen in my whole life. A miniature steeplechase on stout, furry little legs, streaking forward from the starting line at the annual London International Olympia horse show. The ponies are paraded around before the race, and there’s a commentator and pretend bookmakers. When the race begins, the chunky monkeys gallop at top speed, leaping over two-foot steeplechase fences. The little riders – boys and girls age 9 – 13 under 5 feet tall and donning candy colored jockey silks – have to work to qualify for a coveted place among the 10 runners in the race, through a year of competing in riding disciplines like jumping, eventing, dressage and controlling their ponies at top speeds. It’s a huge honor to qualify for the race. The Shetland Pony Grand National is – naturally – a big crowd-pleaser, televised to much media attention every year. The British love racing, both on the flat and over jumps and they love their fuzzy-wuzzy, native ponies.
I want it.
by kara on April 21, 2012
Waiting for Dick Cheney to die? Pull up a Chair! It’s gonna be a while. We all thought he might be dead – months had past without the crooked-mouthed toad on the teevee questioning Obama’s patriotism. And what with the recent pantheon of sociopathic dictators whom everyone wanted dead — Khaddafi, Mubarak, Saddam, Kim Jong-il, Osama, Breitbart….. it’s like God was having a clearance sale and Cheney was next to be rolled onto the showroom floor! It’s a fact that men like this rise to power together, and decline together. If those others died, perhaps Cheney was taken with them in the same satanic pact? Surely The Prime Architect of the Destruction of the American Empire’s fate was sealed when we withdrew our troops from Iraq, leaving the toxic waste barrel containing his soul unguarded….
[click to continue…]
by kara on April 19, 2012
Photograph of Satchel Paige, 1968, by Louis Requena/MLB/Getty Images
via New Yorker
by kara on April 16, 2012
BATTLEGROUND AMERICA via New Yorker
Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.
Russell King, a seventeen-year-old junior, was sitting at a table with another junior, Nate Mueller. King, shot in the head, fell face first onto the table, a pool of blood forming. A bullet grazed Mueller’s ear. “I could see the flame at the end of the gun,” Mueller said later. Daniel Parmertor, a sixteen-year-old snowboarder, was shot in the head. Someone screamed “Duck!” Demetrius Hewlin, sixteen, was also shot in the head, and slid under the table. Joy Rickers, a senior, tried to run; Lane shot her as she fled. Nickolas Walczak, shot in his neck, arm, back, and face, fell to the floor. He began crawling toward the door.
Ever since the shootings at Columbine High School, in a Denver suburb, in 1999, American schools have been preparing for gunmen. Chardon started holding drills in 2007, after the Virginia Tech massacre, when twenty-three-year-old Seung-Hui Cho, a college senior, shot fifty-seven people in Blacksburg. [click to continue…]
by kara on April 15, 2012
skippy
by kara on April 15, 2012
by kara on April 15, 2012
by kara on April 13, 2012
the flintstones crew today at our fare thee well lunch. those 6 weeks we spent together were some good times!
by kara on April 11, 2012
by kara on April 11, 2012
