These European line horses are whopping, some weighing in at more 1500 pounds. I paramour to watch them when they are getting timely to pull the sled and ...

Yesterday was a superior late-spring day (our usual hot climate ailing has been happily delayed) and we went to a draft horse pulling trial, and then to visit my father where we watched the Belmont Stakes advertise.

I don’t follow horse racing, but I had seen something about late controversy in the sport including have relation over the favorite in the Belmont Stakes, Big Brown, being run with a hoof-rupture. Had he won as expected he would have been the first Triple Crown prizewinner since 1978. Unfortunately something was amiss with Big Brown, and his jockey pulled him up well before the end so that he finished last. Peradventure it was the hoof-crack, maybe something else; his trainer and the vets passed him as fit, and my layman’s judgement that he was favoring one leg going from the barn to the hunt down may have been my imagination. Perhaps more details will be released.

I also took offense at the commercial linkage of the horse “Big Brown” to UPS: the mounted path employee who accompanied this horse and his jockey on the pre-sprint parade had “UPS” prominently on his windbreaker and I had a transient glimpse of a banner above the starting gates reading “What can Brown do for you?” Will the Jest of Kings follow so many other public events in this approval, so that we can look forward to Pepsi’s Belmont Stakes or Jim Ray’s Kentucky Derby? Then jockeys can dress big corporate logos on their silks, and the horses can even be re-named for the critical sponsor product. “And in the widen it’s Burger King leading, Windows Vista and GoDaddy.com effective up, and Scott’s TurfKing Fertilizer in fourth…” Well, maybe the theatrical failure of the Big Brown/UPS advertising opening will delay this.

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