Funny, that.

I just turned the last page of an autobiography of almost-but-really-not-quite-Triple-Crown-winner Funny Cide (horses these days... they just don't write the way they used to; I blame that darn IM for the shocking decline in their language skills) and I am reminded of the mystic creation of a champion racehorse. The industry screeches about bloodlines and breeding; I know the geneology of Smarty Jones better than I know my own. But you can mate the very same mare and stud together all day long and still not recreate anything anywhere near the magnificence of a fleet-footed sibling.

While delicately stepping around the angry and malodorous a few months ago at my local POST (that is the technical racing term for "piece of s--t track") I happened across a filly whose name indicated that she might be related to Funny Cide. I looked her up in The Daily Racing Form. Sure enough: She was the daughter of Distorted Humor, the sire of Funny Cide.

And completely winless.

There she stood, a sad little sister in a paddock ringed by dingy toothpicks while her half-brother endorsed his own line of beer and took phone calls from Regis.

For the life of me, I cannot remember her name.

Irony, thy name is the sister of Funny Cide.