Tuesday, December 28, 2004

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.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Score!

Jim The Baby Nephew was in receipt of a basketball net for Christmas, which he took to immediately, which made Country The Brother-In-Law very happy indeed. The baby shows excellent ball-handing skills, but he soon bored of the actual ball, and took to stuffing every single thing he owns through the net so as to develop his small stuffed duck/loud obnoxious fake set of car keys/Aunt Tink’s hair handling skills. Then he started hot-dogging, and grabbed the little net in a gratuitous attempt to pull it down on top of himself, which further pleased his father.

“Every now and then it’s good form hang off the rim on the way down, son,” he said from the couch. I objected, and Jim got mad and charged the stands and beat up two uncles and a cousin before the cops came.

I am un-fond of basketball; it’s entirely too squeaky, and the shorts are uncomfortably close to a female-only clothing item known as a “squort.”

I orginially had high hopes for Jim as a jockey, but he weighs nineteen pounds now and is far past the point of getting any good mounts at all. So I was relieved when he returned to his best holiday sporting event, Throwing A Great Big Fit So You Freaky People Stop Passing Me Around.

I was less disturbed by his early basketball genius than I was by the box the net came in. It shows a whole set of Fisher-Price products, with a small white child attempting a stacking game, and an Asian baby practicing mergers and acquisitions on a tiny spreadsheet, and– for the basketball net? They show a black child towering over the playset. I don't think I have to tell you how massively offensive this is. Are they trying to say the black kid couldn’t handle the stacking game and all he’s good for is to try to dribble his way out of the ghetto? You can see the little white kid oppressing him all the way from the other side of the box.

Of course, the Asian baby will buy and sell them the both at least eight times over by kindergarten.

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