Breeding Bubbles

It’s the economy, stupid.
In the first few hours after Eight Belles’s breakdown in the Derby, just as in the first few hours after Barbaro’s collapse two years ago in the Preakness, we’ve seen dozens of explanations, from the well- and not-so-well-informed. The track was too hard. The horses had been raced too much too young. Fillies shouldn’t be running against the boys. It’s the drugs. Oh, we’re breeding unsound horses.
Yes, it’s probably all of those. But especially the last. There’s no question that racehorses today are less sound, more prone to injury, than those of the 1950s and ’60s, or even of a decade or two ago. Horses today race only half as many times as they did 30 years ago. And the reason is the market. Like other unregulated markets — remember the mortgage-securities collapse, anyone? — the thoroughbred breeding market is subject to that old economics chestnut, Gresham’s Law. Bad money (or in this case, bad breeding) drives out good.
Although thoroughbreds have always been bought and sold, the real explosion in the auction market, and the bubble(s) in prices, date from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fueled by money from Europe and the Middle East, auction prices for the best Kentucky-bred yearlings rose faster in the early ’80s even than U.S. home prices did earlier in this decade. The frenzy reached its first peak with the 1985 purchase of Seattle Dancer for $13.1 million. Seattle Dancer ran five times, winning twice, and earning $150,000, and then failed as a stallion.
Excesses like these led to a market collapse in the late 1980s, but the whole cycle started up again the next decade, and continues today. The Green Monkey is, so far, the top of this price bubble, fetching $16 million at the 2006 2-year-old sale, then running three times without a win before being retired.
What made the market develop as it did was the influx of new money. That money came both from those who wanted to win races — the Maktoum family of Dubai being the prime example — and, more importantly, from those who were looking to make a profit not from racing, but from breeding and selling.
* continued at Breakdowns and Dollars

In other greed-fueled news, check out where your oil dollars are going (via Wagga)...

Yutaro the Koi Boy

The Adventures of Yutaro via Neatorama

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE!
Despite the fact that this guy is a McSame enthusiast, I shall link to the video due to the other aspects I agree with:

Hat tip to Edgar.

Hate Hillary? Vent here.

I seriously need some Beavis and Butthead therapy.

Of Koi and Sledgehammers

Ophelia by ^cosmosue

I am pleased to announce that Nietzsche Koi has inspired something resembling an intellectual conversation over at Shakespeare Geek:

Saturday, May 03, 2008
The Bard Never Would Have Let Me Use A Sledgehammer
http://nietzschefish.blogspot.com/2008/05/bard-never-would-have-let-me-use-sledge.html
[Note, image NSFW]
The above link just goes to a not-safe-to-work, albeit artistic image, with the following caption:
Shakespeare only really wrote with two views on women - the conniving sexualized and the innocent virgins. The guys I work with in construction see me as either a sexual object or an incompetent child, so they aren't much different than Shakespeare. Except the Bard never would have let me use a sledge hammer.
Discuss.
Posted by Duane at 11:38 PM

3 comments:
Craig said...
No, absolutely not, and really quite indefensible. Exhibits for the rebuttal:
Portia
Rosalind
Viola
Helena (All's Well that Ends Well version)
Margaret of Anjou
Lady Macbeth
Mistresses Ford and Page
Elinor of Aquitaine
Tamora
Neither "sexual objects" nor "incompetent children," any of them. There is a great deal we would take issue with today with Shakespeare's presentation and treatment of women, to be sure--and "Shrew" looms large in that presentation in my mind--but Shakespeare also wrote about strong and capable women many times--some "good," some "bad," some pretty hard to categorize (Queen Margaret, one of the most remarkable characters in Shakespeare). A number of these characters are the "cross-dressers," the phenomenon of which must be central to any discussion of gender roles in Shakespeare, as it is highly suggestive that the "limitations" of womanhood are as much a social construct as dresses versus doublets. The argument you quote is the grossest kind of over-simplification of a quite complext topic. It bugs me to see this kind of argument--Shakespeare is picked up like a football and run towards whatever goal the writer is seeking.
11:54 AM

Akubi said...
It bugs me to see this kind of argument--Shakespeare is picked up like a football and run towards whatever goal the writer is seeking.
I completely agree. I'm glad to see some real discussion over a Nietzsche Koi post.Nonetheless, I still find it somewhat difficult to imagine Tamora working construction with a sledgehammer.
11:51 PM

Alan K.Farrar said...
Just re-watched Two Gentlemen - where there is a long list (Launce's) of the qualities needed in a good wife ... rather a lot of hard physical labour (from milking cows - which, unless you've ever tried it, don't mock - to beer making - again, something of an extreme sport). Modern presumptions and not knowing the plays I'm afraid.(And if Greer (bbke) is right, he had his wife working on a building site - as foreman.)
12:18 AM

Further thoughts or OT meanderings...?

Trash the Dress

Trash the Dress 1 by `lady-atropos
Artist's Comments
Photographer: Michael Ellis of Toledo, Ohio
Model: Me
About: This is perhaps the tame and graceful bit of the series. This was shot for 'trash the dress' - a publication featuring wedding fashion that gets destroyed in the process of the shoot. Every girl has that dress in her closet..that aweful, ugly bridesmaid dress that should be lit afire..this is one of those dresses.

I hate dresses - particularly those in horrid Easter egg pastels - yet my best friend is finally getting married (and going slightly insane in the process) so I spent much of the day trying on overpriced and utterly silly dresses I will never wear again. It seems so wasteful.
While her older sister's toddler was screaming and crawling on the floor like a bilingual monkey (French/English) in need of Ritalin, much of my time was spent suggesting that Martha Stewart pastels and sequins were a bit much and subtle designs preferable.

Does anyone understand WTF is going on in Guam BTW? The Democrats have such a Byzantine system.


Trash the Dress 2 by `lady-atropos

Something Fishy for Fishnet Friday

Bazongas. by ~ehenders

Another hat tip to Wagga for this one:
A Japanese council employee has set what is likely to remain an unbreakable record for surfing porn at work, after visiting an impressive 750,000 smut websites in just nine months at the rate of 20 pages for each minute he was sat at his desk.
According to the BBC, the unnamed 57-year-old "works" for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan. During his web pornathon, he clocked up an average of 10,000 grumble pages a day, something that went unnoticed because "each employee's desk was set apart from the others", as a council official put it.
This superb effort was only discovered when his computer caught a nasty case of the clap - a virus which prompted the powers that be to peruse his browser history. They discovered he'd been most (in)active during July last year, when he "surfed for porn more than 177,000 times during office hours".
Quite remarkably, no marching orders were forthcoming for the outrage, but rather a demotion and a cut in wages of 20,000 yen (£80) a month - a figure which by our reckoning works out at just 0.096p for every page he's no doubt still tirelessly examining every four weeks. ®

Happy Fishnet Friday BTW!
I tend to agree with the Something Fishy commenter who writes:
Something Fishy
By Nick Pettefar
Posted Friday 2nd May 2008 13:17 GMT
10,000 grumble pages a day is impossible. Unless the mark is downloading automatically he cannot be looking at so many pages. There is something, most likely something rather large, missing from this story. I think it has been made from the headline rather than the opposite.
If he spends ten hours a day in his office, 10,000 pages is only 3.6 seconds per page. Not long enough to wank to (unless he's accelerated his body like in Star Trek) and quite a number of those pages will take longer than that to appear on his screen.
I wonder what is really going on here. Some trick played on him by a rival worker with some computing skills maybe? Someone in the IT department making a colossal mistake? I wonder how they have calculated this? Did they accidentally include the whole council's records?

Vegetarians Taste Better

Half-naked women or free gas, which gets your attention more?
So, how can PETA use high gas prices and a concern over global warming to advance a meat-free diet for all? How about through the Lettuce Ladies? As you can probably tell from the picture above and the gallery photos below, Lettuce Ladies are, well, ladies who wear not much other than lettuce to attract attention to a messsage. In this case, the message is that eating a pound of meat creates the same wear and tear on the environment as driving a Hummer 40 miles.
This week, the idea was to have two Lettuce Ladies stand at a Lynchburg, Virginia BP gas station during lunch and tell drivers that by switching to a vegetarian diet, drivers could do more for the environment than they could if they switched from a standard car to a Prius. (It's dependent on a person's annual driving details to see if that statement is true or false, but there's no question that limiting our intake of modern megafarm meat is a move in favor of the environment). The two Ladies handed out Tofurky sandwiches and gift cards for free gas.

Hat tip to Wagga for this find!

Do you think those following a loosely vegan diet also taste better?

Tentacled Tattoo

Little Sailor Girl by ~Ambervu13