The world has been waiting for this to STOP!

The World Has Been Waiting… The Unveiling Of A King!

By Nakashen Valaitham & Kristi Hopp

Do you believe in love at first sight? Something so magical it takes your breath away, leaves you speechless and captivates your attention? The time to fall in love is now. The wait is over. He was born in the heartland of America, bred by Jack & Elizabeth Milam of Regency Cove Farms in Oklahoma.

El Rey Magnum RCF has arrived.

For breeders, it is love at first sight when newborn foals struggle to their feet and takes those first steps. It is quite overwhelming to watch the birth of an exquisite gift after waiting 11+ plus months.

His name means greatness in Spanish; El Rey translates to “The King.” He had not been around long before The King became the most talked about colt in the world. Having a keen eye for a unique look, and an urge for hidden treasure, when David Boggs first met The King he was captivated. David acquired the colt and eventually brought him to his Midwest Training Center in Scottsdale, AZ.

Soon after that Doug Leadley heard about The King and scheduled a visit. Once he laid eyes on El Rey Magnum RCF, he urged the new owners to acquire this special young colt. “I travel all around and see several impressive young horses but rarely do I see one that stops me in my tracks. I simply could not believe my eyes and what I saw in front of me. Horses like this come by once in a decade. We must preserve Arabian type or we will loose the majestic look the separates us from other breeds.” Doug Leadley

2018 will be an exciting year for El Rey Magnum and the team behind him - he will be ready for his coronation.

WOAHWOAHWOAHWOAHWAAAAAAAIIIITTT!!!

Yes. The world has been waiting, all right - waiting for this sort of genetic abuse to go away.

This is not a horse. It's Michael Jackson. It's My Little Pony (I almost wrote "Phony"). It's an Arabian horse so genetically manipulated  for certain traits that it has become virtually deformed. Yet it's touted as God's gift to horses, the next generation of custom-made equines (and never mind if they can breathe or not).

I write about horses quite a lot, because I love them so, and never get to ride or even come near a horse. But I do know something from my horsy girlhood. And what I know is that THIS AIN'T IT: this isn't the standard for the breed, at all.

The standard is more like this:

This is a great example of the classic Arabian head: broad forehead, big dusky glamorous eyes, slightly concave profile, tapered muzzle and small nose with large nostrils. What is called the throatlatch (where the horse's head attaches to its neck) is quite defined, and the crest (top of the neck) is high and arched. The Arabian head exudes exoticism and gasping loveliness, and for many a little girl an "Arab" is the ideal horse, the horse of their dreams.

Never mind that the actual breed is a little flaky and skittish, a status horse that's not always too dependable to ride. Maybe they've been told they're beautiful once too often.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time mooning over "Arabs" in my horse books (some of which I still have). The Godolphin Arabian, whose story was fictionalized in Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind, looked something like this:

The Godolphin Arabian was quite literally a prototype, one of the foundational sires of the Thoroughbred horse breed. He was not just an Arab but a Super Arab. But there's no trace of My Little Pony here.

Of course we have no photos of what he really looked like, but since normal horses were being bred to normal horses back then, it's doubtful he looked freakish like poor El Ray Magnum. When his exotic looks were poured together with the war-horse strength and brawn of the horses of the day, magic happened: a sort of genetic explosion which is still echoing down the generations. Take any horse breed, add a dash of Arabian, and voila - you have a brawny or cobby or rangy creature who has the desert horse's beautiful sculpted head and neck, grace in its step and a spark of spirit. It's as if Arabian genes have a long memory.





               Cass Ole, horse actor and star of The Black Stallion


It interests me that of the many dozens of comments on this photo when it appeared on Facebook, probably 85% were negative. These are horse lovers speaking out, and hardly any of them think this look is appealing or even fair to the horse. He's close to having a mono-nostril, for one thing, since the breed's very large nostrils are stuck at the end of a teeny-tiny muzzle. To me, it looks like somebody squeezed his nose with pliers. I think this look is "in" now in the show ring, for some reason, and because human beings always take a good thing and ruin it with extremes, it has likely become a sort of competition to see who can breed the most exaggerated Arabian features.


More has to be better. Right? ( - ??)

Along with the horrid dressage practice of rollkur  - reining the horse's chin to its chest - and "soring" in Tennessee Walker competitions (a painful way of forcing the horse to step so high it looks ridiculous), this extreme inbreeding constitutes a form of abuse. The horse has lost his horseness. 

The fanfare around this Wonder Colt, as if they're unveiling a new Maserati or other fine piece of machinery, is chilling. Behold, a genetic freak! It makes me shudder because this is being promoted by some sort of international Arabian society, clearly more interested in money and status than the wellbeing of the horse (or the breed - you can't tell ME El Rey is the answer to preserving the "majestic look" of the Arabian "type").

So until the situation becomes so grotesque that one of these breeders looks at a newborn foal and keels over in horror, we'll end up with a line of Hapsburg horses which are  more bizarre than beautiful.

(OK, I have leftover pictures, too gorgeous NOT to share!)

World's first recorded sneeze!

An animation I made from frames of Fred Ott's Sneeze, a film made in 1894 by Thomas Edison. The original lasted two seconds and had no musical accompaniment. I've been experimenting with putting some of my animation experiments on YouTube so they will be easier to post here.

What a tortilla sounds like on a record player

Paraceratherium!

 

Black beauties: ravens in the yard

Three ravens like to come sit on the back fence in our yard. They just hang out for a while, not doing much of anything. They don't go to the feeder. Once in a while, one of them lets out a croak. Sometimes, one or more of them sleeps with one foot up. We don't even know if they're the same three ravens, or if ravens just like to hang out in groups of three. One of them will leave, or two of them, or even three, then come back one at a time. Then, eventually, they fly away. (Note. Only two of them appear here. One of them flew away.)

Frida Kahlo: gleefully dabbling

(text) Something about the hilarious incongruity of a stuffed lion, a plaster-of-Paris horse, and a colored chromo of George Washington draped in garlands of red, white and blue crepe paper, all jumbled in the same shop window, proved to be too much for the sense of humor of Senora Diego Rivera, and so she simply had to do something about it. What she did was to go home and paint it, which may surprise people who think that Diego Rivera, the great mural painter now at work at the Detroit Institute of Arts, is the only artist in the family.

That, however, is all a mistake, since his wife, Carmen Rivera, or "Freda" (sic) as her friends call her, is a painter in her own right, though very few people know it.

"No," she explains. "I didn't study with Diego. I didn't study with anyone. I just started to paint."

Then her eyes begin to twinkle. "Of course," she explains, "he does pretty well for a little boy, but it is I who am the big artist." Then the twinkles in both black eyes fairly explode into a rippling laugh. And that is absolutely all that you can coax out of her about the matter. When you grow serious she mocks you and and laughs again. But Senora Rivera's painting is by no means a joke: because, however much she may laugh when you ask her about it, the fact remains that she has acquired a very skillful and beautiful style, painting in the small with miniature-like technique, which is as far removed from the heroic figures of Rivera as could well be imagined.

Thus, while her husband paints with large brushes on a huge wall surface, his wife, herself a miniature-like little person with her long black braids wound demurely about her head and a foolish little ruffled apron over her black silk dress in

And that's as far as it goes. As much of it as we can see, anyway, though the article probably goes on to provide us with "Freda's" favorite recipes, shoe styles and facial depilatories.  

The article is a strange one, in that it almost seems to be acknowledging that Mrs. Rivera has some talent, if only in miniature. Her claim that she "didn't study with anyone" is very Kahlo (and also very true), as is her bold statement, "it is I who am the big artist." The interviewer probably thought she was kidding, though the laughter might have been a little uneasy. 

I love the movie Frida and have seen it seven or eight times. The tango sequence is particularly excruciating. Alfred Molina nails it as Diego, though in truth he's too good-looking to play the dumpy, awkward-looking artist who wore his belt under his armpits. But like F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus, he's the salt in the recipe without which it would lose its savour and fall flat.

Bentley's mystic eyes

Ripped: William Shatner, shirtless

Fab! Gear! It's the Beatles on the beach!

Rattle your jewelry

What happened to YouTube??

                   Some thoughts on the apparent demise of YouTube.

Being Alive

My relationship with this song is a strange one. Decades ago,  I used to watch Taxi, and I remembered an episode where Alex experiences an epiphany - has a near-death experience or something, and comes out the other side feeling superbly alive in every cell of his being. He sang a certain song - hell, I didn't even know what it was! But it recorded itself on my brain, stayed with me, until. . .

Then in the mid-'80s I was going through a Streisand phase, though I can barely stand her now, and the song seemed - it seemed - it seemed familiar, or did it? It may not have twigged at all that it was the same song Judd Hirsch sang on Taxi. It was later on, retroactively, that I made the connection. She sings the hell out of it, of course, but I've come to see her musical mannerisms as irritating.  Still. The power of the lyric was undeniable. Stephen Sondheim, for Christ's sake - it can't misfire altogether.

Tons of years had to go by, again, until I stumbled (again!) on this Dean Jones version. Dean freakin' JONES? The Disney guy, the wholesome goofier-version-of-Dick-Van-Dyke type of guy? I couldn't even imagine him singing a Broadway song like this one, singing it with haunted, even frightened eyes as Stephen (fucking!) Sondheim stood over him . . and singing it with such conviction and passion that I no longer want to hear anyone else sing it.

Ever.

There has to be something good about the internet - there is, actually, but with a lot of scum on the top and sludge on the bottom. Rediscovering something like this, something buried, can be compelling, but it all started with Judd Hirsch on Taxi - and then I forgot all about it.

Interestingly enough - or, at least, I find it so - Stephen Sondheim wrote this musical, Company, with Anthony Perkins in mind. The two were close friends, perhaps lovers, and this song wraps around Perkins' sensibilities very well, both in the fairly limited vocal range and the spare and even laconic sentiments. Perkins ducked away, citing other commitments, but many thought the Bobby character (with its veiled homosexual references) cut too close. The Dean Jones video was filmed, I think, as part of a TV special to demonstrate how an original cast recording is made, though I don't know if it was ever aired. 

The Greek chorus of friends in the song seems to be pushing the character out of a birth canal of fear and inhibition. I wonder if it really was that way with Perkins (and I confess I still have a "thing" for him), for he stated in an interview with People magazine that he never really felt close to another human being until he met his wife, Berry Berenson. And yet, and yet, there were both real and manufactured complications about his sexual orientation, as if that negated all the love and experiences they shared. And then there was the soul-shattering ending, Perkins dying far too young of AIDS, and Berry on one of the planes on 9-11. It has the dimensions of an epic love story ending in towering tragedy.

As I copied and pasted these lyrics, I decided to centre them, because I felt like something was going to arise from it, some shape. And it did. The verses are like chalices to me, maybe even communion cups, but in some cases more like trees. Some of them seem to leap upwards like dancers, others like dolphins. Not many poems will do this, take life and move, even beyond the words themselves.

So, this is the song Tony Perkins never sang, that was written for him, and about him.

Someone to hold you too close.

Someone to hurt you too deep.

Someone to sit in your chair,

To ruin your sleep,

(Dialogue)

Someone to need you too much.

Someone to know you too well.

Someone to pull you up short,

And put you through hell,

(Dialogue)

Someone you have to let in,

Someone whose feelings you spare,

Someone who, like it or not,

Will want you to share

A little, a lot.

(Dialogue)

Someone to crowd you with love.

Someone to force you to care.

Someone to make you come through,

Who'll always be there,

As frightened as you,

Of being alive,

Being alive.

Being alive.

Being alive!

(Dialogue)

Somebody hold me too close.

Somebody hurt me too deep.

Somebody sit in my chair,

And ruin my sleep,

And make me aware,

Of being alive.

Being alive.

Somebody need me too much.

Somebody know me too well.

Somebody pull me up short,

And put me through hell,

And give me support,

For being alive.

Make me alive.

Make me alive.

Make me confused.

Mock me with praise.

Let me be used.

Vary my days.

But alone,

Is alone,

Not alive.

Somebody crowd me with love.

Somebody force me to care.

Somebody let me come through,

I'll always be there,

As frightened as you,

To help us survive,

Being alive.

Being alive.

Being alive!

And this, from the Broadway musical Greenwillow. This song is not like any of the others, so minimal it barely exists, with a glorious setting like a rich autumn day. Somehow he glides along it and does not mess with it or damage it, but lets it be gloriously whole.  And every time I hear it, I cry. Every time. I say, nah, not this time! I'm not going to cry this time. I just listened to it again, and my eyes are stinging and I sobbed again, and it was once more real, and alive.

Velveeta Goodness: animated jelly omelet

Hybrid lovers

Sex kittens of the Edwardian age

Warning: this will scare the shit out of you

This is a nightmare on video, and I don't know why I have to keep going back and watching it over and over again, because it still SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME even though I know it's "nothing". It's really nothing, and a couple of decades ago it was something so familiar, you experienced it every day without thinking about it. Except now, it has been impossibly attenuated into an expression of doom so potent that it can make you lose all hope. So hey, why not watch this right now? Turn the volume WAY up.

Seasons change, and so did I

 

The Glory Is Fallen Out Of

the glory is fallen out of

the sky the last immortal

leaf

is dead and the gold

year

a formal spasm

in the

dust

this is the passing of all shining things

therefore we also

blandly

into receptive

earth, O let

us

descend

take

shimmering wind

these fragile splendors from

us crumple them hide

them in thy breath drive

them in nothingness

for we

would sleep

this is the passing of all shining things

no lingering no backward-

wondering be unto

us O

soul, but straight

glad feet fear ruining

and glory girded

faces

lead us

into the

serious

steep darkness

e. e. cummings

Hot pursuit

Bosley and Belinda, the Romeo and Juliet of Como Lake, get a lot of play on my YouTube channel. I've started editing the videos and setting them to music (though this one isn't - I didn't want to drown out the quacks and splashes). Belinda suddenly appeared in the spring, a medium-sized duck who was obviously a hybrid, with her cocoa-brown-and-white feathers, green bill and curlicue tail. But she has grown to near-gargantuan proportions, dwarfing even her goose-sized boy friend, Bosley. Our hope is that these two will stay together and produce ducklings in the spring. Oh joy - ducklings from Bosley and Belinda! I'd be tempted to take one home with me. But I won't.

This is a mini-drama in which Belinda decides she needs a little "me time", and swims off in a distant direction. It takes Bosley a minute to wonder where she is, but then he literally runs to the water and takes off after her.

Love.

The Mystery of Dunbrody

This blog carries me from obsession to obsession, and horses are definitely one of them. When I see an exceptional horse like this one, a Gypsy Vanner stallion named Copper Coin, it makes me want to go on living.

I never heard of the Gypsy Vanner until seven or eight years ago, when I found an incredible photo of a massive dapple grey horse and could hardly believe my eyes how beautiful he was. I don't know if the photo is still around the internet, but he was a legendary sire at a stable called, I think, Kintyre. It started in Ireland, moved to the States, and now I can't find a trace of it. I wonder what happened.

The horse, I can't find him now, but he looked sort of like this:

I just remember the cream-on-steel-grey dappling, the floaty feathering that must be murder to keep clean, and the unexpectedly tiny pink nose. The trailing Veronica Lake bangs are particularly fetching. This might also be called an Irish Cob horse, because the names seem almost interchangeable. The horse I remember - the picture I remember - was a legendary sire who had "stamped his get" down the generations, dozens and hundreds of prize-winning foals. 

(Later): I can't believe I found him! 

THIS is the horse that blew my mind back in about 2009, though of course it was a grainy photo of only a few hundred pixels. It turns out that this horse is called Dunbrody (of course! How could I have forgotten that?), and is associated with the name Clononeen and Kintyre, though I don't know how. The Kintyre web site stopped being updated six years ago, in that frustrating way they do. And Pinterest, the evil sorceress, has swallowed all his pictures without a trace of useful information attached (because who cares about THAT, eh?).

It's hard for me to believe this is the same horse, though he's called Dunbrody: his mane, fanning out like Farrah Fawcett's hairdo, seems ash blonde compared to the other photos where he's more ginger. But horses of the grey persuasion are somewhat like Lipizzans, in that their coat often begins dark and grows lighter and lighter with the years. It must be him, because of that grey crescent on his left nostril. Imagine seeing all that mane and feathering floating behind him as he trotted along!

I even found some video which MIGHT be Dunbrody, but as usual with older videos, there are no identifying marks on it. Here, his mane and tail (if it's him) are very dark:

I don't want to say with certainty, but this may be a juvenile version, a not-fully-grown Dunbrody. If I could see his muzzle and his nose up-close, I would know for sure.

Pulp Riot Hair Colour!

Though I don't think I'd ever have it done (conservative me), I was surprised to see how cool some of these are. The multicolor/rainbowy ones are most appealing, and some have a kind of silvery/metallic sheen to them. I'm most taken with the ones that look more like - well - hair. Long tumbly hair that has a kind of kaleidoscopic effect when it moves. Shaven looks have never appealed to me much, but even that grows out, doesn't it? I can see my grandkids getting into this, to the consternation of their parents. But it does wash out eventually, doesn't it?

UPDATE. Just went to spend Thanksgiving Sunday with my daughter's family, and saw Caitlin's new hair: strawberry pink! It looked lovely, with many different shades of rose, pink and auburn skilfully streaked and blended through her naturally chestnut hair. With her red-haired skin coloring, it looked great. Then Shannon told me the price tag - somewhere around $300.00. Luckily, she "knew a guy".

Stone soul picnic