“The mastery of any medium using minimal elements has long been considered a noble aspiration.”
Understanding Comics: The Invisble Art by Scott McCloud [Morrow 1993] p83.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Adopt a classical position, resist all fads and gadgets, and ride the horse quietly and softly between the two straight lines of the stirrup leather and the elbow to the horse’s mouth. It’s simple. It’s just not easy.
Training The Three-Day Horse and Rider by James C. Wofford [Doubleday 1995] pp143-144.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
McKinley‘s horses, including Greatheart in Beauty, may be wish-fulfillment but have enough barn odor to be engaging. I’ve never warmed to characters that are shaped like horses but do not act like horses. Well, except for the robot horse Fess in The Wizard In Spite of Himself by Christopher Stasheff [Ace 1982].
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dinner by Powers is good, if odd, but has nothing to do with horses beyond this most excellent cover.
Winning Colors by Moon combines space travel & Eventing. Seriously.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Haven’t read either one. Included for the pretty pictures.
In his song “Online“, Brad Paisley sings about a lonely guy whose sauve index increases exponentially when he communicates through a keyboard:
’cause even on a slow day I can have a three way
Chat with two women at one time
I’m so much cooler online
At one point, I was more willing to write about current events than to discuss them. This began to worry me. Was I more comfortably confessing my inner soul to strangers on the Internet than sharing with friends? That can’t be good.
However, I think it had more to do with getting work done than with psychic turmoil. Lawrence Block (I believe) divided writers into those who like to hash out their projects beforehand and others who feel this dissipates the energy. A member of the latter camp, I didn’t want to talk about current events when I was still trying to get the phrasing right in my head. Afterwards, wanna know what’s going on in my life? Oh, just read the blog.
This was more likely to be the case when I was posting monthly (Back To Eventing & Back To Riding). Then, I had weeks to prepare and ponder. These days, after 256 daily posts, I rarely have a idea what I am going to say today much less in the future.
I still want to point people at the blog when there is a question to which I do not have a short answer, as in Why don’t you buy another horse? Having spent a week discussing it [Horse Shopping 1-4], I want to hand them the dates and say, Oh, just read the blog.
Bloggers, would you rather blog or talk?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gratuitous Kitten Pic An untenable surplus of blogging assistants.
My desk is an enormous wooden law desk, yet all three kittens try to fit between me and the keyboard. This gets harder as they get bigger.
Science fiction, double-feature …. sorry, that was another life.
I used to groom for and ride a friend’s hyper-kinetic little mare [pictured here]. In order to maintain a vestige of control, she went in a figure-8 noseband over fences. She’d get hysterically excited before a cross-country trip or a jumping round, but the only way left to express her opinion was to waive her upper and lower lips. She was prehensile. We used to call her “rubber lips”.
Rodney, OTOH, has loose lips. Rodney also takes himself and the world entirely too seriously. To counteract that, I fuss with him. The cowpox of irritation to inoculate against the smallpox of catastrophic events. He likes to stick his nose into my business. So I grab his upper lip, wave it about, or give it a raspberry. At first, he thought it was weird. Now, he thinks it’s weird but harmless.
Mathilda, on the gripping hand, does not let you grab her lip. If you do chance to get purchase, she will stiffen it to the point that there is nothing left to hold. It’s not tension. It’s more that she will not allow you to take liberties with her person.
What manner of snoot behavior does your horse have?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gratuitous Kitten Pic
I didn’t have a camera, so I will try to paint a mental picture. I am lying in bed, head propped on pillows, iPad propped on chest. Room is otherwise dark. Kitten #1 comes along & drapes himself along my neck and shoulders. Kitten #2 comes up and lies down along my rib cage. Then, Kitten #3 joins us. Finding no room, he stretches out between the other two. In trying to sort out the pile of legs by feel, I realize that he has lain down directly on top of Kitten #1’s head. I looked like the guy in the Hanes commercial wearing a kitten shirt.
Virtual Brush Box 