Doug's Sounding Board

A few weekends ago I accompanied Nicole to Bay Meadows for a day at the races. I’m not big into horses or horse racing but it was fun. The notable events during the races were one horse I picked to win dumped the jockey at the gate and ran the other way about halfway around the track at top speed before slowing down. It took another 10 minutes for everyone to get him off the track and back under control.

The other event was in the last race, the only female jockey of the afternoon was racing on a horce that was like 22 to 1. We bet on that horse to come in first and it was behind the entire race until the final stretch when it passed all the other horses like they were standing still! But it was too late and there wasn’t enough time to catch the first place horse. Still an impressive run.

Last Saturday we went to the Monterey County Fair. Right when we entered there were two tents, one for Hercules the Giant Horse, and one for White Mountain the Giant Steer. We first went to see Hercules and while it was a large horse, I’d seen other large horses. It was a Belgian Draft Horse which tend to get close to that size. After that we were a little reluctant to spend another buck on a cow that might not be that out of the ordinary, but we did anyway. Damn, that is one huge-ass cow! If you look here you can see the top of its back over the partition. Yeah it’s on a pile of hay, but that only raises it about a foot. It’s 6.5 feet at the shoulder and weighs over 3400 lbs. For comparison, the average steer weighs around 1000 lbs.

The rest of the fair was fun. I had a good cinnamon roll and there were some great pictures in the exhibit hall. The giant cow is what keeps coming to mind though.