Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas

Words and pictures and stuff

Depression is Organic

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Jerry

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Let’s pretend for a moment that the brain is an organ. Of course that’s a silly proposition, the brain is simply who we are. But indulge me for a moment and pretend.

If the brain were an organ, jesus what a complex mofo it would have to be to house our identities.

Now, if you follow me so far with this silly conceit, you have to accept that, just like any other organ, in some people the brain may not function in an ideal fashion. But for something as complex as an organ that defines out identities, “improper function” is hard to pin down. We accept a wide range of functionality and celebrate individuality. I know some messed-up, awesome people.

If we accept the idea that the brain is an organ, we are forced to accept that the brain might have well-documented weaknesses. After all, all the other organs in our bodies fail in well-documented ways. The most complex and mysterious organ in our bodies will naturally be the root of the most complex and mysterious troubles. We need to stop saying “mental illness” and start saying “brain malfunction”.

Hoo – even using the word malfunction rubs against the grain, even though it describes the situation exactly. I invite all out there to come up with a gentler phrase.

I get depressed now and then. I get the feeling that there’s no point in pushing forward. Shit don’t matter anyway. What I feel is a low. We all have lows. Since we all feel some version of the emotion, it is easier to diminish people who have lows lower than any low you will ever know. “I’ve been there,” you think. “I understand.” And implicitly because you survived your low, anyone else should survive theirs. But you don’t know low. Honestly, I don’t know low either. Not that low. For me, a trip into true organic sadness is something to savor, to milk for the characters it informs in my writing. It is not a song of self-destruction coming from somewhere behind my left ear.

There seems to be a chunk of folks (and insurance companies) that would like to pretend that brain malfunction is some invented discomfort designed to bilk you and me out of our hard-earned money. Insurance companies cover every organ except the most important of all. That, my friends, is bullshit.

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Last-Minute Halloween Booze-Buying Advice

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Jerry

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I have been remiss in reminding you all, faithful viewers, that the definitive (and well-written) article for best pairings of alcohol and halloween candy can be found here: The Most Comprehensive List of Halloween Candy & Alcohol Pairings Ever Written.

You can get a little more background on the process here on MR&HBI at All in the Name of Science.

Enjoy!

After

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Jerry

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This is what happens when my hair is short.

Venus’ Last Stand

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Jerry

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For a couple of years she beat her little sister, but now Serena gets all the big wins. Time is separating the two, now Venus is “only” the 23rd top player in the world. Tonight’s match may be the last meaningful showdown between the sisters.

First set: Serena.

Second set: Venus — decisively.

Third set: still early, leaning Serena. I’m kind of pulling for big sister Venus. I gotta think it will matter around the table at Thanksgiving.

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Facebook 101 Part 1: How to be a Shrill Victim

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Jerry

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In part 1 of what is almost certain to be a series, we look at a simple, step-by-step guide on how to turn your misplaced anger into a moment of fame at the expense of an innocent third party.

Get in a snit. It has to be a snit with a recognizable name.
Go to a meme generator site and paste your rant on a picture. People don’t read words unless there’s a picture behind them.
Notice that your rant doesn’t really seem all that worth getting upset about. ADD SOME LIES. Racism is a good one. The mouth-breathers who thrive on this shit will eat it up.
Post it on Facebook!
Feel gratified when a quarter of a million other idiots jump on the bandwagon and start trashing the organization that has done nothing wrong.
When people actually start to mention ACTUAL FACTS, duck and cover. You don’t need that sort of negativity in your life!
Years later, thousands of people will still believe the ridiculous accusations you made were true. If you libeled a small charitable organization, for instance, you could permanently undermine their ability to make the world better.

GREAT JOB, SHRILL VICTIM!

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A Good Place to Be

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Jerry

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This is a big technical discourse that ends with a restaurant endorsement. Because Agave in San Jose is a good place to be.

Today pretty much sucked. It started last night, when I ran a routine software update on the heroic little computer that brings you these ramblings. It is a Mac Mini tucked away on a shelf in a climate-controlled facility in Henderson, NV; a little machine that just plugs along year after year.

As a primer before I dive into that part of my hardship, let me take a moment to describe the UNIX world. UNIX is a computer operating system that has been copied and recopied into different kinds of Linux and BSD, as well as Apple’s Darwin, but philosophically the different flavors have much in common and share a lot of little programs. In fact, it’s all about the little programs. Each little app is designed to solve one problem perfectly, and larger applications use these underlying facilities. A graphics program could depend on dozens of underlying libraries.

So when you install one of these programs, how can you be sure all the parts it depends on exist on your system? It’s a huge chore, made much simpler by package managers. Package managers are special programs that maintain a database of who-needs-what so when you install SuperGameMachine it will automatically install CleverGraphicsLibrary, and that in turn will require StupidGraphicsLibrary, and that will require something called gl (actually the names of all these things are criminally terse, so you can never deduce the purpose from the name — CleverGraphicsLibrary would be named cgl).

Anyway, a major upgrade of ncurses just came out, and it gave me a hellish few hours. That database of who depends on what? Well, it turns out is wasn’t so complete, in the MacPorts world. ncurses had been so stable for so long that many program maintainers didn’t even realize they depended on it. The update came along and those programs were still looking for the old version. One of those programs was bash. bash is part of mac OS, but there was a massive (MASSIVE!) security hole in bash and I went to MacPorts to get the new version faster.

When you watch hackers on TV, when they’re typing cryptic symbols into their black screens, mostly they’re giving instructions to bash. Bash is a shell, which is a name for a program that takes stuff you type and does stuff as a result. For veracity, hackers in movies might compare the merits of bash and zch or tsch, but at this time bash is boss.

So when you open up a window to type those cryptic commands, it will launch your chosen shell. If you set your preferred shell to be bash, and then bash is broken, you are screwed. You are especially screwed if you don’t have physical access to the box. You try to log in, bash fails, and you sit at your terminal in helpless frustration, shouting to the uncaring gods of the night. Even if the package manager eventually sorts out the problem, you can’t get in to run the repair.

OK, this is getting long. I got through that, but there wasn’t a lot of sleeping involved. (Two bug tickets at MacPorts now closed.)

Then, today, after a rather frustrating meeting at work, I was betrayed by my bar. By my BAR! By my quiet haven in this noisy world. We had a contract — I paid a chunk in advance and got a discount on my first frosty mug of happiness on each visit for the rest of my life. I am not dead yet, but new(ish) ownership of Rookies Sports Lodge says it will no longer honor the deal. Should I shout? Threaten? Walk away?

It’s going to take some doing to make today come out right.

So here I am at Agave, the neighborhood cantina, and things are starting to feel better. I am working up the vocabulary to make sure that the official Muddled Sweetie gets her chicken burrito smothered with lots of good stuff. None of the English-speaking staff seems to be on tonight.

But make no mistake, these guys here make good food, for a good price. The menu now has many prices lined out and raised with a ball-point pen, but those big-ass burritos still hold the price line. And even the new ball-point prices are a steal. There aren’t many places in this town where my internal cheap bastard and my internal gourmand can party together, but this is one.

Waiting for the food, sippig Negra Modelo, listening to music with bright trumpets and tight vocal harmony, things are starting to feel better. I’m gonna be all right.

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Billion-Person Problems vs. Individual People

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Jerry

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I read an article today idolizing Larry Page, head honcho at Google. I have to confess, reading Larry’s quotes, I was pretty damn impressed. Some of his goals are downright “holy fuck, that’s awesome”. If even a small percentage work out lots of people will be helped. Larry calls them his billion-person problems. But…

Can you solve billion-person problems while exploiting a billion individuals?

Put another way: here’s a billion-person problem that Google is central to: the erosion of privacy in the modern age. For instance, Google has taken very seriously securing your information as it travels from your computer to their servers. But once that email hits their hard drives, it’s fair game! As long as no one else can get at your info (well, except governments with leverage over the Goog), all is well with the world.

Before I get too deep in this rant, let me say that the Internet would suck a lot more without Google’s search engine. I use Duck-Duck-Go to exploit the power of the search without yielding up my personal info. I realize that’s kind of like getting sushi and not paying; if everyone did that, search engines would have to start charging for their services and people would be faced with putting a monetary value on their privacy.

And, I think there’s a lot to be said for the way Google runs their company, they way they commit to their managers rather than just making the best engineers the bosses of other engineers. I give them big props for that. That comes from the very top and Larry Page deserves credit.

But now, on with the rant!

What Google knows when you use their payment system (Google Wallet):

Google Wallet records information about your purchases, such as merchant, amount, date and time, method of payment, and, optionally, geolocation.

What Apple (my employer) knows when you use their payment system (Apple Pay): Nothing.

Apple Pay was designed from the ground up so that Apple could not get your personal information. This made it way more complicated to implement and added hardship for banks as well, but it was a fundamental tenet of the system. Apple gets enough aggregate information back from the banks so they can get their fees, but none of your personal information is in that data. In contrast, Google (not just their wallet) has been built from the ground up to collect and sell your personal information.

Of course, the banks still know, and the merchant still knows, and Amazon tells advertisers what’s in your wish list… So it’s not just Google here. But Google has access to information you never intended to be known — a lot of it — and they have a unique opportunity to make meaningful change on this front.

Nest, the hot-spit thermostat/smoke detector company was bought by Google. I was discussing it the other day with a co-worker who is a (mostly) satisfied customer. It sounds like a pretty cool system, but I mentioned there was no reason for the damn thing to be in the cloud just to be operated from my phone — it just needed to be part of a personal network that could talk to all my devices. My friend, who has a buddy who works at Nest, shrugged and said, “they have to collect and aggregate data to make the service work right” (or something like that). I accepted that at the moment, but later I realized: NO THEY DON’T. I want my home automation to be based on ME, not some aggregate of other people. And, if they made the data collection voluntary, I might even opt in if it looked like it would help the collective good. It’s something I do.

I voluntarily share personal information all the time. I share my bike rides (but suppress the exact location of my house). I share my image on Facebook. I share biographical data right here on this blog. I probably share more personal information than I should, but I make a big distinction between voluntary sharing (Facebook) and involuntary sharing (having my emails read by a corporation). Even though I don’t use a gmail account, my emails are still read every time I send a message to a gmail user. Does it matter if I’ve agreed to their terms of service or not? No. No, it doesn’t.

Microsoft took a couple of shots at Google a while back, promoting their email and search services as being more privacy-friendly than Google’s. But, amazingly, Microsoft kind of half-assed it (they had a produced-by-local-TV-station look) and they failed to deliver the message effectively, the way Microsoft is wont to do. Still, at least they tried.

If Google would do one thing, a thing that is in their power to do, I will take back everything else I have said about them. If they provide real encryption for their emails — encryption all the way to their servers, encryption they won’t have a key to unlock, so only the intended recipients can read it, I’ll believe that they care about me, and the other billions of people in the world. And it would be a hell of a selling point for gmail.

How You Know You’ve Ended a Story Well

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Jerry

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My sweetie and I binged our way through Breaking Bad. The series was over before we even started, and we chewed through that mother in record time. During intermissions for work and sleep we talked about what was going on, and looked forward to more time with the series.

And then it ended. A you-saw-it-coming-from-a-mile-away-but-were-still-blown-away ending. An ending so complete and poetic that I have to sit back and admire it. I don’t hope for more tack-on seasons or spinoffs (though the prequel Better Call Saul, which we started watching before we dove into Breaking Bad, is mighty fine).

But Breaking Bad is over. It finished when it was right to finish, and if maybe some characters found redemption is was not the sort of redemption that carries them forward.

I miss the show. But I don’t want more.

Help Wanted

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Jerry

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Anybody know a kickass Web engineer looking for work? I’m happy to discuss specific technologies and whatnot with anyone who might be interested.

At Last, An Answer to One of Life’s Burning Questions

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Jerry

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Many, many years ago, in a time called the 1980’s, my roommates and I were sitting in our little house in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, talking about this and that. There may have been beer present. The conversation stumbled upon this question:

If you bounce a ball bearing off a steel plate and measure the height of the bounce, will it bounce higher or lower if you cool down the plate?

Before skipping to the end of this episode to see the answer, think about that question for a minute. On the one hand, you could imagine that the warmer plate is squishier, and would absorb more of the kinetic energy of the ball. Or would it be springier, and act like a trampoline? Does the fact that there is more energy in the overall system when the ball and the plate are warm mean more energy for bouncing?

We were stumped, and at the time there was no Internet. We did have one ace in the hole, however, because my good friend and former college roommate was an expert in… material science! So we called him up, fully aware that he was three time zones ahead of us and it was pretty late even in California.

That night, our Science Expert didn’t seem that enthusiastic about the mysteries facing mankind. It was a pretty short conversation.

I began to look like we might never find the answer to this burning question. Little did I know, but NASA engineers were also curious about the bounciness of steel balls as a function of temperature, and ’round about 1994 they built this gizmo to run some tests:

Device to bounce metal things on other metal things.

Device to bounce metal things on other metal things.
Source (crooked and everything)

I ran across the phrase “coefficient of restitution” when reading an example of how to calculate standard error in scientific measurements. The example used was about bounciness and temperature. Zounds! With fevered brow and shaking hands I pasted that into duck-duck-go and found this NASA paper, scanned and recorded for posterity by some underpaid intern.

To be honest, the paper is more an Engineering exercise than a real scientific paper (I’ll discuss another NASA ‘research’ project at a later date), but it does have graphs and whatnot, and here is the conclusion: metal balls bounce higher when they are colder, except for the occasional case where they do not. But MOSTLY, colder metal means higher bounce.

Whew. That’s a hell of a load off my mind.

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Requiem for My Travel Shirt

Posted on July 19, 2015 by Jerry

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It was on another road trip to Kansas that I first dubbed my blue aloha shirt my Official Travel Shirt. I was wearing it for the second straight day (no sense sweating up another shirt), and I tore the breast pocket just a bit while stuffing in change from a drive-through, limiting the other occasions I could wear it.

But for driving across the United States in a convertible, it was pretty close to ideal. Light and breathable, the cotton fabric was quick to wick the sweat away from my back and provide cooling. When I put my elbow up on the door frame, the shirt would balloon up, creating a cyclone of joy across my torso. Good times.

Good times that finally came to an end on this trip. The ravages of sun, sweat, suds, and more sun began to undermine the integrity of the fabric. The dye faded and the fabric got thinner where the sun hit it most directly—on the shoulders and (rather embarrassingly) on the gut.

When packing for my latest road trip, I realized the shirt’s days were numbered. The pocket was really starting to flap in the breeze and the fabric was giving out along the shoulder seams. This was to be the shirt’s last ride. In retrospect, I should have given the shirt a dignified retirement before the trip even started; it just wasn’t fair to ask it to get me across the Nevada desert in its condition.

The first night, in Wells, Nevada, I took off the shirt to discover two bright-red patches on my shoulders:

Sunburn on my shoulders makes me cry

Sunburn on my shoulders makes me cry

By the next night in Vernal, Utah, blisters had formed, and while I waited for my car to be repaired I also tried not to ooze into my sheets too much while I slept at night.

My travel shirt, after one too many days on the road.

My travel shirt, after one too many days on the road.

The shirt had given its last, and while I had other shirts along for the ride that were adequate, they were all too new and too nice to dedicate to being the new Travel Shirt (though one had good Cyclone of Joy™ action—I might have considered it were it not so dark-colored).

So the search begins, but clothing like this isn’t just found on a shelf, it’s discovered through adversity. It is the product of miles, and the grace with which it handles them. It is sun, and sunscreen, and sweat and wind and time and groping in the pocket for the toll ticket. It is the stop at a rest area with a gentle pit bull going to her new home. It is the discovery of a new road, the onset of a sudden rainstorm, the knowing glance from another convertible driver, the pause on a deserted road at night to hear the chirping of the crickets.

It is the stories. The new shirt will have a lot of catching up to do.

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Is Facebook Killing the Blog?

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Jerry

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There was a time, I call them the good ol’ days, when this humble blog was the anchor of a small but interesting community. I took great pleasure in the contributions of the blogcomm, as Funkmaster G-Force dubbed it; there was a second, more interesting layer under my ramblings — conversations that could last months, novel ideas and clever rebuttals. Traditions grew, and along with them a lexicon that applied only here. Members of the blogcomm even coordinated travel plans in those comment threads.

Things change. Facebook, for better or worse, has become the de facto place for online communities. I started announcing my new episodes on Facebook, and for a while that actually grew the community. Then people started assuming they would hear about new episodes from Facebook. Then Facebook started not telling everyone who has said they want to know, unless I pay. And if I don’t have a picture associated with my episode, the notice Facebook grudgingly gives up is almost invisible in the ridiculous noise of the news feed.

And the best discussions, those that would last weeks, die out more quickly now; people leave comments in Facebook-space and those that don’t join the discussion right away are left out.

To be fair this blog has changed as well; I’m working a corporate job at a company that doesn’t appreciate blabbermouths, and so a big part of my life is off-limits. But those changes began long after the erosion of the Muddled Community was well under way.

Meanwhile, many of the community functions that my blog offered to the regulars were supplanted by Facebook’s promise of group communication. It was only natural that the blogcomm would move. But as far as I can tell, the blogcomm didn’t move. It died. Where there was a group, now there is a series of individual broadcasts, the efficiency of which is governed by Facebook’s arcane rules. Perhaps the blogcomm was reincarnated in a form I don’t recognize, but I miss hearing from nico, f-g-f, gizo, and the rest. This is ultimately on me; if I had kept things interesting enough here, folks would still be around. Unless those folks were relying on Facebook to tell them when I posted a new episode.

Times change. It’s quite possible that using this format for personal expression and community building is obsolete. The thing is, social media in general and Facebook in particular don’t seem to be doing a good job of replacing it. Facebook sure looked promising back in the day, but when they decided to make their money honestly (charging their users) in addition to the making it dishonestly (selling their users) the way they always had, the whole dynamic changed. Now you pay to be seen on Facebook, and everyone agrees that they will quit that dang platform and…

Find another social media service that hasn’t started asking them for money yet. But mostly people don’t do anything except complain. As far as I know (which isn’t very far), Google’s social platform is still evil-only in terms of how they make their money, but even they haven’t managed to create a meaningful exodus from Facebook.

Facebook has become a giant advertising platform that we all dance on. Long ago I thought to use them to build my audience. For free. Facebook doesn’t owe me anything; I wanted a one-way relationship where Facebook would expand my audience and I would give nothing in return. Now they want something in return, and I’m not willing to give it. I’m the asshole in this relationship. But maybe it’s time for a breakup.

Huh. I did not expect to reach that conclusion when I started typing this episode, but I can’t argue the logic. Maybe it’s time we broke up. Maybe it’s time I started rebuilding the blogcomm honestly.

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A Little Closer…

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Jerry

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The travel day started with a two-and-a-half mile hike from my hotel to the shop where my car waited, along highway 40, past a hotel that advertised

HOT BREAKFAST
POO SPA

and past a store with a sign that read:

IT IS TIME
WE HAVE
DETACHABLE BLADES

It is time.

Not far past that, in a red-brick building, next to a clothing store that sold both suits and skate gear, the tinted plate-glass proudly displayed a two-foot-tall green glass bong with a skull leaning out to the side. Perhaps some of my preconceptions of rural Utah are out-of-date.

A turn on Vernal Ave took me north, where I met an elderly power-walker heading the other way. She and I agreed it was a fine morning for a walk.

Finally, my destination. The good folks at Rev’d Up Auto Service had tested all the various parts of my electrical system and everything was running according to spec. “We could replace the alternator anyway, but it’s testing just fine.”

The kicker: The closest alternator was a day away. I could wait in Vernal another day, or I could cross my fingers and forge ahead. Heck, there was no guarantee replacing the alternator would fix what was wrong anyway. I chose finger-crossing and drove on, hoping that at least I’d get fair warning from the battery light if the problem recurred.

Nevertheless, I kept the car in minimum-electric-demand configuration, foregoing gadgets and radio and keeping my fingers off the switches for the electric windows.

After 100 miles I started to relax. After 130 I started to curse. The battery light had returned. I sweated the next thirty miles into Steamboat Springs.

When I was on my big road trip eleven years ago, 160 miles was about ideal for a day of driving. (On this day eleven years ago I was at Pepper’s pub, in Creston, Canada; the last night I spent on Canadian soil.) Of course, the best parts of that trip were when I didn’t have a destination. A destination is the bane of a good journey. Now I really want to be somewhere. Kansas, where the Bunch is gathered.

This time the auto shop is only one and a half miles from my hotel, but the walk is far less interesting, and far less pedestrian-friendly. I chose a kinda-dumpy looking hotel, assuming it would be cheaper, and I was not in a position to pop from place to place comparing rates. The internet might have been helpful, but every second my car was running might have been its last, and stopping and restarting would kill the battery even faster.

I’m not looking forward to sleeping in that bed tonight, let’s just leave it at that.

One thing for Steamboat Springs, it is within the craft-beer zone anchored around Boulder, and this time I’m much closer to the cutsey little downtown. I am now in a place called the Tap Room, and it’s pretty nice.

There is a saying I learned from Tony Hillerman: When there is a drought, the Navajo pray for rain; the Hopi pray for harmony with the drought. I think it’s time for me to be Hopi, and find harmony with the journey. I will get there. In the meantime I will travel.

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A Big Milestone

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Jerry

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It seems appropriate that the ride that put me over 5000 miles was a slog. There are days like that, days you find yourself a long way from home and you’re not sure where the energy will come from to get you there. I’d fought a fierce headwind on Wednesday, and Thursday I was still feeling the effort. Man, I hate headwinds.

The traffic lights along Homestead were no help either as I plodded along, but since I had little momentum it was less annoying to lose it. Instead I waited, not winded (I was too tired to burn enough energy to require heavy breathing), and when the light changed in my favor I saddled up and with a moan I pushed ahead.

I catch myself moaning fairly often, in fact, especially when I discover myself in too tall of a gear when I pull out from a light. It’s not so much a moan of pain as it is a super-slo-mo version of a tennis player’s grunt, releasing from the diaphragm as one makes an effort. Only in my case the effort is stretched over a long period of time. “Uh-h-h-h” I sound like Frankenstein’s Monster as depicted in an old B-movie.

5000 miles. That’s a lot in 13 months; not bad at all for a gray-bearded somewhat-overweight dude. (This spring I entertained the idea of crossing that magical line before my bike’s first birthday, but April didn’t go too well, mileage-wise, and May wasn’t great either.) Next week I’ll cross another, perhaps more meaningful milestone: 100 miles for each year I’ve been on this planet. And I should be able to get the next 5000 before another year passes. (Although I won’t be getting many miles in June.)

You might think, with all that riding, that my legs would be really buff by now, but that’s relative. I still have skinny legs. They’re just a heck of a lot more muscular than they used to be.

I still have the newbie glow about my alternate lifestyle, that enthusiasm that makes commuting by bike more fun, not just cheaper and less frustrating and environmentally friendlier and healthier. This might be annoying to the people around me; I mention my bike fairly often in conversation and I’m a regular poster on Apple’s bike-to-work mailing list. The local bike shop knows my face, but they don’t see it as often as they used to. Gradually I’m getting more self-sufficient.

Toward that end, I’ll be taking a class on bike maintenance in July. I’ll be getting 18 hours of instruction by a trained expert while I work on my own bike from the inside out. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s run by a shop in town called Good Karma Bikes, a non-profit outfit dedicated to making the world a better place by providing transportation to people who can’t afford cars and by hiring emancipated foster kids and others who need a good start in life.

I’ve learned a lot since my last bike-milestone post, things like “always give the crossing guards a friendly wave and sometimes they’ll let you pass before stopping traffic,” but really there’s one lesson that stands out above all the others. I mentioned it in a post not long ago, but it bears repeating:

Just keep pedaling.

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Remembering a Great

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Jerry

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Watching sports silently, I just saw an ad for the Preakness Stakes, the second jewel in the triple crown of horse racing.

It got me to thinking about a horse I knew as a kid. Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby in record time, and the buzz began. This was one ridiculously fast horse. I really wasn’t aware of how special that was at the time.

But the three races of the triple crown are different. A horse great at one distance may not do so well at another. The Preakness is a sprint, while the Belmont is a grind. The races favor different horses.

Unless that horse is Secretariat. Forty years and a bit later, Secretariat still holds the records for all three races. I remember watching those races on TV, the first time I ever gave a hang about horse racing, and I remember a horse flying around the course, leaving the pack far behind. In the Belmont, only four other horses even bothered to run against him. The track did not accept “show” bets. One horse kept up for a while, but the tremendous machine put down the fastest 1.5 miles in history of the sport and won by 31 lengths.

It appeared, to a kid watching, almost effortless. The horse just flew, while the rest of the field slogged along somewhere behind. The way he ran, it was like he was barely touching the ground.

I’m not sure, but I think the Belmont was his last race. There was nothing left to prove, an no track wants a race where the outcome is not in doubt. Secretariat broke the game. Nobody asked the horse if he wanted to keep running. Of course, they never asked if he wanted to run in the first place. But, man, that kid could fly. I have to think he enjoyed it.

A few years later I saw a “where are they now” feature and Secretariat was mentioned. I saw a clip of the majestic chestnut romping around in a field, a beautiful horse, still sleek, still fast, still carrying the love of speed, running just because he could. That’s a good retirement.