Sun on a Saturday

For those of us in the Northeast, the winter has been tumultuous. Last night a pile of tracks were closed, including Woodbine and the Meadowlands. I did a couple things yesterday. I took the day off. I think I worked for about 20 minutes. I helped push a car up a hill, for my good deed for the day. And I played like 11 hours of racing.

All in all a good day.

Well the sun is shining today, and we won't see cancellations I would think. It is pretty cold and I am sure I saw two polar bears fighting over KFC scraps left in one of the city garbage cans on my street; but it should be fine for racing. A few things that I found interesting today.

Our pal Dana had a follow up post regarding marketing the sports lookers. She used the word bikini in the piece's title. That is a sharp cookie. Scouring around the chat boards, Rootintootin posted a link to a Chantal Sutherland interview that I had not seen. She is truly into marketing herself. Good for her.

Happy Hoot, one of my favourite horses as a kid, passed on this week. He was a hard hitter. Our family's first horse raced against him and I still have a VHS of one of the races. The announcer at the top of the lane said "Happy Hoot is dead tired." He still finished his mile fine. He never gave up that horse. If heart made one live instead of body, he would have lived to be 100.

Anyone notice Tim Tetrick, off hip surgery is doing the in-house show at Chester? Holy smokes, the kid does not like to sit at home does he? Way to go Tim, but take it from a guy ten or so years older than you. Take a vacation sometime :)

I've been going through some of the harness racing post position data. Hmmm. We will have a post up soon about what we think the sport should change in terms of PP's, especially on small tracks. This data is eye-opening.

Last up, Twooter, twitter, twinks. They are starting to look at monetizing their product; somehow, someway. We have looked at some ways this chat-type technology can be used for racing. One neat way (I think) is by adding a real live web community that bets, and is enthused to post their thoughts and information via the medium. Check this out. Zannel has a new city watch app which allows you to see and follow what is hot and what is not in your area, via twinkles and pictures, in real time.



I can never follow what is happening at four tracks at the same time. When I was seriously playing Woodbine and the Meadowlands at night I would often miss post parades, notes, changes and more. To have a neat app on my phone at the track with a tinkeroo from someone alerting me to something that is happening, visually on a map like this (so the track it is coming from is readily apparent), is something I would look into as a player. It's not going to change the world of course, but the possibilities do interest me. As someone posted, maybe it was Railbird, would it not be neat to get a small beep notifying you of a bridge jumper in a pool? Someone notifying you that Art Official broke while scoring down the backstretch at the Jug, at 3-5? If something like this was business-planned and coordinated by racing itself, it could be a good thing.

Have a good day everyone.