Stagecoach

Stagecoach at Shepherd's Wild West Showdown

People have been using teams of four horses harnessed like this for over 2500 years.

Buzkashi

Buzkashi, the sport that uses dead goats as the ball, a breakdown
Jomboy Media

Aljazeera got me started.

Kyrgyz Eagles

Kyrgyz hunters ride horses with golden eagles during the Traditional Eagle Hunting Salbuurun Festival on the southern shore of Issyk-Kul lake, 213km (132 miles) southeast of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. [Vladimir Voronin/AP Photo]

Kyrgyzstan is in the middle of Asia, just west of the giant desert that forms most of western China.

Kyrgyzstan

Google Map here.

Horses

Lawn mower with big horsepower

Horses are great. Big, dangerous, and they take a lot of your time. But they are very cool.

Jigsaw Planet lets you choose the number of pieces you want to tackle from just a few up to 300. 300 piece puzzles take a while. Around 150 pieces is my preference these days. They take a little work but can knocked out pretty quickly, I'm guesstimating about 20 minutes.

Port of Lewiston Idaho

Why There’s a Pacific Ocean Port in Idaho
Half as Interesting

Marine traffic, trains and pipelines are relatively invisible and mostly ignored, yet our civilization is totally dependent on them. Lewiston is like in the center of the proposed expanded state of Idaho.

So we have a serious method for getting the grain down the river to the ocean from Lewiston, but how do we get all that grain to Lewiston? So I started thinking about combines and how many you would need and I figured we need some videos. There are bunch of modern ones. Many of them are very long. Here's a short modern one and a couple about the old days. I thought the 20 mule team was a big operation. That's nothing compared to these guys.

Wheat Harvest on the Palouse
BJ Swanson

24 million bushels are exported out of Lewiston each year. An acre of ground can produce about 50 bushels of wheat, so you would need 480 thousand acres, which translates into 750 square miles of land. If you are driving a combine with a cutter head width of 15 feet and you are traveling at 4 miles per hour, if will take 66,000 hours to harvest all that wheat. Figure you got a month to get it all cut, and you're working 24 hour days, you're going to need 100 combines to get it all cut. And you probably are not going to have a month, you might have two weeks, and 24 hours a day is wishful thinking, so more likely you are going to need 500 combines. Make allowances for problems as the necessity to get the wheat harvested come hell of high water, you are probably going to want double that number.

To Till a Field: Man and Machine in the Palouse
Washington State University Libraries' Films

Harvesting Wheat with a 33-Mule Team
Fort Walla Walla Museum

Palouse Prairie in the Pacific Northwest

The Palouse:

The Palouse is a distinct geographic region of the northwestern United States, encompassing parts of north central Idaho, southeastern Washington, and, by some definitions, parts of northeast Oregon. It is a major agricultural area, primarily producing wheat and legumes. Situated about 160 miles (260 km) north of the Oregon Trail, the region experienced rapid growth in the late 19th century.

The Palouse is home to two land-grant universities: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman. Just eight miles (13 km) apart, both schools opened in the early 1890s.

 

Zabriskie Point

The Baboons - Drinkin' Gasoline
ducktapeproducties

I'm listening to this tune, one of the best in the whole wide world, and I hear him mention Zabriskie Point, so I gotta go look it up.  As a cultural reference Zabriskie Point refers to one of the worst movies of all time. It is also the name of a scenic viewpoint in Death Valley. The film does visit it.

Panoramic view from Zabriskie Point

The name comes from Christian Brevoort Zabriskie (1864 – 1936)  vice president of Pacific Coast Borax Company. Borax? Death Valley?

20 Mule Team Wagon Train Story
Gold Creek Films

P. S. Wikipedia has a larger version of the view from Zabriskie Point. It has a width of 18,000 pixels. 8K seems to be widest video screen available. B & H Photo has one available for $100K.

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

I picked this up at Powell's City of Books a couple of weeks ago. I was looking for something I could read. I browsed the Science Fiction section for a while, but nothing grabbed me, so I figured I'd pick up a couple of Murder Mysteries from authors I knew. Elmore Leonard usually writes pretty good, hard-boiled murder mysteries. A bunch of shows were based on his books. These four I remember clearly:

• 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• Get Shorty (1995)
• TV series Justified (2010—2015)

Morro Castle Havana

Cuba Libre isn't one of them. It's more of a historical adventure story. It opens in 1898 right after the USS Maine got blown up, which triggers the Spanish-American War. It's pretty great. We have heroes, villains, a pretty girl, guns and a sprinkling of factoids that make it seem very real.

Characters:

• Ben Tyler - our hero
• Charlie Burke - Ben's partner
• Roland 'Rollie' Boudreaux - sugar plantation owner, polo player
• Amelia Brown - our girl and Rollie's mistress
• Victor Fuentes - Rollie's factotum
• Novis Crowe - Rollie's bodyguard
• Palenzuela - Havana Chief of Police
• Rudy Calvo - investigator for Palenzuela
• Lorraine - Amelia's friend and the Chief's mistress
• Neely Tucker - reporter page 12
• Paulina Gonzales
• Gomez
• Osma - former slave and slave hunter
• Dr. Henriques - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
• Mary Lou Jones - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
• Tavalera - evil Guardia leader
• Isabela Catolica page 236
• Islero - insurgent general

A number of historical figures are mentioned:

• John J. Crittenden - American patriot
• Clara Barton - founded American Red Cross page 89
• Winston Churchill - junior British military officer page 85
• Evangelina Cisneros - Cuban imprisoned by Spanish authorities page 89
• Charles Crocker - railroad tycoon page 12 (Crooker)
• Richard Harding Davis - reporter page 12
• Frederick Funston - American artillerist page 297
• Calixto García - Cuban General page 85
• Máximo Gómez - Cuban General page 85
• William Randolph Hearst - Newspaper mogul page 87
• Julia Ward Howe - author and social activist page 89
• Fitzhugh Lee - American Army General page 87
• Narcisco Lopez - Cuban patriot
• Charles Dwight Sigsbee - Captain of the USS Maine page 85
• Valeriano Weyler - Spanish General page 87

Here's some pics of stuff that got mentioned:

USS Terror, page 190

Spanish cruiser Vizcaya

The Sims-Dudley Dynamite Gun
Uses compressed air to fire explosive rounds

Chapter 17, page 260, the cowboy and the marine set off to collect a debt from the owner of a sugar cane plantation. Naturally there are guns involved:

Minute of Mae: Spanish Mauser 1893
C&Rsenal

Minute of Mae: U.S. Krag–Jørgensen 1898
C&Rsenal

Minute of Mae: S&W No.3 Russian 3rd Model
C&Rsenal

Page 301. In 1898, trains and horses were the primary means of transportation. Sometimes you carried your horses on a train, which meant you had to raise the horse four feet off of the ground to get into the stock car.  For that you need a ramp:

Soviet Union, South.- Horses being loaded into a train." August 1942

Havana Cuba 1898

Cuba

I was able to find most of the places mentioned in the book. I marked them on a Google Map. The Cluster of blue markers are around Havana, the green ones are around Matanzas and yellow ones have to do with the war.

I wrote a couple of pages of notes about Cuba Straits, a murder mystery set in Cuba. Page 1 here. Page 2 here. And then there's all my other posts about Cuba.

Aconcagua

Crossing a stream on muleback

Aconcagua is a tall mountain in Argentina. It is the highest mountain outside of Asia. Tam writes about tough equipment and links to a New York Times story about a 1973 attempt to climb it.

The above picture comes from that story. I am amazed that the mules are able to keep their footing in that torrent of water. I don't think a person would be able to do it. Mules have relatively skinny legs compared to their body mass, and their hooves are probably better adapted to  stepping on jagged rocks and they must have an impressive circulation system to keep those legs from freezing in that freezing water.

Why do horses or dogs ever even obey people? Trust and food, I suppose.

Tolstoy

Count Aleksey Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his horse Frou-Frou from the movie Anna Karenina

High Tech in Your Backyard

SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center)

California Bob reports:

I didn't realize exactly where it was, but I drive right over the 2-mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) every Wednesday on the way to Elsa's pony lesson.

I pointed it out to Elsa; she says they should move it so it doesn't bother the ponies.

SLAC is in the south San Francisco Bay area, south of Menlo Park and Palo Alto. The equestrian center is in the upper right corner of the above image. It is about a quarter inch wide and is sandwiched in between holes of the Stanford Golf Course. Pretty sad that horses have gotten squoze out in favor of golf. I guess that's okay, golf is probably going to get squoze out by apartment complexes built to house the horde of video gamers we are producing.

Horses

Lighthouse & Avery Glynn winning 5,000 Derby at Sonoma Horse Park
Avery Glynn
California Bob's daughter competed in the Sonoma Horse Park Summer Solstice. I suspect the course she was competing on was similar to the one in the video, though the jumps might have been a little lower. Bob tells us her jumps were 18 inches, the ones in the video look more like two feet.

I've only ridden well trained trail horses, so I don't know how much skill is involved. Oh, wait, I did get bucked off a horse once when we rode over a creek and the animal shied from a hole in the road, a hole through which you could see the water running underneath. So I'm not that skilled.

Watching cowboys and indians deftly maneuver on horses in the movies kind of glosses over the skill and practice involved. Watched a Nigerian movie recently with horses and we saw a very different level of skill exhibited. Both the riders and horses looked clumsy.

There are seven million horses in the USA. I think horses are hard coded into our brains.

Airplane of the Day

First Class Equine Air Travel 727-200 landing at Dallas-Fort Worth

Flying horses have been here before. Didn't know they had their own airline. I should have known because why not?

Pic of the Day

Ben Johnson rides Alla Romana
(like the Romans)

Blurb found on Pinterest:

Ben Johnson riding ‘alla Romana’ . Rio Grande, 1950 ' Ford called Ben Johnson and me and said :' You boys know Roman riding?' Ben said :' That's standing on two horses ? No, we've never done that.' ' Well you've got to learn in three weeks.' Harry Carey jr.

Ben Johnson was a stunt rider and actor. He worked with director John Ford in a number of movies. Harry Carey Jr. was another stunt rider. 'Harry Carey'. What a name to have during WW2.

Ben Johnson won an award for his role in The Last Picture show. I remember seeing that movie a zillion years ago and thought it was kind of dumb and boring. I do remember one of the guys telling his friend that he drank a beer first thing in the morning since he had started working as a roughneck. That was just before the two of them got in a fight, the bottle got broken, and the other guy got cut and maybe lost an eye.

But back to stunts. I see kids doing all kinds of acrobatic stunts on mountain bikes and motorcycles and I think they are brave, crazy and or foolish, depending on what mood I'm in. But riding two horses over a jump is a whole 'nother level. Or maybe it's just the same spirit applied to a different world.

I have ridden horses a couple of times, usually as a tourist as the opportunity arose. Keeping horses is kind of expensive proposition in both time and money. Maybe one of these days I'll get a horse. Who'm I kidding? More likely I'll buy a lawn tractor and explore my lower yard.

Lloyd's Beware The Blog has a page about Ben Johnson.

Via daily timewaster

Pic of the Day

Hunting with an eagle in the Altai Mountains. Photograph by Tariq Zaidi

The Altai Mountains are found in Central and East Asia, where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. - Wikipedia

Via daily timewaster

Pic of the Day

American Cowgirl - Jef Russell

You've got to know when you've crossed the line.

Metropolitan police horse Echo and Cavalry horse Sefton

A couple of months ago The Adaptive Curmudgeon explained John Wick.

Today, Brian Micklethwait does the same for soccer fans:

Concerning the football match, we later read this:

It is incredibly moving to watch a line of just six horses effortlessly holding back 35,000 fans. The relationship between the police and the British public may be troubled, but judging by this night at least, it seems the force’s equine members still draw a healthy respect.

Healthy respect? My guess is it’s more a case of everyone knowing that hurting human cops is okay, because all’s fair in love and rioting. But hurt a horse, and the whole world considers you scum. I remember the IRA hurting a horse, and the reaction from everyone was: right, that does it. I do not like the IRA any more. Bombing humans to death in places like Manchester and Ireland. That’s okay. But, a horse? Now they’ve crossed a line.

Incendiary Cossack song - Oh, you oyisya

Зажигательная казачья песня - Ойся, ты ойся [Incendiary Cossack song - Oysya, you oysya]
Horses and sabres. I think this might be the Russian version of Yee Haw! Pretty great in any case.

St Bernard Pass

Massively famous painting of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David, 1801

I'm reading The Note-Books of Captain Coignet by Captain Jean-Roch Coignet. In Chapter One he is orphaned, finds work on a farm and trains horses for the army. In Chapter Two he gets drafted into Napoleon's army. He's there when Napoleon stages a coupe and then marches to Italy via the Great St. Bernard Pass. (It's called 'great' to distinguish it from Little St. Bernard Pass.)

Napoleon crossing the Alps at the Great St Bernard Pass by Thomas-Charles Naudet

They had quite a time of it as they were dragging cannons along with them. The path over the pass was just that, a path, not a road, so they had to disassemble the cannons and carry all the pieces. You can see a horse loaded with wheels in the lower center of the above picture. It sounds like they put the cannon barrels on sledges and dragged them.

Map of St. Bernard Pass

I've been plotting the locations mentioned in the book on a Google Map (above). The blue markers indicate places mentioned in the book. The one in the lower right is Fort Bard, which was kind of a sticking point.


The Italian Job, intro, "On Days Like These" (Matt Monro) Remastered HD
Paul Middleton
Looking for more stuff about this pass, I came across this video which shows some of the terrain in the in the nearby Nivolet Pass. It's the intro to The Italian Job.

Update July 2022 replaced missing video with the intro to the original movie.

Old Town Road

Lil Nas X - Old Town Road (Official Movie) ft. Billy Ray Cyrus
Boogety boogety boogety. We've been watching Ertugrul on Netflix and in every episode we have men riding horses, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes in slow motion, but I don't think we've seen horses running flat out like they are in the beginning of this video. A couple of weeks ago we had horses running flat out in the Kentucky Derby. And you can still see horses running in races most every day, at least in places where they still have horse races. Don't think they run them in Portland anymore. And let's not forget the Compton Cowboys.

This video is about six kinds of goofball, but it's got horses, so it's cool.

Via The Unwanted Blog

Kentucky Derby

Kentucky Derby 2019 (FULL RACE) ends in historic controversial finish | NBC Sports
Maximum Security won the race, but then somebody cried "foul", and then Country House was declared the winner. I watched this video a couple of times and I fail to see what the big stink is about. It's a horse race, fer cryin out loud. But then I'm not an expert, and I don't have a gazillion dollars riding on the outcome. I fully expect lawyers to get involved, which means we're going to be hearing about this for months.

I like horses, not enough to spend any time or money on them, but I like them. They are kind of like big, dumb dogs. I've ridden a couple of times and I've been to a rodeo or two, but I don't think I've ever been to a horse race.

A post by Borepatch got me onto this.