Godspeed, Teddy....

It is with a heavy heart that I let you guys know that America's Favorite Eventing Pony, Theodore O'Connor, was humanely euthanized following an accident on the O'Connor's farm today.

Teddy was shortlisted for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, had won a Team Gold medal at Pan Am last year, and was one of the most, if not THE most decorated pony in Eventing History.

This is a devastating blow, not only to the O'Connor Event Team, Teddy's syndicate, etc. but also to the American public, especially to young riders, a great many of whom held Teddy very close to their hearts.

Godspeed, little man. You touched many lives.

Run Free Eight Belles

Those of you who read this blog will know that Today was Kentucky Derby day. I'm not going to give you a play by play of the race -- I just finished watching it and need to process and cry for a while.

I will say this: Run Free Eight Belles....You were an amazing filly and you will be missed.

These horses are too young for this..... they're too young and their bones are too soft and they don't need to die for our entertainment.

that's all i'm going to say about horse racing right now... I'm too stunned to say anything else.

Cult Fiction

The London Telegraph posted this List of the Top 50 Cult Fiction Books Of All Time....

The ones I've read personally are italicized....

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
• A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
• The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
• Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
• Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
• Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
• The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• 
  
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• 
  
• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
• Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
• The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
• The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
• No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
• The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
• Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
• The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)