Low Hanging Fruit and Horse Race Wrap Up #NaBloPoMo

Thank you for all of your wonderful tips from the Horsing Around With A Race That Stops A Nation post.

The race has now been run and the winners and losers sorted. Champagne has been drunk and bunions have been formed. Time to put the fascinators away for another year.

After the resounding Tres Blue backing from the blogosphere, I placed a small bet on the horse. You’ll be happy to know he finished 22nd out of a field of 24. So I guess the trainer and owner are now Petit Blue.

But fear not, dear readers for that is not where the story ends.

After a more thorough analysis of the form guide and deciding that the pink stripe on the jockey’s fabric of Fiorente was more purple than pink if you squint hard enough and look at it in a tunnel, I placed a bet on the favourite.

AND SHE WON!!!

In addition to that I drew another horse which came second in the office sweep, so a somewhat profitable day all around.

Where things get a bit murky is the somewhat predictable love note I found from the local council placed under my windshield wiper when I returned to my car after my hard day at work. After running a little late for work that morning, I went through my usual routine of parking my car near the bus stop. The bus stop happens to be near a racecourse. Parking is usually tight, but on Melbourne Cup day it is at a premium. Lucky for me I still scored a spot in the morning. The kicker is that parking in this street is two hours only for non-residents. Normally, I run the gauntlet and park there anyway as the street is seldom monitored. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Being late it only occurred to me that my parked car was really low hanging fruit for the parking police when I was half way into work. Plump, juicy and ripe for the picking on race day. And plucked it was.

The state of the ledger is therefore:

total family winnings on Melbourne Cup – $152
total payment to NSW State Government for the privilege of going to work – $101
funds available for the Curtain Raiser retirement fund – $51

My family has kindly donated their winnings to the fund which will be used to increase parking restriction awareness in its members and avoid any more contribution to the low hanging fruit crop.

There was a sad postscript to the race. One of the horses, a mare, was put down immediately after for a broken leg. The decision for the horse to be euthanized was not without controversy. To get the fully story, click here.

RIP Verena.

Horsing Around With A Race That Stops A Nation: #NaBloPoMo

The first Tuesday in November is only days away and dear readers I need your help. I am desperately hoping your wisdom and good horse sense will see me through this important day.

Next Tuesday is Melbourne Cup day here in Australia. The Melbourne Cup is a $6million horse race which literally stops the nation. So good in fact that all of the lucky sods living in Melbourne receive a public holiday to head out to Flemington Race Course. The rest of us schlep to work and watch the event on television amist an eerie phone and keyboard silence. Which means that I have to issue this public service announcement to my international readers – if you are trying to phone Australia next Tuesday afternoon, local time between 2.45pm and 3.15pm, you might as well just stay in Brooklyn and Fuhgeddaboudit.

It is traditional for this one-day-a year punter to place a bet on the Melbourne Cup. Nothing huge, let’s just say if my horse won, the winnings would just be sufficient to purchase an upsized fast food take away meal or a taxi ride home. So fear not, I am staking the farm on your feedback.

Being a one-day-a year-punter, I’d like to say I study the form guide intently in the days leading up to the race, along with the weather conditions and race commentary. I’d like to say that, but neigh, that would be like saying that Phar Lap was just a horse. Instead I rely on a highly secret and scientific formula to choose my horses. This formula involves the intricacies of design, onomatopoeia and poetry, along with some mathematics as length and weight are taken into account. It is of course vitally important that the name of the horse one backs rolls effortlessly off the tongue and that the jockey’s stripes are beautifully colour co-ordinated. Surely, there are no other factors that determine the winner of a 3200 metre horse race?

It therefore must be patently obvious by now that I have no horse sense when it comes to picking a winner.

My general criteria for choosing the worthy candidate for my once a year flutter is a name that resonates in conjunction with a pleasing colour combination both on horse and rider and absolutely no:

PINK

So here is a link to the form guide for the race, dear readers and I need your help in choosing which horse is worthy of my once a year flutter.

My thoughts so far:

Simeon (19) and Red Cadeaux (3) are definitely out – too much pink
Super Cool (13), Masked Marvel (14) and Hawkspur (18) have great names – although is 13 an ominous sign?
I like the fact that Green Moon (2) and Sea Moon (4) might be related on the ethereal plane, given the commonalty of last name
Fiorente (6) and Tres Blue (23) are contenders because they are trained by one of the few female trainers in this country. Fiorente also happens to be the favourite, but has the disadvantage of carrying a pink stripe. (You see my dilemma?).
The best jockey stripe award goes to Dunaden (1). Love the whole polka dot effect and yellow is my favourite colour.

I therefore place my confidence in the blogosphere to assist with resolving this quandary. Please help a once-a-year punter out and place your suggestions in a comment below. All feedback will be gratefully considered and acknowledged and taken back to the stable without any expectation of those kind enough to contributed of having studied the form guide or having any horsey expertise.

And here’s a little something to get you all in the mood for the important task ahead.