The race isn't on YouTube yet, but you can see the same sort of explosive speed on display at the Florida Derby, the horse's final race before the Kentucky Derby:

In a way, it's a shame that this is Big Brown's year. The field he's racing against isn't the strongest, and you'd really like to see a Triple Crown winner who's tested in all three races. The Belmont may still pose a challenge though: other owners may run long-distance specialists to try to stop history from being made. Nevertheless, Secretariat didn't exactly beat a field of all-stars in any of his races, and 35 years later, is still fairly well thought of.

As for lacrosse, Virginia got by Maryland today 8-7 in the NCAA quarterfinals. The two had split during the regular season, but Virginia, who's been first or second most of the year, won it in overtime this year. Their opponent will probably be Syracuse, who faces Notre Dame, and whom Virginia beat 14-13 in overtime on a neutral field back in March.

The other side of the bracket features perennial representative of evil, Johns Hopkins, and newly-minted representative of evil, Duke. Duke has gone from being the joke of the ACC 10 years ago to being a national powerhouse, and Virginia lost to them twice this year. Best outcome of next Saturday - a U.Va.-Hopkins final. Worst outcome: Duke-Syracuse.

Lacrosse used to have 3 or 4 competitive teams among a field of 8 perennial powerhouses. But lacrosse has been getting more competitive, with all four ACC schools making the field of 16, and every quarterfinalist had a reasonable shot at the title.

He seems like a nice fellow with a winning personality, who's genuinely more interested in policy than politics per se, but who's also clearly too liberal for the state. It'll be fun debating him in the Fall, carving up his policy proposals, and showing that if he really wanted to get elected, he should have stayed a Republican.

He also doesn't seem like the sort who would have the time (he's petitioning on, remember) or the inclination to play games by sending over his people to support my opponent in a primary dust-up. Which raises the question: who exactly is supporting my primary opponent, if not Republicans?

The Amazonians did deliver three offerings while I was at work, however. In The Gravest Extreme, by Massad Ayoub, and reputed to be one of the best primers about tactical and situational awareness in personal defense. The Denver Post may find it paradoxical that people carrying weapons aren't out there hunting big game on the mean streets of LoDo, but for most of us, it makes perfect sense not to want to shoot somebody. And no, not just because of all the paperwork.

Then there was the kochtopfe. A 10-piece cast aluminum with triple inner and outer non-stick layering. Of course, the "10-piece" business includes the tops, which it like saying that I have a three-piece car because the key and the gas cap aren't physically connected. And for some reason, the knobs on the tops were attached to the underside, and needed to be unscrewed and re-attached to the other side. They probably take up less room that way, but it's still the first cookware set I've gotten with some assembly required.

I gotta say, it's sturdy, heavier than cheap stuff and lighter than iron or copper, and the non-stick outside promises easier cleaning.

Now, if only I had the time to cook.

No, the whole happy lot of us is moving upstairs to a different conference room. I've working in offices (with and without office-mates), cubicles (with and without unendurably loud neighbors), at home, in coffee shops, and in quarters so temporary they'd make an army tent look like the Pentagon. But this is by far the weirdest set-up I've endured: 6 (now 5, soon to be 9) people in one conference room without walls, cubicles, or any semblence of privacy or climate control. Add to that the tendency to use the speaker phone when you're the only one on the call, and the room's transformation into an over-sized Easy Bake oven around 11:00 AM, and it wins the Environment Least Conducive to Productive Work running away.

Now we're getting ready to move upstairs into a larger conference room. There will be more space, and the opposite wall won't make you feel as though you're re-enacting the trash compactor scene from Star Wars. Since there are no windows, the room will be cooler, which will irritate some but which I find refreshing. We will have a clock, which, being that we're all contractors, we will occasionaly watch.

The hardest part wasn't the move itself, but the negotiations yesterday over the interior design. It was like the Paris Peace talks. We were literally talking about the shape of the table. Or at least, their arrangement. We all more or less wanted the same thing - a big horseshoe with a table for the projector in the middle, and then we spent 10 minutes moving them this way and, until they were just right.

There was a time when this sort of thing would have bothered me - just put them someplace and live with it! But now, I sort of accept it as the overhead of making everyone happy and feeling as though they've had a say. So I tend to stand there without much to say, which probably makes me look uninvolved. Oh, well. That's part of the overhead, too.

This came right after the Rosen interview yesterday. It's not often you get an hour to run free on the Blowtorch, with a chance to plug everything from the campaign to the blog, to the other radio show.

And then last night, the Colorado Union of Taxpayers spent about an hour on a briefing from legislative staff about the uses and misuses of Referendum C money. As with the Flatiron Building, what it looks like depends on where you stand, but it's pretty clear that the Legislature (and not just Democrats, unfortunately) has been playing pretty severe games in the expectation that they won't get caught.

So frankly, High Society last night was a much-needed tonic.

Actually, that's not snow. It's the styrofoam we put out in the winter, and then hire the college kids to slowly remove and store inside the mountains during the summer.

Which means that it won't be melting, causing flooding and then disappearing down to Arizona because we don't have enough storage to keep it here in Colorado.

Most of the comments on the Rocky article are of the "Thank goodness for global warming," variety, which is understandable, given that this winter saw record snowfall in China, cold snaps in Canada (that's news?), extremely heavy snow here in Colorado, and snow in Iraq. (And given the Mahdi Army's recent performance, maybe they ought to go ahead an adopt the snowflake as their symbol.)

Look, long-term trends don't get undone by one cool, wet winter. But let's keep an open mind here. My money's still on the sun, not on us, and if it does start to get cooler again in the next few years, we may regret having turned so much of our food into fuel.

So here I am, listening to the Fletcher Henderson version of the King Porter Stomp (if you're still reading this, you already know the Benny Goodman version), when what do I hear, but that same set of descending chords.

So either Fletcher was having a little fun at Paul's expense, or he was putting in a bid for his share of the royalties, or lots of bandleaders like quoting famous bits of other songs in the middle of their own riffs.

UPDATE: So who is this on Roy Eldridge's "Stop! The Light's on Red" who sings it like "Stob!" as though she has a cold? Turns out it's Anita O'Day, who had the famous banter with the cab driver (actually Eldridge himself) in "Let Me Off Uptown." Nicknamed, "The Jezebel of Jazz," she seems to have had one of the roughest lives in jazz, with being eaten by dogs, Jeeves, just about the only misfortune she escaped, which is good, because she apparently liked raising them.

The story has as much of a happy ending as can be expected in real life for someone who went through so much. She did seem to revive her career in the 90s, riding a wave of nostalgia, but also her considerable talent, back to the bandstand.

Native Dancer won everything in sight in 1953, and 1954 before he was retired at age 4 because of, you guessed it, injury-proneness in his feet. (He was also descended from the brilliant but completely unmanageable Hastings, most famous as a great-great-grandsire of Seabuscuit, but also known for stomping a groomsman to death.)

But that success has led breeders to mate Native Dancer's progeny so often that the thoroughbred gene pool has shrunk. And as it shrinks, another trait of the Native Dancer line is becoming more pronounced.

Like hemophilia in the Russian royal family, Native Dancer's line has a tragic flaw. Thanks in part to heavily muscled legs and a violent, herky-jerky running style, Native Dancer and his descendants have had trouble with their feet. Injuries have cut short the careers of several of his most famous kin, most notably Barbaro, a great-great-great-grandson who was injured during the Preakness Stakes and was later put to death.

Overbreeding has exacerbated the problem. "There's a lack of durability right now," says Ric Waldman, the former head of operations for Windfields Farm in Canada, which has bred and raced Native Dancer's descendants.

...

Some believe the success of this line, coupled with the boom in the breeding market, has come with a price. The risk of injury and the prospect of guaranteed millions in the breeding shed have taken many great horses out of the sport at a young age. That's left fewer veteran stars to lure fans to the track.

It's also what happens when a sport's top-level success becomes disconnected from its farm system, so to speak. Eight Belles was, and Big Brown is, descended from Native Dancer, Big Brown on both his sire's and his dam's sides. (The WSJ has also provided a pedigree chart, showing the links back to Native Dancer, and to the other main Royal bloodline, Nasrullah's, which produced Secretariat and Seattle Slew.)

The good news is that breeders are starting to look to foreign bloodlines; interbreeding with them may make horses more robust. The bad news is that it's likely only to be a temporary infusion, until the flaws in whatever new royalty emerges become apparent.

There's also an argument for genetic engineering in crops here. Continued experimentation is the only way to make sure that a crop with a specific weakness, that hasn't manifested itself yet, can be quickly replaced with another, less-vulnerable crop. We live in a world market for seed now, like it or not, and we need to be encouraging, not discouraging, experimentation.

Two years ago, it was Barbaro.

This year, Big Brown.

Horse racing hasn't had a Triple Crown winner since 1978's Affirmed, and his three-race duel with Alydar. But when your horse comes from the 20th position to win the Kentucky Derby by 4 3/4 lengths with a finishing kick, you know he's got the chops to run the Belmont. The question is, will he fall victim to some sprinter having a career day two weeks from now at Pimlico?

I like horse racing. But I want to love horse racing. Sadly, horse racing's owners have managed to do damage to their sport that baseball owners can only dream of. Sally Jenkins has it half right in today's Washington Post:

But thoroughbred racing is in a moral crisis, and everyone now knows it. Twice since 2006, magnificent animals have suffered catastrophic injuries on live television in Triple Crown races, and there is no explaining that away. Horses are being over-bred and over-raced, until their bodies cannot support their own ambitions, or those of the humans who race them.

The only reason they look over-raced is because they're over-bred. Go take a look at Seabiscuit's record in the back of Laura Hillenbrand's book, and you'll see that horses used to race a schedule that NASCAR drivers would have a hard time with. John Henry (whose history and physique look a lot like Seabiscuit's) ran until he was nine. Secretariat and Bold Ruler at least raced through their four-year-old seasons.

The horses need to race long enough and often enough to develop fans, and the top of the sport can't succeed without the dozens of tracks and thousands of races around the country. But off-track betting has diluted the track atmosphere, and ever-larger takes (er, taxes) have made almost impossible for even a successful horse-picker to come away a winner. The combination has simultaneously killed both the romance and the avarice, and the romance of the avarice.

As for the top stakes races, there's virtually no TV coverage except for the Breeders Cup and the Triple Crown. The other major stakes races barely get a mention, except for perhaps the Wood Memorial and the other races leading up to Derby Day.

Maybe the horse owners should form a league, and spend some of that breeding money on a TV contract. And let their horses get a little more robust.

Eventually, there was some stuff to like, and some to remind me of why he wasn't my first choice.

He started off by thanking us for all the water we send to Arizona. Now this was interesting, because in 2005, he made a joint appearance with George Bush to promote Social Security reform, he opened by saying how glad he was to come to Colorado to visit his water. This elicited somewhat good-natured boos and hisses, but it's amazing how his tone changed, now that he was asking for votes.

He also singled out Divided We Fail, the AARP's attempt to unite America under a crushing burden of debt, by blocking any meaningful reform of Medicare. I couldn't tell whether he was actually being supportive, or whether he had caved to a group that was shadowing his every appearance on this issue. But the whole post-partisan idea of a purple Donkephant ignores the fact that the two parties are supposed to present very different visions for the country. It's something that McCain himself has been accused of forgetting.

As for the apparent centerpiece of his health care proposal - a $5000 tax credit for individuals buying their own health insurance, while simulatenously starting to remove the incentive for businesses to provide that, is a terrific step in the right direction. He rightly pointed out that individuals are presumed not to be smart enough to intelligently spend the money, but fairly quickly learn what works and what doesn't. At the same time, divorcing health insurance from business will increase portability, and probalby add more cash to employees' paychecks at the same time.

There is some concern about what happens to group coverage. He didn't directly answer that, but my own guess is that this reform will have to be combined with the ability for small businesses and individuals to band together to form their own groups. At the same time, increasing competition by allowing insurance to be bought across state lines will bring prices down.

The rest of the plan sounded like more nany-state hectoring, though. All those extra plans to encourage people to be more healthy could be implemented much more efficiently through, oh, more expensive insurance for those who don't?

One moment stood out for me. I don't think it was a planted question, but when one woman who runs a laser- and massage-therapy clinic with her husband asked a question, McCain interrupted to prompt her to define and discuss laser therapy and its benefits. It was obvious he knew the answer, but just as obvious that he wanted her to say it. He didn't need to prove how smart he was by lecturing; he could do it just as well by letting her talk with pride about her work.

Some conservatives argue that the decision to use such information is a private matter, and to a large degree, they're right. Private insurance is private, and after all, why shouldn't employers and insurers have access to the best information available concerning the likely trajectory of their prospective employees' careers and health?

But the implications, given the world that we live in, of mandatory genetic testing - and make no mistake, it would soon become mandatory - for hiring and insurance are too troubling.

1) Basic fairness

As one caller to Bill Bennett's show put it this morning, I can choose whether or not I smoke, but I can't choose my parents. As conservatives, we believe in effort and measuring outputs. The widespread use of genetic testing measures inputs, and creates the possibility of another victim class, something we surely don't need. It also gives HR people another irrelevant piece of data to screen by, which appears to be the thing they're best at.

2) The Black Swan effect.

In his tremendous book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb notes the tendency of people to overrate the risks they can define, and to underrate the risks that are more diffuse. For example, when asked whether they'd rather pay for life insurance against their plane going down in a terrorist attack, or pay the same amount for insurance against the plane going down for any reason, people routinely pick the first more often than the second. This choice is clearly irrational, but it's how the mind works.

The same caller noted that you can have all the tests you want for cancer, but still can't account for someone getting hit by a truck. "Well, there's no test for that," barked the host, apparently not comprehending that that was the point.

What may work in large numbers for actuaries is unlikely to matter much in a hiring decision between two candidates, and focusing on information that we have, without understanding that it's swamped by all the information we don't have, may lead to worse, rather than better decisions. It's in many ways analagous to Modern Portfolio Theory, which makes all sorts of nonsensical assumptions about price movements, in order to reach beautiful and dangerously misleading mathematics.

3) Refusal to enter clinical trials for fear the information will end up in the hands of insurers;

Some will argue that insurers, aware that better drugs are to their benefit, will not misuse such information. But of course, better druges aren't necessarily to the companies' benefit. Whatever the actuarial results, competition will tend to force premiums down over time, regardless of conditions.

More importantly, there's Bastiat's Seen-and-Unseen. The insurance companies can, for the benefit of their boards and shareholders, point to concrete benefits from specific individuals they've denied coverage or increased premiums for. The benefits to them from better treatments are diffuse and distant.

Of course, one might also argue that this danger would lead the drug companies to guard genetic testing results like classified information, which might be comforting if the government didn't leak like a sieve.

MORE THOUGHTS: In theory, government would be well out of all of these arenas. It wouldn't regulate insurance as heavily as it does. It wouldn't distort the health insurance industry the way it does. It certainly wouldn't go around telling private individuals whom they could and couldn't hire.

And there's always the risk of frivolous class-action lawsuits lawyer-driven shakedowns, possibly on the basis of the very statistical anomalies the law is trying to read out of the system. For instance, it might happen that a plant shuts down in a part of the country where a certain gene, by virture of early settlement by a particular ethnic group, is prevalent. "Disparate Impact" might well be brought spuriously into play in such a case. I have to admit, I haven't studied the legislation closely enough to know what the legal standards will be for bringing suit.

Still, I think these things make it close, rather than tipping the scales the other way.

It's an odd little movie about a guy (Dennis Weaver) driving home through the southern California mountains from a business trip. He passes a semi, which ticks off the semi driver, who then spends the rest of the movie trying to kill Mr. Weaver by running him off the road, running him over, pushing him in front of a train, etc. He won't let go until McCloud finds a way to push back, in deadly fashion.

(Even at this early stage, the film shows the master's touch, building up tension, and then releasing it at a higher level each time, until the final, climactic showdown. When Carey Loftin, a stuntman not an actor, playing the truck driver, asked Steven Spielberg what his motivation was for tormenting the car's driver, Spielberg told him, "You're a dirty, rotten, no-good son of a bitch." Loftin replied, "Kid, you hired the right man.")

The tagline on one of Duel's posters: "When the headlights of a truck become the eyes of a psychopath." A lot of Obama supporters probably feel that way about Hillary right about now.

OK, not really.

According to the Wall Street Journal, large swaths of cotton fields have been replanted with corn, whose prices have been driven as high as an elephant's eye by subsidies reaching clear up to the sky. Ethanol subsidies, for a product that's fuel-inefficient and which nobody is burning. As a result, kosher for Passover margarine, which is made from cottonseed oil, has run out here in Denver and was being rationed in NY, where angry mobs of Jewish women were threatening to burn down the grocery stores.

Now, just about nothing on Passover beats matzah with margarine. And I finally managed to track down what I have reason to believe is one of three remaining blocks of the stuff here in Denver. (No, I'm not going to share.)

This isn't an example of special pleading. I've thought government-funded corn-based ethanol was a dumb idea for over a year now, which may even make me late to the party as far as that's concerned.

It's just an example of how lousy policy hits home.

Indeed, the most prominent Colorado blogger-turned-candidate other than Bane is Republican Joshua Sharf, who aspires to serve as a state representative in the 6th District. (Sharf authors a blog called "View From a Height" and has contributed to the Denver Post's PoliticsWest.com site, home of the so-called Gang of Four, in addition to co-hosting a KNUS talk show with former state senator John Andrews.)

The article is actually about Jason Bane, co-founder of Colorado Pols who's now running for office as a Democrat in Jefferson County. They link RockyMountainRight, conservative blog and friend of this blog and my campaign. But instead of linking to the story about Bane, they just link to the blog. (I haven't researched the accusations about Bane, so I have no position on their truthfulness or relevance, just for the record.)

C'mon, Westword. Link to the blog posting in question instead of making people search. You should be "progressive" enough to know how that works.

But in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, home of the Steelers, union households comprised only 31% of the vote in the Democratic primary. That's it. That includes the public employees, which are both more unionized and more Democrat than private employees. What's more, of that 31%, only 19% were actual union members, while 12% were non-union voters in a union household.

(Interestingly, Clinton won actual union members 57-43, but won the non-union cohabitants 61-39. Naturally, I have no idea what this means. This may be because men are more likely to be union members, but women are more likely to vote for Hillary.)

Of course, Obama won the black vote 89-11. And while Hillary won those without college degrees 58-42, the "education gap" manifested itself again, with Obama winning college graduates 51-49. (Hat tip: Pollster.com).

In 1968, Teddy White warned that the Democrats might well become the party of northern unions, southern blacks, and college campuses. In the past, these groups have tended to vote at least somewhat in synch, although the union vote has never matched the Democrat predilection of its leaders for campaign donations.

It may well be that the decline in private-sector union membership has hit a natural bottom, and can't really decline much farther. On the other hand, a severe economic crisis of the sort the Democrats appear determined to bring about could form the basis for renewed interest in unions as a means of soaking the supposedly deep pockets of companies verging on bankruptcy. In the meantime, the mutual disenchantment of blacks and unions, and the contempt of college campuses for both, are making the Democrat coalition look awfully shaky this year.

Everyone blames Daley for the police and the situation in Grant Park. In fact, White makes it clear that the police acted properly over the first three days of the convention. The real brutality only occurred after the convention, when they stormed the 15th floor of the hotel, and took out their frustrations on the McCarthy kids, who had had nothing whatever to do with the SDS-organized mayhem outside. That wasn't shown on TV.

A telephone strike meant that the video from outside couldn't be transmitted live for broadcast; a taxi strike, coupled with Mayor Daley's refusal to let the TV trucks park on the sidewalk outside the convention hall, meant that the tape couldn't even be transported reliably.

Today, the riot would have been televised live, and the nomination and acceptance would have been televised later. As it transpired, Humphrey's acceptance speech was broadcast at the same time as the riot videotape, helping to give the impression that Humphrey was being installed as nominee by bayonets and tear gas.

And the unions were the reason for that.

Dems and ballot initiative voters, take note.