Horse, dance, jaw, drop

Following the lj-cut is a video of Andreas Helgestrand riding Blue Hors Matine in the 2006 World Equestrian Games.
This hit the net late last year, but I only saw it today.

I know next to nothing about competitive freestyle dressage, but even without the commentary I could tell that this was an amazing performance. The commentators have the same awed tones that were used to describe Olga Korbut's 1972 performance. Translated into American sports commentary, the closest would be screaming "THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!" about seventy-zillion times.

Go, watch. It's about five minutes.

( Cut for the good of your browser. But, really, go watch.  )

Birthday Week; Penn and Teller and the Seven Principles of Sleight of Hand

In my birth family, there's a seven-day period that I call "birthday season"--it starts with my mother's birthday, encompasses my birthday and the Fourth of July, and ends with my sister's birthday a week after my mother's. (Also in here now is my anniversary with nellorat, and alas, the anniversary of my brother's death.)

Today is one of the non-event days, sort of the Holy Monday of Birthday Week--part of the week but not really of much note. So I'm enjoying this slack day by slacking off and catching up on some blogs.

My rest was just interrupted by a particularly wretched telemarketing call. The call showed a normal phone number (in Missouri) and a name ("Melissa Brandan"), but was a robocall offering me carpet cleaning services. When I pressed 1 to indicate that I was interested, I was connected to a human. I asked her for her company name, location, and contact number; unsurprisingly, I was lied to on all three. (She said "Magic Carpet Franchises", Concord California, and the contact number was a phone sex line. I'm actually a little impressed that they have these answers prepared instead of just hanging up.) So I called *69 to get the actual calling number (816-389-2549) and filed a complaint with the national Do Not Call registry. We'll see what comes of it.

Anyway, back to the blog catchup. Sometime in the last month, Mark Evanier posted a link to a video of Penn and Teller performing a version of a routine that they did in one of their earliest TV specials. In it, Teller walks in smoking, throws the cigarette on the ground and crushes it with his foot, pauses to exhale some smoke, produces another cigarette from a pack in his jacket, and lights it. Except that, well, no single activity that I just described actually happened the way it appears; there are something like fourteen different sleights involved in this ten seconds of noirish drama. Well worth watching.

( Enter--the misdirection zone! )