Zoo Station

The more jobless among us (that rules me out, obviously) follow the Kentucky Derby. You would, for instance, know that Street Sense won the Derby this year. I personally don't care much about horse racing, but my attention perked up immediately when Chris sent this Hunter Thompson piece on the Kentucky Derby. It is a bit dated, but by god, HST is in form here.

I also found this little interesting piece of trivia around this particular piece. Apparently, Boston Globe reporter Bill Cardoso read this piece and exclaimed, "This is pure Gonzo!" From there, it passed into legend, include a frequent misattribution to HST himself. Here is a little excerpt to give you a taste. Read. Enjoy.

He had done a few good sketches, but so far we hadn't seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for a lead drawing. It was a face I'd seen a thousand times at every Derby I'd ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry--a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient--to the parents--than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways. ("Goddam, did you hear about Smitty's daughter? She went crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!")