Janel's Place

I hear people sayin'. We Don't need this war.
I say there's some things worth fightin' for.
What about our freedom, and this piece of ground?
We didn't get to keep 'em by backin' down.
They say we don't realize the mess we're gettin' in
Before you start preachin' let me ask you this my friend.

Have you forgotten, how it felt that day?
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away
Have you forgotten, when those towers fell
We had neighbors still inside goin through a livin hell
And you say we shouldn't worry bout Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

You took all the footage off my T.V.
Said it's too disturbin for you and me
It'll just breed anger is what the experts say
If it was up to me I'd show it everyday
Some say this country just out lookin' for a fight
Well after 9/11 man I'd have to say right.

Have you forgotten, how it felt that day?
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away
Have you forgotten when those towers fell
We had neighbors still inside goin' through a livin' hell
And we vow to get the ones behind Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

I've been there with the soldiers
Who've gone away to war
you can bet they remember just what they're fightin' for

Have you forgotten
All the people killed
Yes some went down like heroes
In that Pennsylvania field
Have you forgotten
About our Pentagon
All the loved ones that we lost
And those left to carry on
Don't you tell me not to worry 'bout Bin Laden

Have you forgotten?

Have you forgotten?

Have you forgotten?!

Artist: Darryl Worley
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Most of us don't know where we came from or where we're going. What we're doing today is only a question to ask down to a certain level or it gets uncomfortable. Well, ask it anyway. Ask it before you die. Ask it every day until you find the answer. Ask the people who think they have the answer. Find out if they're crazy or if they have it. Maybe there is a war going on for every soul and maybe you're losing. Just find out.
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Updated: May 26, 2006, 2:02 PM ET
By Pat Forde
ESPN.com

Robert Lewis of Louisville signs one of two cards for Barbaro at Churchill Downs this week.


The e-mails come from across the globe, deluging a University of Pennsylvania Web site with personal pep talks for an utterly oblivious beast.

"Barbaro, I am only 12 but if I was 30 I would become a vet and make you better in one second!" wrote Maeve Geismar of Annapolis, Md.



AP Photo/Garry Jones

"You are such a sweet baby! Our love for horses is so represented by the outpouring of well wishes for you! Mend and have the best life!" wrote Mary Baird, 49, of Pflugerville, Texas.

"My Mom had a new hip and was just fine, and so will you be just fine," declared Kathy Fish, 63, of New York, N.Y.

The means of expression have changed since the Ice Age, when prehistoric man drew pictures of horses on cave walls -- more images of horses, according to one study, than of any other animal. The emotion behind the expression remains the same in the computer age. Barbaro's jarring journey from champion to victim to (so far) survivor serves as a societal reminder: Our bond with equine kind is indefinable, intimate and infinite.

"The horse is still sort of a shadowed deity in the culture," said John Jeremiah Sullivan, a writer-at-large for GQ whose fascinating 2004 book, "Blood Horses," in part examines the joined histories of man and horse. "There's just this inexplicable sense of attachment that goes back to the very beginning. … The closest thing I have to a theory is that this association has been part of the species for so long -- this instinct to venerate them -- that it has almost wired itself into our cultural DNA."

That wiring is rarely more conductive than when a thoroughbred is injured.

We can -- at least some of us -- watch news footage of starving African children without feeling a burning call to action. But the sight of a race horse's right hind leg flaring out at a hideously incongruous angle last Saturday made America -- at least some of us -- snap like Barbaro's bones.

For about two days we flat lost it on behalf of a horse. And we're just now starting to get it back.

Barbaro's injury and the efforts to save him -- not Barry Bonds' 714th home run, not the NBA playoffs, not the Stanley Cup -- was the dominant sports news Sunday and Monday. It's been a prominent story on every network morning news show this week. Coal miners trapped underground might not have been monitored as anxiously by the public as the colt undergoing surgery to repair his lower leg.

Since coming out of surgery, Barbaro has been bombarded with more than just thousands of e-mails. Bushels of apples and carrots have arrived at Penn Veterinary Medicine's New Bolton Center -- enough to feed every horse in the hospital's care. Cards, pictures, posters -- even religious figurines have been sent, tribute to Sullivan's shadowed deity.

Up until Barbaro's bad step in the Preakness, he'd produced exactly 121.36 seconds of athletic connection with the populace -- the time it took him to win the Kentucky Derby on May 6. Yes, he had won five previous races, but the vast majority of the e-mailing, nail-biting, hard-praying public had never seen them. They only knew the colt they saw win the Derby by a resounding 6½ lengths.

So by the time the gates opened at Pimlico Race Course -- the second time, not the first, when the colt ominously false started -- Barbaro had not done enough to make America fall in love with him. But it has long been in love with horses in general.

That didn't start with domestication of the animal, which Sullivan's book estimates occurred 7,000 years ago. Nor had it ended after we ceased using the species as a primary means of transportation. Our affection for horses always has extended beyond utility.

And when a race horse is severely injured before our very eyes, the reaction is outsized.

The natural questions: How can human suffering be trumped by animal suffering? How can human sporting achievement be trumped by animal sporting injury?

A couple attempts at answers:

• In drama-addicted America, human starvation does not resonate like a horse breaking his leg. You cannot see starvation happen on live television, per se. You can, however, see Barbaro limping awkwardly and desperately on three legs, holding his wounded limb in the air, and feel the panic and pain of the moment.

Even worse, this breakdown happened right in front of the grandstand -- in full view of many of the paying patrons. Think back through the most memorable and traumatic breakdowns in racing history and they generally occurred front and center, in the stretch: Go For Wand's ghastly crash in the 1990 Breeders' Cup and Ruffian's shattered leg in the 1975 match race with Foolish Pleasure.

Barbaro's injury immediately conjured images of Ruffian: two undefeated horses seemingly on the cusp of an historic achievement -- for Barbaro the Triple Crown, for the filly Ruffian a battle-of-the-sexes triumph over the reigning Kentucky Derby winner -- when they shockingly were hurt. Some fans still aren't over the loss of Go For Wand and Ruffian, who were destroyed. The same would be true this time, if Barbaro does not pull through.

• Bonds' hitting 714 was inevitable. Barbaro's breaking his leg certainly was not. It was a wholly unpredictable outcome -- especially to casual fans who don't know the grisly statistics on how common thoroughbred breakdowns really are.

And while it is easy to cheer against Bonds and other athletic churls, cheaters and chokers, race horses are -- like most domesticated animals -- almost universally laudable creatures. They try hard, do not complain and do not get in much off-the-track trouble. They're pure.

And they are absolutely beautiful, at rest and especially in motion.

Their involuntary presence in our sporting marketplace is probably a large part of the empathy that pours out when an animal gets hurt. Racing is a guilty pleasure to many fans, who sublimate concerns about the manifold health risks to the animals in order to enjoy the thrill of the sport. Those concerns confront us when a horse breaks down.

"There's this hypocrisy to it, too," Sullivan said of the societal fondness for its race horses. "Of course this kind of thing happens because they're being asked to do something their bodies aren't able to do."

That is the tormented nature of the current relationship with our old friend the thoroughbred. We don't e-mail the healthy ones.
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Barbaro on his feet Tuesday, 'doing very well'
Updated: May 23, 2006, 12:31 PM ET
Associated Press

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. -- There was more good news Tuesday on Barbaro's recovery from a catastrophic injury to his right hind leg.

"He's actually better today than he was even yesterday and he was pretty good yesterday," Dr. Dean Richardson said. "He's walking very well on the limb, absolutely normal vital signs. He's doing very well."





Barbaro was on his feet in his stall, even scratching his left ear with his left hind leg just two days after Richardson and a team of assistants spent more than five hours pinning together the leg bones he shattered in the Preakness Stakes on Saturday.








Barbaro is lifted out of a special swimming pool following hours of surgery to repair his badly injured right hind leg.
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That-a-boy!

Barbaro eating, flirting with mares
Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro is making progress after surgery on his broken leg, eating and even showing an interest in mares, his surgeon said today. "There's some mares there, and he's extremely interested in the mares," Dr. Dean Richardson said in a televised interview. Richardson cautioned the colt still faces a long and perilous road to recovery.
CNN.com
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“Have you given the horse strength?

Have you clothed his neck with thunder?

Can you frighten him like a locust?

His majestic snorting strikes terror.

He paws in the valley, and rejoices in his strength;

He gallops into the clash of arms.

He mocks at fear, and is not frightened;

Nor does he turn back from the sword.

The quiver rattles against him,

The glittering spear and javelin.

He devours the distance with fierceness and rage;

Nor does he come to a halt because the trumpet has sounded.

At the blast of the trumpet he says, ‘Aha!’

He smells the battle from afar,

The thunder of captains and shouting.

Job 39:19-25



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There are many things to blog about flies and brains and interesting people. But instead I have to blog the next place I need to visit:




wintrex.tripod.com/. ../petronas.jpg


How COOL.
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These are Stinkerbell's two little angels.













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Just when you think you've heard it all, you discover a streaker in the gospel of Mark. The Bible is so not boring.

I "lacked enthusiasm" in lab meeting this afternoon. I am becoming one of those dreaded scientists that give boring talks. This IS bad. I tend to talk lowly and slowly when brainpower is low. Saves energy. I don't mean to scare people. Come to think of it, O'Neil gave up way too easily on that gradient gel debate. I must have been scary.

Well good grief it's midnight again and I'm supposed to use my brain tomorrow morning. The thing about low brainpower and high caffeine in the morning is that it manifests itself in great weirdness. This will be good for final exam discussions of pertinent issues in epidemiological research encountered by my highly educated multi-doctorial classmates. I will probably tell them all about the streaker in the gospel of Mark. Surely it scared nearby sheep and stress is a risk factor for disease which could certainly have lead to an FMD outbreak in Jerusalem which could have lead to inter-species viral recombination creating issues in middle eastern animal health and welfare that persist even today, and without knowledge of the true cause there may be another episode.

Random T-bred names are popping into my head these days and I can't stop them. That is what I get for indulging in 10 minutes of reading pre-Kentucky Derby news. Tonight's featured horses in Janel's brain are Mumtaz Begum and Demons Begone.

Gotta sleep.
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