GP Efforts an Exercise in Futility

- Gulfstream opens today. As opposed to past years however, I'm going to continue to focus my blogging efforts on the local racing here at the Big A. On the other hand, as in recent past years, we're once again reading of the efforts down there to make the track and the meeting not suck anymore. Five day a week racing instead of six, a new racing secretary, new stewards, improvements to the turf course, complete coverage on a daily basis for the first time from HRTV (which does most of us a whole lot of fucking good), and changes to the stakes schedule....such as, turning the Fountain of Youth, long a key prep for the Florida Derby and the spring classics that follow, into a one-turn mile, and thus rendering it more or less irrelevant as such. Good thinking there.

Of course, there's still no backyard nor grandstand seating, so unless we can go back in time and save the original structure before its mindless and ill-fated destruction, nothing is really going to help....especially in terms of the idiotic track configuration which prevents the track from conducting the kind of sliding scale of distances which make for a proper three-year old program, and which makes even the mile and an eighth races more a matter of the post position draw than anything else.

Rather than a boycott, my sticking with the Big A is more a way of me changing tactics from past years to keep things from becoming too routine, providing alternate content given all of the bloggers and columnists who will be concentrating on the Florida racing, and to keep the momentum that I've established - at least in my mind and for my own selfish purposes - in keeping tabs on the trends we're seeing up here. Which will all, hopefully, lead to us making a little money.

Of course, I'll be keeping an eye on things down south, and won't hesitate to ridicule the proceedings at Gulfstream when warranted. For example, here on their website we see that, on Sunday, from 11 - 2PM at Frank's Beach, you can play and party with none other than....er.....Spomgebob. So I see that Magna must be using the same proofreader for this website as the Breeders' Cup used for their signs. Nice work there Framk.