So far we are up to 5 additions to CC\'s post whining about mine about my European trip. Without a hint of irony they:
Accuse me of not having a personal life (I was writing about a vacation in Europe).
Accuse me of obsessively stalking chat rooms used by persons who have no interest in me (unlike CC and the others, who read an account on THIS board about my VACATION, and felt driven to respond). I\'m running a business, so I monitor the competition-- what are you guys doing? Certainly not being obsessive-- nah.
Accuse me of \"namedropping my trip to Paris\". Huh?
Accuse me of being devoid of identity, and defining myself in terms of others. Okay, I\'ll play-- I\'m Victory Gallop, Da Hoss, Distorted Humor, Even The Score, and mostly Thoro-Graph, a company that took on a monopoly and now has almost half the market, and growing. And since you bring it up, I\'m Jerry Brown. You don\'t have identity problems, so who are you guys, and what are your accomplishments? At least Plever signs his name (and again, Steve, that was pretty funny).
I\'ll say it again. You can\'t make this stuff up.
Tomorrow, Friedman.
You left out Thunder Gulch.
I generally try to ignore Janis (Alydar, Hell-Hath-No-Fury, etc.). I try not to respond to his dozens of personal attacks (some calling me a liar), or his cracking the TG crime of the century every couple of weeks-- I\'m concerned that giving him my attention, which he so desperately craves, will reward his bad behavior, and encourage more of it. Well, this time he\'s discovered the missing 17 minute Watergate tape, in the form of TG employees and ex-employees posting here under pseudonyms. It\'s not clear what \"vouching\" is being done anonymously, and ex-employees owe me nothing and aren\'t being paid, so presumably they speak their minds like everyone else, and are entitled to their privacy.
But this does give me the opportunity to talk about someone I have finally coaxed out of the closet, one that HHNF called some names a couple of weeks ago after being spanked by that individual-- the one who posts here as Mandown, and who is currently on our payroll.
Mandown is a Brit, but he\'s okay. He also has a more significant resume in terms of this industry than all those who have posted on the Ragozin board combined, including Friedman. Doing business as George White, he edited The Weekender, the weekly British racing paper, in the 80\'s, and went on to become Managing Director at Sporting Life there. Assigned personally by (and reporting directly to) Robert Maxwell, George came to the U.S. to start up a racing newspaper, and to compete with Murdoch\'s DRF. That paper was The Racing Times, and its advent marked the end of the handicapping dark ages-- lots of things that never had seen the light of day in the Form (like speed figures) got full play in the Times, and lots of individuals who are now household names in this game (like Crist, Beyer, Watchmaker etc.) made their reputations there. George was the one that hired Steve Crist, and lots of others he hired have gone on to become important players at the Form and elsewhere in the industry.
It was George who started a data base by buying up the old Figs Form data base, thereby creating a parallel one to the DRF, and George who did the deal with Equibase to share the data, letting the industry own its own data for the first time-- and since the DRF has since shut down its own data collection, now using the Equibase one, it leaves the one George started as the only P.P. data base for American racing in the world.
Since the Times folded, George has been in semi-retirement, but has done an awful lot of important and groundbreaking work for us. George helped us broker the deal with Equibase to get an on-line feed of their data (we were their first customer). He set up our data base, and did it in such a way as to be flexible and most useful, in that we can easily ask it questions and do the groundbreaking studies you have seen, and others you will start seeing this weekend. He also does our programming, figuring out how to execute all my brilliant ideas, and coming up with some I haven\'t thought of, which isn\'t easy since I spend all my time thinking about this stuff. He also is the one who has implemented some of the ideas of Derby 1592, Catalin, and some of our other extremely smart clientele.
That\'s who Mandown is. So, who is Janis/Alydar ?
Well, he\'s a guy who got thrown off this site for bad behavior, a guy who recently posted that he had studied \"thousands\" of our sheets, from many circuits, to check on how we rounded off our quarter points.
When the Mets first started, Casey Stengel was asked about two of his players. \"That\'s Ron Hunt,\" he said. \"He\'s twenty years old, and in ten years he has a chance to be an all star. That guy over there is Rod Kanehl. He\'s also twenty years old, and in ten years he has a chance to be thirty\".
Guess which is which.
Where did it all go wrong?