I sleep wrong one night and end up with a sore, gimpy leg for a week.

And yet Coney? ( Sleeps like this all the time! )

Also, for sagitare--I know you love his fangs, so here is a good yawn for you!

...here is Marty Robbins, singing a one of my childhood-favourite songs (and yes, it was on Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs)



Incidentally, if I ever do write a series of horsey mysteries I plan to use lines from cowboy songs for some of my titles. So one of them will surely be called They Haven't All Died.

"He had the nerve, and he had the blood
And there never was a horse like the Tennessee stud..."

When I was a kid I used to try to imagine what the horse looked like--"the colour of the sun" sounded like a palomino, but palominos are supposed to have dark eyes.

I have since decided the Tennessee stud was probably some shade of dun--I can't find a good picture right this minute, so just take this as evidence that some people think about horses too much...

...but she could stand to lose a little weight. This is a seven-year-old Fjord pony cross.

Crossed with what? A seal??





Look at the neck on her! I'd be afraid to work her for fear she had a heart attack...

(By the way--this little mare is, in fact, a dun. Although unlike some duns I have seen her eyes appear to be quite dark.)

While I'm thinking about duns, here is a link to Hollywood Dun It's Web site. Well, it's now a memorial site, since the handsome man passed on a couple of years ago.

Do take a look at the gallery. There are a bunch of pictures of him when he must have been quite the elderly gentleman, hanging out with his humans. A while back I posted a little rant about people who use horses and don't think of them as individuals. I suspect the McQuay family is not that type of people.



I never met Hollywood Dun It, but I have two funny stories to share. Back in 1989, when I was getting ready to attend a community college program about horse care and knew I would be learning to ride Western, someone loaned me some videos of the National Reining Horse Association Futurity from 1986. My mother and I watched them. The last horse out was a cropout filly named Sophie Oak, who beat the previous leader by a fraction to win. My mother knows nothing about horses, but she was quite sniffy about the result:

"I liked that big yellow horse that came second, the one the same colour as your uncle's mare. He did the best sliding stop things." He'd also been the first horse to go after the ring was dragged and we'd been astonished at how perfectly his footprints formed the pattern--his circles were deadly.

Years and years later, when a half-interest in Hollywood was sold to a syndicate for a million dollars, I put two and two together and called my mother. "Hey, Mum? Remember the time we watched the reining together and you liked the yellow horse? Well..."

My mother can pick 'em.

Second story: some Internet friends from a Quarter Horse email list once went on a tour of famous QH barns in Texas. When they visited McQuay Stables they actually got to meet Hollywood Dun It. One of the members of the group had an embarrassing fangirl moment and blurted out,

"He's so beautiful I could just kiss him on the nose!"

To which the famous stallion's famous owner replied,

"Go right ahead. He loves kisses."

I hope she got a picture of it.


Not the Tennessee Stud, but I think his friends would agree there never was a horse like...

I check YouTube periodically to see whether anyone's put up a Hollywood Dun It video yet.

Success!



Plus bonus footage of Smart Chic Olena, but that's Hollywood Dun It in the first half.

An article from a quarter horse site about roan and roan genetics.

(I apologize to all new friends for the number of messages today, and also for the punishing amount of horsey content. My journal isn't always like this.)

(No, wait. I think it is.)

(Except when Matt Mays does something new, I mean...)

...I will not turn this story into a joke about Okies:

Oklahoma man who was declared dead says he feels "pretty good"

Now, if he'd been an Aggie, I'd be making jokes (as a former employee of the University of Texas system, I claim it as my right). But even so, what a strange and scary and ultimately sorta funny story. I hope he continues to get better!