They're Moving Father's Grave

The Clancy Brothers have all passed away. They were an Irish singing group, very popular in the 50s, 60s, and 70s who brought their brand of Irish song and humor to the United States from Ireland.

One of their ditties was, "They're Moving Father's Grave to Build a Sewer." Any type of song that skewers the upper class is always popular with working-class audiences, and this one was no exception. The lyrics started...

Oh, they're moving father's grave to build a sewer.
They're moving it regardless of expense.
They're moving his remains, to lay down nine-inch drains,
To irrigate some posh bloke's residence..."

I immediately started to think of this song when I read in Saturday's New York Times that they have already moved the horse Ruffian's remains from the infield of Belmont Park Race Track to Claiborne Farms in Paris, Kentucky where she was foaled.

Ruffian, if you're old enough to remember, shattered her left front ankle in a match race against Foolish Pleasure on July 6, 1975. Foolish Pleasure had won the Kentucky Derby and the match race gained traction as a female vs. male event.

The $350,000 match race was to be a mile and a quarter. In those does Belmont's mile and a quarter races started on the backstretch, literally cutting across on the training track, making the race the longest one-turn race you can imagine.. 

Ruffian was already a standout 3-year-old filly, having won 10 out of 10 races, 8 Graded Stakes and an allowance race after her 2-year-old maiden win by 15 lengths.  I remember reading a Sports Illustrated story on her when she made her debut that her trainer Frank Whiteley Jr. gave Jacinto Vasquez his instructions as he gave him his leg up: "Don't fuck up." Vasquez never did

The winning streak included the three races NYRA collectively called the Filly Triple Crown. These included the Acorn, the Mother Goose and the Coaching Club American Oaks, then run at a mile and a half. The three races are still run, but the Coaching Club's distance has shrunk to a mile and an eighth.

After being 4-1 in her debut, Ruffian's was so well-thought of that her odds couldn't be found with a tweezer. She was perpetually odds-on, with once being the lowest odds possible, 1-20 (5¢ on the dollar) in the Coaching Club on June 21, her last race before the match race with Foolish Pleasure.   

Nearly a half a mile into the match race Ruffian, ahead by a neck, had her ankle snap. She continued on for another 40 yards before stopping. The split for that half mile was :443/5, a suicidal pace for both horses for a mile and a quarter race. Of course, Foolish pleasure went on to win.

Overnight surgery to save Ruffian's leg was successful, but the horse on coming out of the anesthesia couldn't stand being in a cast. She thrashed her leg against the stall, further injuring herself, and leading to her being put down. Nothing further could be done. 

I wasn't at the track that day, and I don't remember if the race was even televised. It probably was, because even then feature races were carried on the local Channel 9.

I remember hearing about the race and the breakdown as it happened, and I remember that the sky just before the race had gotten grey and angry, threatening rain, possibly foretelling the tragedy. 

I knew they buried all of Ruffian in the infield at Belmont in a marked grave. I didn't remember it was all within two days of the tragedy. Usually, when a great horse is buried, they just buried the heart. Ruffian deserved more.

Unmentioned in the story about moving Ruffian's grave because Belmont is building a one mile synthetic track inside the inner turf course, along with other massive projects that for the second year running will not have racing come back to Belmont after Saratoga, but instead will be heading to Aqueduct for an even longer meet than usual, is that a horse named Timely Writer was also buried in the Belmont infield not far from Ruffian's grave.

Timely Writer suffered a leg injury running in the Jockey Club Gold Cup in October 1982 and had to be put down. He was buried one day after the incident, on a Sunday night, under a flag pole one half mile from the finish line. 

Timely Writer was not as famous a horse as Ruffian by any means, but did get the honor of a Belmont infield burial. My guess is he might have been moved years ago. Maybe, maybe not.

The movement of Ruffian's remains to Claiborne Farm is not a sacrilegious move, but still strikes me as certainly unexpected and leaves her recognition in New York incomplete, or even erased. Many great horses are buried at Claiborne's Marchmont Cemetery, including Secretariat, who didn't suffer any career-ending injury, but who stood stud at Claiborne, passing away at the somewhat young age of 19 from laminitis. 

We were at Belmont this year and you could see that the infield looks like they're building a major highway, with earth movers everywhere. They held the Belmont Stakes there this year, but won't be back until the place is refurbished in 2024, hopefully in time for the Belmont Stakes. We'll see.

Belmont was in need for some much needed infrastructure, creature comfort improvements, especially since NYRA is anxious to get the Breeders' Cup back again one year. We'll see.

I had heard a synthetic track was planned, but didn't know where it would be. Belmont at a mile and a half is the largest track in North America, can easily fit a one mile oval inside the second turf course. Hopefully it will be inside the inner turf course, and the inner turf won't be sacrificed. The inner turf course is 13/16 miles around.

Uses for the synthetic course? Long rumored is that all-weather Aqueduct will eventually go, and Belmont will be winterized. A synthetic one mile oval could introduce winter racing to Belmont, along with the possibility of harness racing. There hasn't been harness racing on Long Island since Roosevelt Raceway was closed decades ago.

The story in Saturday's NYT by Eduardo Medina quotes NYRA as saying of Claiborne's Marchmont Cemetery as a final resting place for Ruffian that it is a resting a place of "numerous legends of the sport,"  and a location that "will dramatically expand public access to her gravesite in contrast to Belmont Park, where Ruffian's site was clearly visible from the grandstand but inaccessible to fans."

Well, if they start to allow infield access, then her gravesite wouldn't be "inaccessible to fans," would it? And what's wrong with seeing her gravesite from the stands where perhaps 55,000 or more will watch the Belmont Stakes?

I don't know if all the plans are finalized, and that perhaps a statue of Ruffian is planned for somewhere on the grounds at Belmont. Goodness knows, statues of all kind abound at ball parks and at race tracks. I remember an old photo of a stuffed Phar Lap, the great Australian horse, that was on display in the paddock at Belmont for a while.

But if Ruffian's remains were disturbed for a harness track, then listen to the some more of the Clancy Brothers' lyrics.

"What's the sense of having a religion?
If when you're dead you cannot get some peace.
'Cause some society chap wants a pipeline to his privy,
And moves you from your place of rest and peace..."

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Pre...Fill In the Rest

Humana is currently running an ad for their health care that is taking a somewhat different tack of advertising themselves by not showing a flock of happy, healthy people playing pickle ball, hiking mountains, or swimming across channels. They're trying to be realistic about health. You might need insurance for a health event. Well, yeah.

They show someone who quite seriously is telling you the virtues of being with Humana because they're "pre-diabetic." I don't know what this is, but I'm convinced that having been born I'm at an increased chance of "pre-death." Pete Hamill put it succinctly: Life is the leading cause of death.

There is a TV ad that shows a woman going into a pharmacy for a shot of something because she's afraid of her chances of getting pneumococcal pneumonia and winding up spending days in the hospital hoping that the other patient in the room will ever stop watching Steve Harvey, even with their headphones on. She tells us she's at risk. No shit sister. We've all got a chance of that one, and probably not a very big chance unless you're working in a biological weapons lab. But go ahead, sell that one.

Humana, or any other health insurer, is not going to show you actually using the insurance for a serious medical event. That's too scary.

They're not going to show you with your leg bandaged up and hoisted up in the air in a hospital; they're not going to show you getting dialysis, or infusion therapy for cancer. No, those events are too scary to depict. You'll just rationalize them away because you feel they can't happen to you. They're going to dance around a village square and tell you how you can control your A1-C levels instead.

I take several medications for past ailments that required some serious medical attention. I worry that none of the medications I take is being hustled on the evening news. I wonder if I just wasn't sick enough, or maybe my medical providers are deaf to different drugs. I feel good, for which I should probably feel guilty with so many people seemingly in need of all the other medicines being hawked by Big Pharma.

The one good thing about the evening news is that Jeopardy follows.

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Overlooked No More

The 'Overlooked No More' obituary feature of the NYT is one of the most interesting features that highlights obituary writing. By selecting a subject, man or woman, who passed away decades ago—often many decades ago—whose passing wasn't thought much of then, if it was thought of at all, and in effect now writing the obituary they might have received, the NYT editors have filled in some history that until now has been long forgotten.

Like any obituary, these pieces are always interesting, and like anything else, some pieces have more resonance than others. To date, the most recent one about Back Number Budd, to me is very interesting. It almost solves what to me was a bit of mystery as to how did the 18th Street side of the a

window of Pete's Tavern in the early 1960s display the front page of a very yellow, faded front page of a newspaper announcing, in a very large headline, the assassination of president Abraham Lincoln?   

Since Pete's Tavern has been in the same location since 1864, and Lincoln was killed in 1865, it is possible that the owners of the Tavern pasted the front page to the window the day after the assassination, and it remained there for nearly 100 years when I first saw it in the very early 1960s. We'll never really know.

Or, did the owners at some point after the assassination feel the need to establish how long they've been in business, and at some point in the latter part of the 1800s buy a copy of a front page from April 16, 1865 from Back Number Budd? Who? Back Number Budd, the subject of the latest 'Overlooked No More' installments.

Back Number Budd was Robert M. Budd, an enterprising Black man who saw a market as a teen-ager in selling back issues of newspapers to Union soldiers during the Civil War. It seems the need to scratch the itch of nostalgia is not confined to any era. And when a soldier wanted to read about a past battle he might have been in, Back Number Budd was there to sell what perhaps had originally been a 3¢ copy of a newspaper for $3.

He grew up in Washington D.C. and after the war he worked at a Philadelphia newsstand, and later came to New York to open his own newsstand in the early 1880s in Greeley Square in Manhattan. 

Greeley Square is a triangular park nestled between 32nd and 33rd Streets, bordered by Broadway and 6th Avenue. It sits south of the more well-know Herald Square on the northside of 34th Street, made more recognizable to people these days as being where Macy's department store is and where the Thanksgiving Day parade ends. A large statue of a seated Horace Greeley is in the park that no one really looks at. Greeley was of course the founder and the editor of the New-York Tribune.

How appropriate. The newspaper publishers of the day had moved uptown from Printing House Square downtown by City Hall and the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Herald Square was where The New York Herald had moved, published by the founder and editor James Gordon Bennett.

Interesting to note that the obituary describes Budd's place at Greeley Square has having a gaslit basement where he stored his papers, an inventory that would eventually reach 2 million copies. A subway line and PATH trains are under Greeley Square now. There is still a street level newsstand at these entrances.

Back Number Budd was eventually forced to move from Greeley Square because of rent increases. Gentrification is not confined to any era. His inventory eventually reached over 6 million copies. Warehouses he rented just over the East River in Queens suffered fires, and much of Budd's inventory was lost. He was however still in business until he passed away at 81 in 1933. 

There is no mention where his newspapers went after his demise. They were probably scooped by the New York public library, or some such entity.

So, did the owners of Pete's Tavern get their Lincoln assassinated front page from Back Number Budd? As anyone who might have a decent memory from reading these postings knows, my grandfather's flower shop occupied the front of Pete's Tavern when it was a speakeasy during Prohibition. The first 8 feet or so of the store was the Royal Flower Shop, then the speakeasy entrance was behind the refrigerator that everyone knew about. Apparently, the Royal Flower Shop wasn't the only flower shop of that era to act as a front. Flower shops for some reason were favorite fronts for speakeasies.

My father used to tell me he would come into the flower shop after grammar school, get up on a stool and wind the huge regulator clock that is just to the left of the entrance. The clock is still there, but it's been cannibalized by an unscrupulous repairman and hasn't worked for decades. At least that's what the current owners tell me whenever I stop by, which these days isn't often.

After prohibition the flower shop moved to 202 Third Avenue, one block east of Irving Place and 18th Street where Pete's was, and still is.

That shop was at 202—and my first memory of the family business—until 1956 when it moved from the southwest corner of 18th and Third to the northwest corner at 206 Third Avenue, where ii remained in the family until 1975 or so. It remained a flower shop for a while, but is now come sort of coffee café. (Not a Starbucks.)

I save newspaper clippings, and sometimes whole papers, but I'll never be a Back Number Budd. And I know my wife has her eye on some boxes that she knows I'll never get to again. Fire is not likely to be the cause of any inventory loss. It will be my wife.

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Back from Saratoga

There are many things in life that can make you happy, and I'm not here to try and list them. But when you go to the track, particularly Saratoga, there are two things that can make you smile. Winning races, and making money. And that's just what happened over a four day stint at the Spa.

Getting to Saratoga is not particularly hard. But when you compare it to just turning TV on and making a bet, you begin to realize how many steps it is taking to getting that starting voucher and making your first bet, especially when you arrive in the area the day before Wednesday's start.

There's Tuesday dinner; there's Wednesday's breakfast, generally after a bit of a wait at the diner; then there's the parking at the free NYRA parking area off Henning Road; then there's the ride on the courtesy bus to an entrance to have your tickets scanned from your phone; then there's getting to your preferred seating in the Fourstardave sports bar, and then you're finally ready to make use of the handicapping you did the night before.

And when that handicapping tells you to bet a Davis family exacta in the first race, coupling Katie Davis and her brother Dylan Davis on Bernietakescharge and Run For Your Money respectively in a state-bred maiden special weight race, and then watching Katie taking Bernie all the way on the rail, coming back in the stretch when headed slightly by Once an Eagle who faded to third, while brother Dylan guided Run for You Money just ahead of Once an Eagle, you can collect a $39.80 exacta for $2.

There is no bigger, nicer, brighter smile than that of Katie Davis in the winner's circle, and no better feeling than hitting your first bet at Saratoga on your first day there. You're pretty much bullet proof then.

The second day at the Spa was even better than the first, but then a glitch was hit when the track came up muddy for Friday, with everything naturally off the turf. When forced to attend the races with a less than fast track, the betting is reined in. Never done well on an off track day.

A good day at the track doesn't necessarily mean another good day. And a bad day doesn't mean the next day is going to be a bad day. Races are mutually exclusive events.

So Saturday dawns with a fast track and three races still remaining on the turf. It's the Grade I Alabama, a 1¼ race for three-year-old fillies. It's the distaff version of the Travers. Champions emerge from here. We were here for this race in prior years.

We start to achieve some traction after a few races, and it looks like it's going to be a decent day. Johnny M. and I move from the Clubhouse reserved seats because seating at Saratoga is cramped when people fill up the aisle. We were in section E, row K, next to last row, and it's almost gloomy back there. It's hard to read in the dim light, even though it's bright and sunny out. Is that a six, eight or a zero in the Form? (I couldn't get the seating we prefer in the Fourstardave.)

Standing wasn't so bad, and we were able to plop on as bench that didn't have someone's clothing on it every so often. The handicapping number I use from my own rating "system" were screaming Wet Paint and Randomized as a solid exacta for the Alabama.

Wet Paint was easy to envision, being the favorite with a flock of stakes races and Graded Stake victories, notably the Grade I Coaching Club American Oaks at Saratoga on July 22nd.  Randomized? Very lightly raced with only four starts, the last of which was a victory, at Saratoga, on July 14 in the Wilton, a $125,000 Black Type Restricted race in which she ran a  97 Beyer in winning  a mile race, wire-to-wire, in what was only a four horse field.

Randomized broke its maiden in her second start, always a good sign, but after a short layoff came up a cropper in the Grade I Acorn at Belmont Park June 9th. Then came the blowout performance in The Wilton, but can that result be trusted against only three other horses?

The connections are golden: Klaravich stable, Chad Brown trainer, Joel Rosario in the saddle. The oddsmaker sees potential in making her a 9/2 morning line choice. 

A recent win over the track is always a great handicapping angle, and Radomized had it with that July 14th win. There were other horses in the field who had won at Saratoga, but not lately. And the 97 Beyer was the best last race Beyer in the field. 

A 1¼ race, dirt or turf, is a taxing distance for American horses. The distance is seldom run except in the top Classic races, like the Kentucky Derby and Breeders' Cup Classic. Does a lightly raced, front-running horse have what it takes to win a 1¼ races against the best competition?

The public doesn't think so. The 9/2 morning line has drifted up to 7-1, with Wet Paint holding onto favoritism at 19/10, just under 2-1.

But the personal handicapping numbers tell us go. There isn't anyone in the field who comes close to those two with the numbers.

So what happens? Rosario, to what should have been no one's surprise, takes the lead, and sets decent but hardly suicidal fractions, going the mile in `1:371/5 .

Taking the lead in two-turn route races is often the best tactical way to win—at any track. We've seen it happen all too often, so there is no worry about what Rosario is doing. Who will come out on top? Will Randomized hold and go wire-to-wire? Will Defining Purpose hold second and ruin our exacta? Will Wet Paint get in there and Randomized tire? The saver bet is Wet Paint to win.

The distance is taxing, and the field spreads out like a drop cloth. Into the stretch, Randomized is looking solid, but Defining Purpose is holding second—holding that is until she gets extremely leg weary and starts to drift, a sure sign of a tired horse.

Wet Paint is not going to catch Randomized, but she is going to come up on the rail and pass the badly tiring Defining Purpose and take second. Exacta! The way you like them, longest price first.

We were expecting an exacta payoff of $50 because the possibilities showed that, but that was several minutes before the betting closed.  A general rule of thumb is that the exacta will pay the win price of the first horse multiplied by the place price of the second horse. Based on this rule of thumb, the exacta should pay in the vicinity of nearly $60.

Nope. We collected only $33.80 for $2, still decent, but a little short of our expectations. Skullduggery? Hardly, the rule of thumb is only just that. Obviously, right before post time a coterie of well-heeled high rollers pumped money in on that exacta combination, thereby shortening the payout when the payouts were computed. It happens.

No one ever has to be asked to smile in the winner's circle, and as Chad Brown led Randomized in from the track, his smile was as megawatt as a Katie Davis grin.

Despite the unexpected shorter payoff, so was ours.

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Reading

That I like to read is no secret. Newspapers especially, and I've always got at least one book in progress on the nightstand. After headlines and subheadings I skip over a lot of things in the newspapers, but I pretty much always read the book reviews in the Monday through Friday Wall Street Journal. I like the WSJ reviews because they are usually not about novels. Leave that to the NYT.

Anyone familiar with daily WSJ book reviews knows they can always be found in the same part of the paper; first section, right hand page before the editorials. I go there right after the front page A-Hed piece.

Monday's book review carried a piece about "Anansi's Gold" by Yepoka Yeebo. The review is by Frank Gannon who was an assistant to the president in the Nixon White House. This has no bearing on the content, but it probably means Frank and I remember the same presidents.

Anansi's Gold is about a consummate con man John Blay-Miezah, who in the mid-1970s was living very well promising people he knew where secreted Ghanaian gold was located in a Swiss bank, he having been at the deathbed of the dying first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, who confirmed to his ears that there was a boatload of cash, diamonds and 30,000 gold bars plundered from the country sitting in a Swiss bank. The dying president gave John Blay the account numbers and passwords he would need to claim the money.

John Blay, not wanting to keep this all to himself—what fun would that be?—offered partnership shares to whomever would listen to him and put up some money so John Blay could retrieve the booty. 

John Blay travelled in rarefied circles, and no less than Shirley Temple Black, (Yes, Good Ship Lollipop Shirley Temple.) the U.S. ambassador to Ghana saw through him and tried to warn others, notably in a 1975 cable to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that John Blay was a fraud.

It is not always a bridge someone is trying to sell you. And even if isn't true that a sucker is born every minute, it is true you may not have to look for long to find one. (And certainly more than one.)

It's a great tale, with the name Anansi coming from the author Yepoka Yeebo comparing John Blay to the mythical Ghanaian trickster.

Enter the former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, who Frank Gannon describes as being "on his uppers" after release from prison in 1979 who could be counted as one of the many who were hoodwinked.

On his what? His "uppers?" What the hell are they?

Anyone approaching my age will remember the famously long trial in a New York Federal court of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, the Commerce Secretary, two of the many people caught up in the Watergate scandal vortex. That trial had legs. Our outgoing mail supervisor was on the jury and pretty much disappeared from his family's life and our workplace during that trial. After a ten week trial and an acquittal, our outgoing mail supervisor's dog probably didn't know him.

In another trial for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury, John Mitchell was convicted in 1975, entered prison in 1977 and was released in 1979. Legal defense costs money, even when you lose. No doubt Mr. Mitchell had trouble rubbing two nickels together after all this.

Having to look up the phrase "on his uppers", I found it apparently means someone who is broke, pitifully broke, walking around in shoes so worn that the only thing left to them are "the uppers."

It will remain to be seen if this phrase will someday apply to a former president.

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The Repairman...The Technician

I was born at the end of the 1940s. As such, there was always a TV in the house, a large, round picture tube encased in a nice piece of furniture, kept out of sight if the unit's two doors were closed, visible if the brass hardware, hinged handles were pulled on and the doors were opened.

I have no idea if my parents bought the TV new. New was not their thing. When I was born, I was probably the newest thing they had. Most everything else in the house came from someone else.

The TV was always there. I don't remember it being delivered and a fuss made over its arrival. I seemed to be the only one who watched it. I was an only child, and I can never remember my mother or father sitting down and watching it. It was of course a black and white set. (We never had a color set until 1968 when I added a Zenith set to the household in 1968.)

The set worked. Most of the time, until of course when it didn't. TVs of that era were powered by vacuum tubes that had an amber glow. These tubes eventually burned out and needed replacing. This was accomplished by a TV repairman coming to the house, opening the back of the set and removing the perforated hardboard that kept you away from the tubes.

The back of the set warned you not to go there. It was labeled HIGH VOLTAGE. The repairman moved the unit away from the wall, got on his knees and did some things, holding a mirror in one hand in front of the set while he fiddled with things in the back with his other hand. (It paid to flexible.) It generally fell to me to tell him how he was making out.

You NEVER wanted to hear that the picture tube was "gone." This was guaranteed to cost mucho dinero and probably meant the end of life as you knew it. Nearly equally as bad was to hear, "the set has got to go back to the shop."

This surely meant you weren't going to have TV for probably at least a week. No Lone Ranger for you. No Superman either. The repairman pulled the guts of the set out of the back and left the house with it. It was not fun to watch.

My wife's uncle was a TV repairman in the 1950s and 60s in Freehold, New Jersey. He would tell anyone who would listen that his knees were shot from being on them so much as he repaired sets. Later of course you would learn this was "housemaids" knees or inflamed bursas. An occupational hazard of all TV repairmen.

If the adult male of the house was really adventurous they might look at the back of set, see which tubes were not lit, and go to a hardware, or TV store and buy replacements. This was not something my father did. I don't remember any neighbors bragging that they fixed their own TV.

It's taken a while, but TVs have almost been replaced by computers and their display screens. Not quite completely of course, because they are plenty of big, wide screen TVs that people have, generally mounted on a wall in the living room or family room. What has changed is that no one expects to have these sets fixed if they konk out. Even if there is an extended warranty, you can pretty much bet that the set will konk out after the warranty expires. When this happens, P.C. Richards, Best Buy, or some other TV vendor will be very glad to steer you to a new and more top-of-the-line set. Because no matter how long you've had your TV, there is always a better set for sale.

And when the desktop computer goes, what next? An automatic new one if hours spent on a help line haven't resolved the issue? Not necessarily.

Somehow, with wisdom I didn't think I had, I must have extended whatever warranty that came with the Dell computer I bought perhaps 4-5 years ago. It has served me well, until it decided not to this past Friday.

Time was spent with the support service I also must have bought. The upshot was there was something going on with the hardware. The computer wouldn't stay on. I was hearing the word "motherboard" as  probable cause. In a computer, that sounds like the picture tube has gone. Start spading the earth.

Discussion followed that gave me the alternative of waiting for Dell to ship me a prepaid shipping box, placing the tower in the box, and sending the computer in effect, "back to the shop."

It's been decades, and I really never thought I was going to hear that again. Anything else we can do? We can have a technician come onsite and try and fix it. You mean, come to the house? How much is that going to cost? Well, since you have the extended warranty, nothing. Let's do that. And since it was Friday, the earliest someone can come out is Monday. Works for me.  

(Over the weekend I caught up on all the newspapers I hadn't fully read. I think I've said this before: reading a newspaper several days, and perhaps several weeks after the date it was printed makes reading go much faster. The U.S. women's soccer team has by now lost. I don't need to read how they should be able win if they do certain things. Certain players did not stay on the Mets roster. Trump did get indicted. Again. No use speculating if he would.)

And out they came. They did replace the motherboard, but that may not have been the reason for the failure. Still not staying on. The technician left after ordering parts for Tuesday. And out they came on Tuesday; both times right in the widow they said they would. Updates sent to my phone. It's a new world.

Success this time. Up and running, but with another visit coming tomorrow to replace the power switch which the technician was not happy with. It doesn't light as it should, and it feels mushy. Fine with me. Come on back. I'm always here.

After all these years, it's still good to have the screen in front of me working.

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Heads Up

The following are some headstone inscriptions I'd like to see.

----------------------------------------

I DID WHAT YOU ASKED ME TO DO  

SATISFIED?

ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?

WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?

I DO NOT LIKE THIS VIEW

I DID NOT AGREE TO THIS

CAN I GET A SECOND OPINION?

YOUR TURN WILL COME

IT IS TOO LATE FOR THAT PHYSICAL?

I'M GOING TO GET EVEN DESPITE THIS

CAN WE TALK?

SO YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

NOW YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME

I THINK THERE'S BEEN A MISTAKE

IT WAS FAR MORE DANGEROUS THAN IT LOOKED

I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN

I GOT MOST THINGS RIGHT

I'M NOT AT ALL HAPPY ABOUT THIS

I'D LIKE A SECOND OPINION

HOW ABOUT A DO OVER?

THIS DIDN'T REALLY HAPPEN, DID IT?

I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK

I'LL GLADLY TRADE PLACES WITH YOU

NOT EXACTLY WHAT I HAD IN MIND

--------------------------------------------

You can keep adding to this list until...

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