… Or should I say, “basketball, basketball, basketball”?

Last summer and fall, in the lead-up to the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, I offered occasional posts about things going on here in Lexington; these were usually related to horses, the WEG, local food & restaurants, or basketball. (You might think that about all we do here in Lexington is eat good food, watch horses, and watch basketball. You might be right.)

If you’ve missed these sorts of posts, today’s should help fill the void.

In order to keep up with the challenge of posting something here every day, I try to prepare weekend posts during the week and schedule them to go up on Saturday and Sunday. I didn’t quite make it that far this week, and so I’m writing this on Saturday.

Because I don’t have Internet access at home, I’m sitting in a lovely corner of the delightful Cuppa: A Tea Café on Jefferson Street. They have sandwiches, homemade scones, coffee drinks, and a huge array of black, green, and white teas. You can drink your tea by the mug, or by the (small or large) pot. If you go the teapot route, you even get to pick out your own teacup and saucer from the china cabinets in each room.

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I don't have any photos of my food today, but this is the corner of Cuppa that I'm looking at as I drink my green earl grey tea

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Outside the window is a fairly steady stream of basketball fans, walking to and fro. I can’t tell, of course, where each group is headed, but there are several options: the state high school basketball championship games are all day and into the night at Rupp Arena (just down the street), and there’s a great pizza joint down the street in the other direction — and a pub across the street from that — with TVs that I’m sure are showing the UK game. As I write this, the Kentucky Wildcats are playing a close game against West Virginia in the second round of the NCAA Championships. Go Cats!!

Having now caught you up briefly on two of our three main interests here in Lexington, we’ll head back to the third on Monday: horses, of course.

If you’re an admirer of horses, you’ve no doubt seen at least one (or several) of Robert Vavra’s photographs or books. He has an uncanny ability to take photos that look like something out of a fairy tale, or a dream.

If you are a fan of Robert Vavra’s photos, and if you’ll be in or near the Kentucky Horse Park before the end of May, you may want to stop and see the new exhibit at the KHP’s International Museum of the Horse. The exhibit, which opens today, is the first major retrospective of Vavra’s work.

Our local newspaper had an article on Friday about the exhibit and the artist. To read the full story and to see a couple of images from the exhibit, click here.

On Wednesday, I went to a reception at the KHP’s International Museum of Horse, to welcome Big Lex to his new home.

Who’s Big Lex, you ask?

Well, he’s the mascot of our fair city: a bright blue (what we here know as UK blue) horse, based on a painting of the famous nineteenth-century racehorse named Lexington.

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this is the, um, modified version of Edward Troye's painting of the racehorse named Lexington; in this version, he's Wildcat blue instead of bay

 

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Lexington the horse, bred and born near Lexington the city, won six of his seven starts. That doesn’t sound like much today, but many of his races were four miles long!

He went on to a successful stud career and was named Leading Sire in North America sixteen times.

According to Wikipedia: “Lexington was part of the first group of horses inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1955. Not so long ago, Lexington was so forgotten that on a fourth-floor attic catwalk of the Smithsonial Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, [Lexington] was listed simply as Catalog No. 16020. On Tuesday, August 31st, 2010, Lexington’s remains were transferred to the International Museum of the Horse at the Kentucky Horse Park.”

Wednesday, it was Big Lex’s turn to come home. Although he didn’t start out being quite so far away.

During last fall’s Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, a fiberglass horse painted to look like the one pictured above stood patiently in the media tent. Here, after every medal press conference, he was signed by medal winners. At Wednesday’s reception, several people said that he was signed only by gold-medal winners (and, truth be told, the number of signatures gracing his blue coat would appear to bear that out), but I know for a fact that the silver-medal-winning drivers signed Big Lex as well.

Besides the gold-medalists (and our U.S. driving team), the other signatures on the horse are those of Princess Haya (FEI president), Lyle Lovett (who owns one of the reining horses that competed at the WEG), and William Shatner (who lives near here and performed in the Opening Ceremony).

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Big Lex, in his new museum home, showing off for the TV news cameramen

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signatures on Big Lex's offside rump; you can see some reiners' signatures (and their horses' names) and Lyle Lovett's signature on the right

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more signatures here; that signature to the left of the lower left corner of the vaulting pictogram (on the underside of the neck) is Tucker Johnson's (he won the team silver and individual bronze medals in driving)

This has nothing to do with horses or horse-drawn vehicles … or with much of anything, really. But I couldn’t resist.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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Yesterday’s funny video (an old Budweiser Clydesdale commercial) prompted Nancy to send a link to this amusing dressage pas de deux.

Enjoy!

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Tomorrow, we’ll have one more funny video, and then we’ll get back to carriage- and driving-related things.