In writing the piece about Joe Palmer that went up today, I was tempted to include a lot more of his writing. As it is, the review is imbalanced in his favor, but the way I figure it, it’s better to read him than me. But I wanted to share just two other brief excerpts (of many) that didn’t make it into the final version:

“In Australia practically everybody goes to the races,” said the visitor to our shores. “And they drink. Those are the two principal pastimes.”

Well, it seemed that the Australians were well grounded in the fundamentals. With an encyclopedia to guide them they could not have picked amusements on which time had bestowed a greater accolade. The Greeks did both around the funeral pyre of Achilles. There had been instances since.

And this about someone whose job at Saratoga was to keep ducks out of a pool in front of a steeplechase jump:

Don’t know if you ever tried to shoo a duck out of water, but unless you wade, the duck has all the best of it. . . . The man who handled this has probably been snatched to glory by this time and is betting now on which constellations smash first, and the ducks were no doubt eaten by stable hands, since this was in the ’30s, when times were not so good and any fowl within three miles of a race track held its life by no very certain tenure.