This afternoon, I made a small, unexpected but voluntary contribution to the Lexington street music scene. But the skeptic in me keeps wondering whether I was scammed socially engineered out of the price of a set of guitar strings, or whether I somehow luckily but unknowingly escaped from a more complicated, expensive con, or whether a somewhat unusual transaction was really no more than it appeared to be.

After several years of my four-legged population being fairly stable (no pun intended), the last couple of years have seen some turnover, some of which has been noted here and some hasn't. In the past 20 months, I've lost 3 dogs, acquired 3 dogs, and lost one horse. Since I'm killing time updating the blog today, I might as well fill in all the details.

The 2009-2010 foxhunting season ended with a very nice hunt on March 27, and I'm just now getting around to summarizing it here, not because my life has been filled with more exciting activities, but just because I've been lazy. (I still haven't gotten around to cleaning the mud off my boots from that last hunt).

This blog is still being sorely neglected, with only 2 entries so far this year. Since it's a rainy weekend, curtailing outdoor activities, I'm faced with the choice of cleaning house, watching inane Derby blather on TV (if my TV even still works, I haven't turned it on for months), or updating my blog. Housecleaning is probably the most sorely needed, but it's almost as distasteful as Derby idiocy, so here I am. Some of the updates probably deserve spinning off into separate articles, so today might see the article count for 2010 double.

Although Central Kentucky's recent bout of winter weather was somewhat puny compared to the DC area's recent Snowmageddon, it was not completely uneventful. And since I've had another extended spell of blogger's block, I might as well break the silence with an account of some of the minor adventures created by the snowfall.

Today I said Goodbye to Shadowfax after a 22-year relationship full of amusement and frustration. I often said that he didn't cost me an arm and leg, just a knee. He was an interesting horse, who probably had the potential to achieve much more than he did if he had better human handling. He was smart (sometimes too smart), athletic, and unlike many thoroughbreds, he had tough feet and was an easy keeper (unfortunately too easy, which contributed to his demise).

"Can you hear King now?". Almost four years ago, I wrote about a local Martin Luther King celebration in which the audience was asked that question repeatedly. The speaker, a pastor from Chicago named Jeremiah Wright, quoted extensively from King's 1967 Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence speech to support his suggestion that King would be as strongly opposed to the Iraq war as he was to the Vietnam war. "After 2,200 American boys and girls are dead in a war they do not understand," Wright said, "can you hear King now? I hope to God you can hear him so we can begin to live together as brothers and sisters before we all die together as fanatical fools." Since that speech, there have been some ironic twists in history.

Once again, a combination of stories in the local newspaper helps reinforce some of the worst stereotypes of the citizens of our beautiful Bluegrass state. To be fair, some of the idiocy is nationwide. But one story adds a unique Kentucky flavor to the mix.

Once again, I begin by apologetically mentioning the long hiatus between posts here. I suppose it's only fitting that I break the silence by musing about whether the silence has really been broken. If a blogger blogs on a deserted blog and nobody reads it, has he made a virtual sound? This musing about the impact of random ranting has been triggered by a couple of recent incidents, one widely publicized and one more obscure.

I've been neglecting this blog for a few months, for several reasons. I've been busy. I haven't had anything interesting to write. So I guess that means I've been busy with boring stuff. I've also been lured into Facebook as an alternative for online babbling. More on that later. I'll try to summarize events of the last few months that might be interesting.