Phthursday Musings: Let's Horse Around

Musings have been a little lax around here the last few weeks. I am pleased to report that this is indicative of some other exciting things happening, which will be shared over the next couple of weeks.

I am also pleased to report that, thanks to a suggestion from intrepid reader Thorest, one of the more flippant ideas I’ve had in recent times actually came true tonight, as I ambled over to Kinslagher Brewing in Oak Park for a book swap event hosted by The Pile Bookstore. The setup is smart, take a small taproom and have a small number of people come and mingle and trade off books. I wound up with a rom-com novel called Wedding Dashers because I was under directive to find something “light” and the book about the Oregon Trail seemed a little… perilous.

I’d like to tell you that I have a lot of great content to share. Well, I DO. Now see here:

A few weeks ago in a chat the topic of CBS television programming came up and the assertion was made that such programming is mostly "procedural copaganda/legal dramas and horse shows that old people could fall asleep to". Naturally, I asked:

Horse shows?

And I thought:

Two and a Half Horses…

Two Broke Horses…

NCIS: Horse.

But then I had the real epiphany, and I am actively soliciting you, television-oriented reader, to help me develop the greatest television show ever:

Mr. Fed.

Mr. Fed is of course a talking horse, just like Mr. Ed. And, he is also a federal agent.

Mr. Fed of course has a trusty sidekick, Wilmer Valderrama, probably played by Wilmer Valderrama. Wilmer is also a federal agent. He and Mr. Fed drive around the country in a state of the art horse trailer full of strange computer screens, not unlike the trailer that took Michael Knight and KITT around the country in Knight Rider. Oh, and, Mr. Fed isn’t just a talking horse, he’s also slightly bionic. He wears a visor that looks just like Geordi LaForge’s, except that, like KITT, there’s a red light that scrolls back and forth along the visor. This means that Mr. Fed can not just speak, but can also see better than any horse has ever seen before.

There is of course a big screen in the horse trailer which connects Mr. Fed and Wilmer directly to the FBI Director, portrayed by J.K. Simmons, who is constantly flustered. Wilmer tries desperately to please the Director, but is not helped by Mr. Fed, who is constantly cracking dad jokes about horses. To wit:

As you’ve all figured out, this is the best idea ever, it just needs some bulk, probably some financing. Also, a horse. It needs a horse.

(Apologies to everyone whose ideas I may have incorporated here without crediting you but I figure you probably don’t want the credit here anyway…)

This naturally brings us to our Phthursday Flag, that of Lubs’ke, Ukraine:

Lubs’ke (Лубське in Cyrillic script) is a small place in Kyiv Oblast. A very small place. How small? Well, Wikipedia is confused, claiming a population of 45 people, from 132 households, but then separately claiming a population of 53. Many questions are hereby begged, but surely this is the most pertinent question: How does it have its own flag?

According to the website heraldry.com.ua the answer is that the flag was “confirmed by the decision of village council session”. Look, I’m not here to dispute the information that’s provided. I’m merely here to speculate on all of the information that’s not provided.

Here is where I was going to find a common Ukrainian surname and speculate as to how a person with that name might be both a village councilor in Lubs’ke and also a real Philip, if you know what I mean. Say, I’d invent a character named Pylyp Kravchenko, and tell you about his famous white horse, who would have to be named Murph.

Instead I stumbled upon a Wikipedia page about Ukrainian surnames where it offers what it claims are “Cossack names” and offers as some examples:

And look, that’s not an exhaustive list. The reason I stumbled upon this is because of the entry for Kandyba, meaning useless (crippled) horse.

Again: I’m not here to dispute the information that’s provided.

Anyway, somebody, let’s call him Pylyp Uvorvykyshky, must have come up with the flag of Lubs’ke. We’ll speculate that the green represents the free land the horse runs across, and that the yellow represents banush, a “velvety Ukrainian corn porridge”, which is probably Pylyp’s favorite food, and why not, it looks delicious, if you leave off the pork rind:

Lest anyone think that my tone seems off, please note that I hail from the upper Midwest, where one of the closest things we have to an indigenous cultural meal is the Maid-Rite loose meat sandwich. My point here is that we have no idea whatsoever what the deal is with the white horse on the green background with the yellow band at the bottom, why a hamlet in the countryside of Kyiv Oblast has such an indeterminate number of residents, or much of anything else really, and therefore we’re left to speculate wildly.

If it’s helpful - and really, what has all this been if not helpful - Lubs’ke seems to be in a part of the Ukrainian countryside where there are a lot of home rentals? It’s very close to Sosnivka in Lviv Oblast and, well, if we really want to go down the squirrel hole, this is the flag of Sosnivka:

This is all a bit too much though and is probably fodder for another day…

I would like to clarify something.

Mr. Fed is not really the horse’s given name, but it is close. His name is actually Federico. He is an Andalusian horse, see. An immigrant!

What I haven’t quite unpacked yet is how exactly a talking horse sporting a visor with a scrolling red light is ever supposed to go undercover, but really, this is a very minor detail.

Since this has devolved to a series of horse stories, this seems a fine time to mention Horse Stories, the second album from the Dirty Three, those legendary Australians who just so happen to be going on a U.S. tour this spring for the first time in 3954 years.

It’s easy to imagine having gone down a Ukrainian red squirrel hole earlier in my life and having gotten completely subsumed by the music of the Dirty Three. There were, I suppose, some other bands in the 90s who were sort of in the same realm - purely instrumental, often sweeping and epic in sound, each song feeling like the soundtrack to a miniature film.

A lot of music I like is music which can accompany other activities, like exercising, or, would you believe, writing Phthursday Musings. Dirty Three albums are not so much like that. They tend to demand focus and attention, and over time, as it’s been harder to focus and attend, I suppose I’ve listened less often. But when the spirit hits and I listen repeatedly, they are probably one of my ten all-time favorite bands, and I am very excited about seeing them in April.

And so I was pleased tonight to find that someone decided to make a video of “Horse” with… just a picture of a horse:

Here is a thing though. There’s a lot of music I’ve listened to over time where, when I’ve gotten into a place where I listen to a lot of it, it’s sort of reflective of / reinforcing of what I think I have to describe as a sweet sadness… a blue period, maybe, and the thing is that a lot of how I am these days really leans away from blue periods. Back when I would have blue periods I wasn’t doing things like exercising daily, and even though I literally have a playlist called “sad sack shit”, that’s not really what my blue playlist would be. I mean, I don’t think I could spend 25 minutes on a treadmill listening to a weeping violin. (For what it’s worth, I don’t know that most people could handle 25 minutes of this stuff under any circumstances…)

Look, this stuff is dramedy gold… I’m just pretty sure I need someone with some cinematography experience to help me pull it off. Also with some horse experience.

Down in Kentucky, they actually name roads and other things after horses. There’s a big multilane loop around Lexington called Man o’ War Boulevard and it’s not exactly named after a jellyfish.

I think the mistake they’ve made is that they haven’t just gone all in, kind of like how if you go down to Atlanta there’s 71 different streets with “Peachtree” in the name. (Not joking there. Look it up.) I think they should change the name of every street to something horse related.

Y’all take a left on Nag Street, ride it nine furloughs until you get to Jenny Lane. Hang a right, stride along and take another right at Black Beauty Avenue. Glide past the haberdashery and it’ll be on your left. Can’t miss it.

Look, I can take this joke a lot farther, but I’m going to let you run with it yourselves. Draw your own map of Harrodsburg replacing the name of every street with something horse related and send it in and I’ll share it with everyone!

I would probably be remiss at this point to not mention that Band of Horses is also on tour and ever since learning that Archers of Loaf bassist Matt Gentling is now in Band of Horses I’ve thought oh gee maybe I should get out there and see them right? Right.

So I figure that Mr. Fed and Wilmer can only be sent on very special assignments. In my mind Mr. Fed, for all of his wisecracking, is also a bit like Vincent D’Onofrio’s character from Law and Order: Criminal Intent where he takes some strange clue and pieces together some wild tale and eventually the criminal is like, oh you understand me, talking horse, so I’ll tell you everything. Wilmer, well, I haven’t really figured out exactly what Wilmer does besides take care of Mr. Fed, and also be kind of the hunk of the operation, not that Mr. Fed can’t impress a filly or two!

I had been thinking that the Director would be kind of like Colonel K from Danger Mouse but maybe he should be more like Chief Quimby from Inspector Gadget? Though I’m not really sure why he would need to personally deliver notes to a horse. I think it’s best to just let him stay in the Director’s office where presumably he’d have a very large marble run set up, because the only thing he likes better than directing the FBI is racing marbles.

Really, I don’t think this is going to get any better than imagining J.K. Simmons in an office with a 2000 piece marble run set directing a talking horse wearing a strobing visor to go investigate a pharmacy benefit manager executive cutting illegal rebates. I think I’ll stop here.