The Cash Run Stakes is a Good Betting Race

There aren’t many 7-horse fields that can be considered a good betting race. After my first look at the Cash Run Stakes, the 8th from Gulfstream on New Year’s Day, I didn’t think it would buck the trend. I nearly decided to just take #6 JETTY’S HOME as my pick in Pick ‘n’ Pray tournaments as the “other Saffie” and move on with my life.

But I came to see “THE Saffie” in the race, #7 SECANE to be an exceptionally bad favorite, which got me curious enough to check out the field.

I think there is a very healthy trio of strong contenders to beat either of those Saffie horses, and none of them is Jetty’s Home, who I figure is quite likely the second choice in the betting. She can certainly win but will be underlaid enough off of my personal line for her of 4-1, to also be worth trying to beat.

My top pick in the race is #5 NYCON, lightly raced filly making her third career start after breaking her maiden last time also at this 1-turn mile distance, impressively. She doesn’t need to get much faster to win this race and I think very likely has that in the tank.

I am also intrigued by probably the highest price of any contender when they leave the gate, #3 BLAZING BRAT. She may not even be bet like a contender at all. But I liked her Tampa race last time off a 3-month layoff. I think she can have some more behind her and I am also not very worried about going a mile now. It’s a sign of confidence, I think, that the trainer even goes in this spot.

I’m less enthused about the chances of #4 DUNMORE BEACH being worth getting mixed up with in the win pool, or probably even the exacta, I think Secane is a bad enough favorite that she is definitely worth using in horizontals.

Arepas So Close and Yet So Far

One of the food vendors at SAP Center that I enjoy at Sharks games is Pana Food Truck, an outfit based in Santa Cruz that serves up their arepas at the arena. My stepdaughter and I most recently sampled their wares about three weeks ago. It was her first time having them with me and I must have said something to her about their garlic sauce because the guy working the spot told us that they sell it by the bottle at their store.

I responded that this store is over in Santa Cruz, isn’t it? He said they were opening up over here in San Jose in a couple weeks. I asked where, and he said they were going to be part of the Downtown Food Hall, a kitchen staffed by numerous casual restaurants for the carryout/DoorDash era. I have eaten at all the places in their that I care to, except I haven’t tried the Japanese curry place. I’ve been there a bunch because it is extremely close to my abode, so this news that Pana was opening up there warmed my cockles considerably.

Alas, they have opened up now and we have a problem. I pay for food at the Shark Tank because my tickets come with $15 of credit toward food and drink per ticket. Otherwise I wouldn’t pay arena prices for food there. I’d eat at home or someplace else downtown and then go to the game. I think the arepas in the arena are in the $18-$22 range. I was curious how much they’d come down in a normal setting. Unfortunately, at the food hall the good ones are like $16.50-$17.50. I went in and selected an order for two arepas and a bottle of the sauce, and it came out to like $56 with tip.

It’s too much, man. These arepas are nice and use good ingredients, but not that good and/or exotic. There is expensive stuff in a super burrito these days and they are usually about $15 and also typically about three times as much food as one of these arepas.

If you ask me, these $16.50-$17.50 arepas should be $11.99-$12.99 or thereabouts. Lo and behold, on the website for Pana they are $12.75-$13.75, which I would consider acceptable.

I don’t know how these food halls operate and quite how much of a bite the building owner takes from the vendors, but the other stuff I’ve paid for in this place, I’ve actually paid for and not recoiled at the price and canceled an order about to be placed, as I did for these arepas I was excited about.

It’s bumming me out that these arepas are so close I can almost reach an arm out and touch them, and yet pricing is going to keep me from indulging.

Get A Load of These Fucking Morons

For the better part of a week I have been seeing headlines from various local news outlets about a couple who inadvertently purchased a narrow dirt lot in San Francisco. I finally clicked on one yesterday, since it was a slow work day leading up to Thanksgiving. The link I am providing here is to the one I checked out, from a newish outlet known as the San Francisco Standard. Do not be misled into thinking that this is an independent outfit doing good work along the lines of Hell Gate in New York City. The other stuff I’ve seen from them is just left-punching horseshit. And they employ mega-dumbass Tim Kawakami to write about sports.

But here we are with a tale of two people who thought they were buying a lucrative rental property in San Francisco for $25,000 and had no alarm bells going off in their heads. Who also received lots of paperwork identifying the available parcel as a piece of shit strip of land that cannot be developed. And now they want their money back, and also are willing to go public and make sure they get written about so that everyone knows what epic dumbasses they are.

Do they think the community is going to rally around them now that this has been aired out in public and exert pressure on the board to give them their money back? What’s the aim? Whatever it is, you can be sure they didn’t think it through very well. That’s not their bag, baby.

LMAO.

I’m Saving A Lot of Money This Year Thanks to Enshittification

After the San Jose Sharks drafted Macklin Celebrini they started taking advantage of that bit of momentum to try and get people into SAP Center again, as evidenced by them giving my dad a call for the first time in 25 years after the last time he had season tickets, back when I was in high school. He assumed they were looking for our company to advertise and directed the caller to me. It turned out the representative just wanted to sell some tickets, and in the end, I bought a pair for the 2024-25 season.

I stopped paying attention to the Sharks and hockey after the team blew a 3-0 series lead two years after having to win Game 7 in another series they had been up 3-0 in. The odds of that being random bad luck were miniscule, it was clear Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau were not guys to have leading your team outside of the regular season. I didn’t even pay attention when they went to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2016.

But I had, in recent years and with the destruction of Major League Baseball by its owners, come to learn that NHL hockey was a much improved product these days, with skill allowed to do its thing. And I had gotten into a pretty big rut as far as doing things outside the house since COVID, and saw getting out to these games as a way to rejoin civilization.

I told myself I was just getting the tickets to enjoy seeing some good hockey and not getting back into Sharks fandom, but that idea turned to shit pretty quick and I was hooked again by seeing Macklin Celebrini do abnormally excellent things every night. I didn’t watch road games on tv because the team still stank too much to bother with that, but I was a Sharks fan.

I still am, but the team has already gotten to work eroding that feeling with enshittification of the experience, even for supposedly valued Sharks 365 members such as myself.

When it was time to renew late last season, the team offered to have me signup for three years with a locked in 3% annual increase, and also like $560 in their Teal Tokens each year. I had reservations about signing up for anything with a private enterprise, knowing that they are out to fuck me, but put those aside thinking that there was not that much they could do.

Then they immediately, in the first year of the agreement, concocted the worst home schedule in league history, with seven home back-to-backs and eight total home games that are the second night of back-to-backs. Unprecedented, and not explained by the condensed Olympic schedule.

I aired my disappointment to the team and was told to go screw, but in their weaselly explanation to me it became clear that this was done intentionally, because they can’t get people into the arena on weekdays.

I still go to all the games, but have tickets for pretty much every game up for sale. Some sell, and I also play some games with the ticket exchange program so I have account credit, and games that sell I just buy myself one seat to go to the game alone. Given that I live a ten minute walk from the arena, I am cool doing that. If I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t, but I do.

But I spend a ton less money on other things like merchandise. And now as the petty wars heat up, I’m saving even more.

You see, a modern development in the concessions game, I guess, is to sell 20-oz bottled soft drinks and not syrup-mixed soda into cups with ice. Coke, and in my case Zero Sugar Coke, is much better in ice whether it’s poured out of the bottle or a syrup mix. Last year, and for the first handful of games this year, I could just go and get a cup of ice from one of the bars in the Club area. (Actually, out of embarrassment at requesting that as a grown man, I would have either my quasi-stepdaughter or quasi-niece do it if they were my companion for a game.)

But, as of two weeks ago, the bartenders also tell them to go screw now when the request is made. Cups are tracked, they say, they cannot give out freebies. Of cheap as fuck cups and some ice. They can’t do it anymore.

The team will take offense at me blaming this on them. I know with certainty that they would say this is an Aramark thing. And that they are completely handcuffed about what happens in their own damn facility.

So, I don’t have to have a drink with my food. Starting with the last game, Thursday night against the Kings, I’m not getting a damn soda or bottled water or whatever. I’ll get my food with my $15 allowance per game and 20% off, and then burn through a lot fewer of the teal tokens without needing to pay $6 for a soda. The Sharks, or Aramark or whoever, shall lose hundreds of dollars in soda revenue from me in exchange for saving probably about a dollar in cup costs for the rest of the season.

Nice job, dipshits. I will out-petty you fucks every time.