Giant of a Horse: It's Chips:Ducking Out.

By way of a change, I thought I would introduce every month or so, horses from the flat, that I have warmed to. We start with Giant's Causeway, who became known as the ' Iron Horse ' because in his five straight Group One wins in 2000, he showed a relentless tenacity to be first past the post.

Very much a horse to have on your side. Here's a  video  of the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown racecourse, with a suitable driving finish.
The Iron Horse.

The icing on the cake was that he was ridden by the senior English jockey, George Duffield  then aged 53.

The main difference between Flat and Jumping horses is their longevity in terms of racecourse appearances. Giant's Causeway , now aged 18, was only seen on a racecourse as a two  and three year old. He was then retired to an illustrious life at stud.
 Jumpers, on the other hand, if they remain fit and healthy can often be seen in action as ten and eleven year olds.
Flat horses, like athletes are therefore at their peak for only a limited period of time; but like The Iron Horse, these are times of greatness.

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The expression, " Cheap as Chips "  certainly is true in terms of silicon-based microchips which continue to diminish in price. This combined with nano-technology (reduction in size and space ) has made increasingly powerful computers at a lower price level.

Take the ZX Spectrum for example,  which together with the BBC Micro was at the cutting edge of computing in the mid 1980s. Both were British built and boasted cassette drives to load ( painfully slowly ) the software.

Around 1988 I purchased for family use a Spectrum 128k.

Note: this picture is an earlier model 

for which you had to plug in a separate cassette player to operate .

The 128k had a cassette player (great joy ) built in !

I paid about £150 for it and then bought cassette games from time to time. I remember our favourite was a darts simulation, which  complete with grey plastic joystick,  we happily tried to play 501. The bulls-eye I remember was particularly difficult to 'hit .'

Zoom forward to today and lo and behold, in April a ' new ' ZX Sprectrum is about to re-launched to the astonished world. It will sell for a sub £100 and get this,  be pre-loaded with one thousand games.

I think it will be success and my goodness what a saving,  with those games onboard. It has been able   to be manufactured, thanks to money raised, through a crowd-funding scheme.

The thinking behind this venture being,  that increasingly modern video games are getting over-complicated and that maybe in a 'back to the future ' mode  people want to play simple Pac-man and Mario  platform games, once more. We shall see.

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Once again, my apologies for another truncated blog posting. This  spell of cold weather has kept me largely away from photo opportunities, so to finish I have only this picture of some swans and ducks on the banks of Lower Lode, near Tewkesbury, which I took last Thursday ( 24 / 1 ). Notice how muddy the river looks.

Hoping for better conditions next week.

Cheerio for now,

C.k.