Long and Winding Roads

FYI - My upcoming road trip (this weekend!) isn’t to Sweden:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/08/world/europe/sweden-nobel-prize-medicine/index.html

There aren’t a lot of Gurdons in the world; in fact, it’s a rare enough name that the chances are fairly high that we’re all related to each other somehow, though I don’t know this guy intersects with our family tree. Our branch appears to be from a little town in Hungary called Borzavár:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borzavár

(Allegedly we’re related to royalty, but if you go back far enough, everyone is. Moot anyway, since there’s nothing left to inherit. Another fun family rumor: either a great, or great-great grandfather was in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry. So maybe I might have inherited something after all.)

Dang it, though, there goes my dream of being the first Gurdon to win a Nobel Prize. Guess I better get cracking on being the second. (Why must I forever be Alydar to someone else’s Affirmed? Bah!)

Maybe I can be the first to win the prize in Literature? I could live with that. I’m now undecided about participating in NaNoWriMo this year, BTW; I have plenty of ideas, but time is definitely going to be an issue.

I suppose I should put a little something model-related in this post, yes? Other than the road trip thingie, my mind hasn’t been on the horses much the past few days. I’ve been checking in and out on Blab, but it seems to be going through another one of those phases where five or six people are posting a lot of giggly nothing every day. I’ll admit I don’t have much of a life, but yeesh. guys. Go bake a cake or rake some leaves, why don’t ya?

I am intrigued, but not overly excited, about the upcoming Web Special, which appears to be something Decorator-y, though it’s not clear what the "theme" is quite yet. Purple, Silver and Blue equals what, exactly? Halloween? Fall? The Presidential Election?

I need to move more horses out, not in. I’m currently on the fence about this fellow, for instance:

This year's pretty porcelain Store Special Killarney!

I only just opened him up this week. In the ensuing hubbub, I sort of forgot he was even here; it also didn’t help that I was a little afraid of him, with me being clumsy and him being porcelain. He’s actually really cute, and I lurve his big ol’ Roman schnozz. I’d certainly be open to having him translated to plastic: he strikes me almost as a more handsome and up-to-date revision of Morganglanz.

Too bad his lackluster sales at BreyerFest probably put a kibosh on that. I think it was the paint job more than anything else: if they had put some minimal pinto markings or a blanket on his behind, fewer would have been left behind.

Page Clicks

The most exciting thing about the WEG Chestnut Esprit giveaway for me was that they finally gave us an official name and item number for it: it’s the WEG 2010 Media and Athlete Gift Esprit (item#9142). Yes! And thank you! Another tiny hole in the data patched.

I’m putting my daily clicks in, but I haven’t cleared a space on the shelf for him quite yet; I still think I have a better shot at getting one via other means. Even after all this time, they still have to have more than just one knocking around the office.

If they are cognizant enough of the demand to estimate the value of the prize at $500, though, I’m becoming increasingly doubtful that they’ll dump them in the NPOD, but one never knows. They haven’t been averse to unloading high-end merch in there in the past.

I don’t take any pleasure in reading the commentary everywhere about how so confusing the Breyer web site is. (Other than pointing out that maybe now more people get my point about the confusing graphics.) Instead of trying to navigate around the site manually, I just visit via the link in the e-mail they send. They get sent to the e-mail address I have to check in on every day anyway.

It would be helpful, though, if the Powers That Be had most of the bugs worked out and the typos corrected before they send the e-mails out.

(And if you’re not getting your e-mails from them, could y’all just call them up and take care of it, instead of complaining about it Every Darn Time it happens?)

Reeves is just trying to generate page clicks, which is all well and good. I’ll start actually clicking around the site when, you know, they start putting up a little more content worth clicking on.

They did post a couple more Bfest specials today - a Store Special Irish Draft "Killarney" in a lightly dappled reddish bay, and Line/Ticket SR "Cheerio", a Glossy Dun Tobiano Pinto Bell-bottomed Shire. Just a couple of days ago I was thinking it was about that time for a few more photos to come out. Yay!

The Shire is the one I was (very) tangentially referring to in my last post about the Web Site Photo Fiasco. The first photo I saw was from a different angle, I think, but I like her even more from this one.

On my want list? Yep, so far. I love the Bell-bottomed Shire; a lot of others do, too. Gloss + Pinto + Vintage Draft mold = Winner! (Not if you listen to the younger set, who seems to think any mold released prior to Silver is "icky" and "unpopular", but I’ve been working on that for Lent, too.)

Don’t know if I’ll go for the Killarney yet. The Ballyduff mold looks wonderful in that color, but the Porcelains make me nervous. It is interesting that they’re putting him in the store instead of as a Line/Ticket Special. Does that mean that the resins from last year were a dry run towards putting the Nonplastic SRs in the store itself, or will they continue to do both?

I suppose we’ll find out in a few more weeks, as other SR pictures get (officially) released.