Race Track Diary, Entry Number Six

Century Mile Racetrack (3) (April 11, 2025)

Introduction

This blog and some following blogs are sections from an informal diary of “visits to the race-track” at a particular time and place, by a person who has followed the races with varying levels of participation over a long period. These relate primarily to some visits to the track and/or off-track betting venues in the 2025 period and onward. They contain observations about the activity, both specific and general. Although these remarks are personal, they also reflect general cultural and historical trends, as they have impacted horse-racing, wagering and culture in general.

The setting is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (population of about one million plus). However, I imagine that the observations would apply to many places in the world, as they are a reflection of how changing trends in technology, globalization and culture in general have affected this ancient and honourable activity of horse-racing.

For now, I will use what I call “polished point-form” for the narrative.

Century Mile 3 (April 11, 2025)

This is the third visit to Century Mile. My brother Craig seems to like this place, though I would also like to hit a few other spots, for a complete tour of race-track betting shops in the area. Some of the places far from the city would be interesting.
Long ago, the only off-track betting one could do was in a place called Wetaskiwin, about a 45 minute drive south of the city. It drew fairly good crowds – some rural people, and some Edmonton people who wanted to get out of town and bet on the spring meet, which was going on in the nearby city of Calgary. I had a great spring meet there one year, lots of early speed horses were coming in at excellent prices. That was a good deal of fun.
So much for memories. Now we can bet on horses at any of a number of tracks in North America, depending on what was being simulcast that day. Betting on a local bunch of racehorses that mostly ran between a few tracks in western Canada seems like a story from the distant past, but it wasn’t actually all that long ago. You really got to know the horses and riders in those days. Now, it’s all numbers – too many horses to ever get a feel for it in any way but numbers. That said, I was always a numbers person anyway.
On this day in 2025 there was a pretty good afternoon crowd at the new racetrack, Century Mile, by the standards of our visits so far this year. This was a Friday afternoon, so that may have had something to do with it. The weather was also very pleasant for this time of year in central Alberta, so undoubtedly that also helped.
Some of the guys behind us were a bit boisterous, but not in an irritating way. I heard someone say that they were a crowd that generally played the races from Fitzgerald’s, another local offtrack betting shop that Craig and I have visited. That place had a pretty good atmosphere, but the machine that printed programs and racing forms didn’t work on the day that we were there. Not good for someone like me, who likes to speed handicap, using horse’s past performances. For that, you need a program.
Another guy, who was sitting in front of us, was a pretty good fellow. We chatted a bit, but not so much as to detract from the business at hand (i.e. racing). When he left, he gave us his program for Keeneland, which still had a few races to go. So, that was nice, though I didn’t win any of those. Apparently that is in Lexington Kentucky. The grass already looked very green and lush – they have a turf track as well as dirt.
Another one of the tracks was called Evangeline. We didn’t know where that was, but I guessed Louisiana, based on the well-known poem by Longfellow. The fellow in front of us seemed to recognize the reference, and agreed about that. He looked it up, and we were correct. You never know when you will run into someone educated in the classics, even at the racetrack.
The waitress was a bit of a looker, quite pleasant, according to the fellow who gave us the Keeneland program. She seemed a bit standoffish to me, but maybe that was just because I got some chips and a beer rather late in her shift. She perked up when she saw a decent tip on the payment machine. They had a fairly nice IPA draft beer, and their French fries and gravy are reliably edible.
There was something interesting about the cutlery that came with the French fries – they were magnetic. After taking them out of the cloth serviette, I moved the fork handle, sliding it along the counter. It happened to be next to the knife, and when I moved the fork, the knife slid alongside of it. Voila! The cutlery was magnetized! Apparently magnetic knife bars are a thing (they can be used for storing knives on a wall). However, this was the cutlery itself that was magnetized.
And it was a fairly strong magnetization at that, though not strong enough to pick up one implement with other (I tried – they were fairly substantial implements). The other odd thing was that I could get them to attract, but not to repel. Theory tells you that they must have been acting as bar magnets, so they should have had both a north and south magnetic pole. Nonetheless, I couldn’t get them to repel, no matter how I arranged their orientations. It was as if magnetic monopoles actually exist, but only when made into knives and forks.
I displayed this trick to he waitress. She was very surprised and was not aware of their being magnetic. She gave me an odd look at that time, when I think about it. Maybe she thought that I was somehow behind this phenomenon.
Enough of exotic physics. Back to the races. We got there at about 1:30. Many of the racetracks on tap were well into their cards by then, up to the 5^th or 6^th race already. I picked up a program with past performances for Aqueduct, a big popular track near New York City, not far from the airport there.
For such a big track, some of the fields were pretty small (i.e. not many horses in some races, even less after considering scratches). But, there is a lot of money in that area, so one assumes that the racing will be high quality (i.e. honest). In terms of betting, that didn’t really help me much. They weren’t really running to form, as they say.
We also tried a few races at Oaklawn Park. Apparently that is in Arkansas. Not much luck there, either.
Oddly enough, our big break was at Woodbine/Mohawk, in Toronto, with the bucket pullers (i.e. harness horses). I handicapped some horses on a race late in the day, and Craig threw in a lucky long-shot, so we won a pretty nice trifecta.
Harness races have the virtue of being pretty easy to speed handicap, as the races are all at a mile; that makes races easy to compare. The program also shows the actual times for each horse, not just the time of the winner, so there is very little tedious transforming the data.
For the thoroughbreds you need to do something like this (not easy mental math, if there are a lot of past performances to consider):
- Horse time = winner time + (lengths behind winner * 0.2), in seconds.
As noted above, the nice score on the trifecta meant that I left the track with more money than I arrived with. That always makes the visit seem worthwhile.
As during an earlier visit, the horse-racing cashier was closed by the time we were leaving, so I couldn’t cash in my voucher there and had to go to the casino cashier instead. Some day, I will meet the mysterious cashier of the horse-races, but that day is not here yet.
Traffic on the way back was quite reasonable, which isn’t usually the case. I don’t know why it varies like that, it is one of those little mysteries of life, something like the horse races themselves.

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Since I am running a book publishing blog, here is a plug for a horse-racing oriented short story that I wrote.

A Dark Horse

In “A Dark Horse”, a gambler’s desire to hit a big win seems to lead him to make a Faustian bargain with a supernatural evil. Or is it all just a string of unnaturally good luck?

The story is just $0.99 U.S. (equivalent in other currencies) and about 8000 words. It is also available on Kindle Unlimited and is occasionally on free promotion.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Spain:https://www.amazon.es/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01MDMY2BR

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Here’s an interesting review from Goodreads

(BTW, the writer has never met the reviewer and was not even aware of the review until very recently – You can look up the review on Goodreads, if you like)

A Dark Horse

Every gambler is bound to run out of luck eventually, right?

By far my favourite type of horror is psychological horror. I was quite pleased with how Mr. Olausen frightened his audience without spilling a single drop of blood or so much as hinting at anything gory. He knew exactly what hints to drop for us that made us deliciously dread the next scene simply by throwing out hints about who or what the dark horse might actually represent. This is the kind of stuff I love getting scared by, especially as Halloween approaches.

It would have been helpful to have more character development in this short story. While I certainly wouldn’t expect to see as much time spent on this as I would for a full-length novel, I did have trouble connecting to the main characters due to how little I knew about them and how much their personalities seemed to remain the same no matter what happened to them. If not for this issue, I would have felt comfortable choosing a much higher rating as the plot itself was well done.

I must admit to not knowing much about gambling at all, so I appreciated the brief explanations the narrator shared about how placing bets works and why some people have so much trouble walking away from a bet. While I will leave it up to experts on these topics to say how accurate everything was, I did enjoy learning more about the main character’s addiction and what he hoped to gain from betting on just one more game or race. It gave me a stronger sense of empathy for folks in his position.

A Dark Horse – A Gothic Tale was a deliciously chilling story for the Halloween season and beyond.

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And here is a book about my dad’s sapper unit that I wrote:

The Sappers' War: 12th Field Company Royal Canadian Engineers, Oct 1943 to Sept 1945

What follows is a review of the history of the 12th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, primarily relating to the time that the company was in the Italian and Northwestern European theatres during World War II. Though the book focuses on the experiences of a particular company of Canadian military engineers, it also discusses some of the wider issues of the second world war and how it affected the people wholived through the era, civilian and military. Among those are my father (a sapper or military engineer) and mother (a war worker in wartime Britain and ultimately a war bride).

Thus, this is meant to be an informal and unofficial history of the company, written by an interested party in an effort to understand what these men went through during this period, and how that experience affected them and other people who lived through the war. The military aspects of the company's history are there (e.g. training, fighting, building bridges, detecting mines, maintaining routes), as are the cultural factors that influenced them and their times (e.g. the movies that they watched, the drinking they did, the many diseases they faced, their interactions with the Italian, British and other civilians that they lived among, their worries for the future). Some focus on life on the British home front is also given, via the experiences of my mother and her family.

Since many people had family and relations that lived during this time, it is my hope that the account will be of general interest to them, and to any that have a particular interest in this critical interval in history. Also, though the text relates specifically to Canadian sappers, I believe that many of the experiences will be common to the soldiers and loved ones of other nations who lived through the war, especially Americans and those from Britain and the British Commonwealth.

The primary sources of this document are the 12th Field Company War Diaries and related orders, with some material from The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, Volume 2 as well as various official histories by the Department of National Defence. Various other published sources are used as well, especially when discussing the wider issues of the war or the army experience (e.g. Churchill’s history of the war), or conversely when relating very specific episodes of the war (e.g. Popski’s Private Army in late 1944). Personal accounts of my father’s or mother’s stories also augment the narrative. I have tried to fit those in during appropriate time periods, though some stories are more general and have therefore don’t necessarily relate to the time period being discussed. Nonetheless, they do help capture the essence of “being there” during the war years.

The War Diary is a day by day account of the primary activities of a given unit, as recorded by personnel in the headquarters staff of that unit, and signed off by the commander of the unit. As such, it is an official record, though the writers often brought a bit of their own character into the document. Naturally, as a relatively brief document it can’t hope to capture the complexity of the individual stories of 280 or so men, so the family lore generally has no corresponding entry in the War Diary, though there are sometimes tantalizing hints and near-verifications of these personal accounts.

There are a number of other sources for the book, from official histories to popular history books. I include quotations and references from these works (an eclectic mix), as I believe that they also shed light on different aspects of this period of time, and besides that, are just interesting accounts, in and of themselves.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

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Finally, since I mentioned magnetic monopoles, here's a novel that I wrote in which these particles (which may or may not actually exist) figure prominently. Just for the record, I do have a degree in physics/math:

The Magnetic Anomaly – A Science Fiction Novel

The novel version of The Magnetic Anomaly is now available on Amazon (ebook, print version, also audible version soon to come). The cover images are by Corrie Olausen an up-and-coming book illustrator of my acquaintance. :)

Summary

Two young Earth scientists, Alex and Mary, get caught up in a vast conflict, based on an accidental finding that they make at a diamond exploration camp in the far north. Eventually, this discovery leads them on a perilous quest and involvement in an interstellar war, a conflict of literally cosmic proportions with a rogue AI, which considers itself duty-bound to destroy sentient life (or, from its point of view, liberate sentient life).

During this time, they encounter a variety of enigmatic persons, as well as other entities, all of whom are also engaged in this struggle. With some of them they end up allying; with others, they contend in deadlyconflict. The struggle takes them around the world, and eventually into the far reaches of the solar system.

During this time their relationship continues to evolve and deepen. Circumstances demand that they grow in courage and confidence, though within the scope of (mostly) normal people, as has been the case for countless people throughout history.

The story also showcases some historical events, relating to different versions of what went on in Antarctica, shortly after World War 2. Several versions of these events, official and unofficial UFO lore are given. This becomes a springboard to much of the action. Some philosophical and scientific concepts are also explored, though not in such a way as to get in the way of the plot.