Horsing around

following recent posts some more horse stuff........ but a little more personal!
A good friend, Ben AKA ASBO who now resides in Australia has informed me via further person in the know (the grudge) won approx 4,000 oz dollars on a horse some years ago
The name of the horse was Octagonal
wiki link:
Octagonal (foaled 1992 in New Zealand) is a retired champion Thoroughbred racehorse, affectionately called the big O or 'Occy'. He was sired by Zabeel, out of the broodmare Eight Carat, a descendant of Man o' War who was ranked No. 1 on the Blood-Horse magazine List of the Top 100 U.S. Racehorses of the 20th Century.
Trained by John Hawkes, in 1995 Octagonal was crowned the Australian Champion Two Year Old. The two-year-old Octagonal won the AJC Sires Produce Stakes and earned a second placing in the STC Golden Slipper, and AJC Champagne Stakes.
In his three-year-old season Octagonal won seven times. But what was even more remarkable was the standard of his 3-year-old contemporaries. Saintly had already won the Australian Cup. (In the next season Saintly would win both the W S Cox Plate and the Melbourne Cup). Nothin' Leica Dane had already been runner-up in the Melbourne Cup. While Filante would go on to win the Epsom Handicap in record time.
Octagonal's seven three-year-old victories started with the weight-for-age championship of Australia, the W S Cox Plate at Moonee Valley in his most dominant season. He went on to take out the 3yo Triple Crown consisting of the Canterbury Guineas, Rosehill Guineas and the Australian Derby in record time, and he is still the last horse to have done so. Add to this a victory in the WFA Mercedes Classic marking his fourth Group 1 race win in five weeks. Already the earner of close to $A4 million, Octagonal was voted the 1996 Australian Champion Three Year Old as well as the Australian Horse of the Year title.
Octagonal continued to perform well in 1997 when as a four-year-old he collected his second Mercedes Classic plus further Group I wins in the Australian Cup, Underwood Stakes and Chipping Norton Stakes. Octagonal retired to stud after 28 starts with a record of 14 wins (10xGroup1), 7 seconds (6 in GI or GII races) and a third. He ended his racing career with a stakes tally of $A5,892,231, the highest of any galloper in Australasia to that point.
Octagonal stands at Woodlands Stud, NSW. He is the Sire of Australian Group 1 winning brothers Lonhro and Niello, the South African Group 1 winner, Suntagonal. In 1998 he stood at Haras du Quesnay in France where his most prominent offspring was Laverock whose wins include two Group 1 races: the Prix d'Ispahan at Longchamp Racecourse in Paris and the Gran Premio del Jockey Club at Milan, Italy's, San Siro Racecourse.
On the ASBO front following previous posts re; Obama portraits I managed to locate a website in which you can create your own versions, this is good linking and bringing subjects together, I'm impressing myself here! so I had a go.....

street art and handcuffs

A street artist famous for his red, white and blue "Hope" posters of President Barack Obama has been arrested on warrants accusing him of tagging property with graffiti, police said Saturday.Shepard Fairey was arrested Friday night on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art for a kickoff event for his first solo exhibition, called "Supply and Demand."

The story of his famous Obama portrait, a large-scale, mixed-media stencilled collage, is already taking on the mythic qualities of a quintessential American narrative. Emerging from humble beginnings in the back alleys of Los Angeles, the portrait became an instant sensation, a pop culture "icon" that was willingly embraced by the Obama political machine.
Before the President-elect sweared his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's personal Bible, the portrait has became part of the Smithsonian's permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery, which is conveniently only a few blocks from the White House. Fittingly for the narrative of change, the Obama portrait was donated to the gallery by the head of Mr Obama's transition team, Tony Podesta, and his wife, Heather.
The striking resemblance to the Che Guevara portrait which has decorated generations of student bed-sits, has not been dwelt on. But a little way from where Fairey's portrait will hang there is a small portrait of the Cuban revolutionary by Charles "Chaco" Chavez, drawn from the famous photograph by Alberto Korda.
The portrait gallery is better known for its stuffy collection of George Washington portraits than street art, but the museum's curator, Carolyn Kinder Carr, said simply: "We all fell in love with it. We always like portraits that reflect a particular moment in history, and we like the fact that it is an image that resides in popular culture."
He is becoming the ‘darling’ of the under-art world – deemed along side as Banksy, many say that his posters are a throwback to past political representations

Looking and scouting around the interweb I came across this piece written by artist Mark Vallen and thanks to him for this very eredite piece.

What initially disturbed me about the art of Shepard Fairey is that it displays none of the line, modeling and other idiosyncrasies that reveal an artist’s unique personal style. His imagery appears as though it’s xeroxed or run through some computer graphics program; that is to say, it is machine art that any second-rate art student could produce. In fact, I’ve never seen any evidence indicating Fairey can draw at all. Even the art of Andy Warhol, reliant as it was upon photography and mass commercial imagery, displayed passages of gestural drawing and flamboyant brushstrokes.

Fairey has developed a successful career through expropriating and recontextualizing the artworks of others, which in and of itself does not make for bad art. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein based his paintings on the world of American comic strips and advertising imagery, but one was always aware that Lichtenstein was taking his images from comic books; that was after all the point, to examine the blasé and artificial in modern American commercial culture. When Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey, a 1961 oil on canvas portrait of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, everyone was cognizant of the artist’s source material - they were in on the joke. By contrast, Fairey simply filches artworks and hopes that no one notices - the joke is on you.Plagiarism is the deliberate passing off of someone else’s work as your own, and Shepard Fairey may be unfamiliar with the term - but not the act. This article is not about the innocent absorption of visual ideas that later materialize unconsciously in an artist’s work, we do after all live in a maelstrom of images and we can’t help but be affected by them. Nor am I referring to an artist’s direct influences - which artist can claim not to have been inspired by techniques or styles employed by others? What I am concerned with is the brazen, intentional copying of already existing artworks created by others - sometimes duplicating the originals without alteration - and then deceiving people by pawning off the counterfeit works as original creations.

After further searching I came across these images which have a link to Fairey's Hope pice, they appeal to my sense of humour