Pam's Path, Jr.

 I jogged twice, for 1:45 at c. 12 minutes a mile and 3:04 at c. 13 minutes, and otherwise walked Pam's Path, Jr., this morning in 1:04:49. ...I noticed two obvious mistakes in my story last night at about 11:30 p.m. when I put it on Pam's Boy. In one, a jockey referred to his horse in a quote as ",...he...," and I typed "...she...," and in another quote, at the bottom of the story, the trainer of the winner said, "Oaklawn means a lot to me," and I wrote, right at my deadline, typing a million words a minute, "Oaklawn means a lot to me. Oaklawn means a lot to me." I sent an email about the first error but not about the second. It didn't seem quite as glaring. A copy editor/page designer named Steve Rogers had already corrected both. ...Those guys also didn't change the cliche in may lead, hands down. Apparently, Rogers knew "hands down" originated with horseracing. It means easy because when horses run fast without need for encouragement, jockeys leave their hands down with a loose grip on the reigns. Usually, they have to get their hands up to use their whips. Hands down is often misused with any sort of lopsided result. For instance, an actor who wins an academy award gets 90 percent of the vote, and someone says he won "...hands down," but he might argue there was nothing easy—hands down—about dieting to lose fifty pounds or spending sixty hours a week in a New Delhi slum or camped out at a base camp halfway up K2.