Mall:

I'm in a hurry. Please pardon the inevitable errors.

Moving beyond your straw men and ludicrous pedantry:

1: In his book, Ragozin advises his readers to compare horses to themselves and gives examples of horses who should be played right off their tops--"eight weeks rule" be damned. You are wrong. Regardless, you should be taking this up with Friedman. Be sure to include the stuff about the chant.

2: Karl Marx borrowed liberally from Hegel, including Hegel's view of history, though Marx ditched idealism in favor of materialism. Marxism is often called "inverted Hegelianism." If you disagree (I'm not sure you do), you are wrong.

3: Quirin's statistical studies of weight are nearly worthless. Your confidence in them is telling. Quirin called weight a function of recent form and class. In other words, he admitted that he couldn't isolate it for testing. It's silly of you to write of the "lack of import" of weight based on this book.

4: If you persist in thinking that Quirin's weight research is important, consider this: Quirin found that weight was more significant at longer distances, which kicks the hell out of your theory.

5: I'm not going to spend a dime studying weight. Why bother? Just ask one of those trainers of whom you are so fond. Almost to a man, they believe that weight is important. (At this point, Mall, I want to thank you for telling us that you have your own business. That qualifies as information one can't do without.)

6: Your "Unlike you guys, I think for myself" BS is beginning to grate. If you don't make your own figures, you are leaving the most important thinking to someone else. However, I do admire your disinclination to embrace received wisdom. Your push to get TG to test the "eight weeks off a top" pattern, and other patterns, inspires awe. No passive, wait-for-them-to-give-me-their-pearls-of-wisdom handicapper are you. You want evidence. Sure wish I had thought of something like that.

7: When you write that you think it's wrong to split hairs based on small weight shifts, and when you minimize the importance of weight in general, you are saying more than you seem to think you are saying. In fact, you are saying that ALL of TG's and Ragozin's numbers are wrong. Weight is built into these numbers and the projections based on these numbers. Please read the TG and Rags introductory literature and address this.

8: You actually wrote this sentence: "It compounds the felony, as it were, to simply assert, without offering any proof, that weight has been used profitably during this undefined period."

Ragozin and TG "use" weight. It is in every figure. I did define the period: about 40 years (a reference to Ragozin). Weight is one of the things that separate sheets from Beyer, etc. I know several people who use TG and Rags profitably. I'm sure you do, too. Do you want me to get them under oath? Based on my experience, the percentage of TG-Rags users who win is a lot higher than the percentage of Beyer (weight free) users who win. This is a tough game. Success is precious and precarious. Successful formulas should not be tinkered with based on the caliber of argument that has been coming off your keyboard so far.

9: I'm sure the TG/Rags weight adjustment would be better if we knew the weights of the horses. Absent that, we still have good figures. Besides, I can't think of a better way to assess the value of weight than this: Put a couple of fanatics in hole-in-the-wall offices (I know your office is new, JB; the term came from Jay Hovdey) and have them study the sheets of countless thousands of horses for dozens of years. There are times when experience deserves to triumph over theory, and this sure looks like one of those times to me.

10: Your Joe McCarthy comments are insufferably didactic and gratuitous. I stated clearly that I was KIDDING. But my words stand up well even if I were serious. McCarthy was notorious for claiming he had lists of 200 communists, smearing countless innocent people, and then refusing to produce the lists. Eventually, it would come out that he only had a few names on his lists, and those were often hilarious. In your case, the list is now down to one, it seems. (See chapter three of David Halberstam's "The Fifties," along with hundreds of other works.)

11: HP is a bright guy whom I have never met, spoken to, or exchanged emails with. He takes me seriously when he shouldn't, but I appreciate that. He is one of the few people whose intentions always seem to be good. And his determination to try to do the right thing, even though he's anonymous and won't get any real credit for it, warms my heart. It really does.

12: Your attempt to turn your "Jerry's Kids-Dittos" line into an attack on a lone idiot who was blasting the TG analysis is quite funny. I challenge you to put that part of your post on top of this board and defend what you just wrote. We will have some real fun.

13: I appreciate your telling me that there is a world out there apart from horse racing. At your urging, I will look for it. But if it isn't there, I will be very disappointed.

14: There is no 14. I'm superstitious, so I didn't want to end on 13. How about this? "Drops of Jupiter" is the song of the year, and it ain't close.