I was trying on some cowboy boots when I started to hear the pipes playing. I assumed it was just the local radio station extending the brand. The local radio station is KLAN on FM and KLTS on AM (or the other way round). They have to start with 'K' because they're in the western USA. The Glasgow station has chosen Scottish identifiers. Then one of the assistants said she just had to go and see what was going on, and it dawned on me that this was live, from outside.
Sorry about the quality of the picture. I only had my phone with me, and I couldn't entirely block the backlight. He's from Circle, MT, and had come to Glasgow for a party. He said he was self-taught, and played because he like the bagpipes. He said he just had to come out for his daily practice, and his wife was hiding in the car. The pipes really have to be played out-of-doors. He said the nearest band was a hundred miles away, and he didn't think he was good enough. He sounded good enough to me. I told him about Glasgow (MT) Octoberfest, when then have the Saskatoon Police Pipe Band down from Canada. He said he would probably come.
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Tomorrow is the Milk River Catfish Classic. Teams of two compete. The first stage of the contest is the 'Calcutta'. I'm sure you all know that the Calcutta Turf Club invented a funny way of betting for its classic Sweepstake, which was a world-wide betting craze before the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake started. Anyway, unlike normal betting, where you bet on any contestant you want, and the bookmaker works out how much of the pool goes to those betting on the winner (which, by-the-way is called 'parimutuel' betting), the Calcutta Club came up with a system where there is only one bet on each contestant. So there has to be an auction, offering each contestant in turn, to see who gets to bet.
This was done with a true American-style auctioneer, and I recorded it so I could offer you a clip. But, much to my surprise, this blogging system makes audio much more difficult than video, and I would have to have a lot of figuring out, some in the HTML I've long forgotten, so you'll just have to imagine it.
All the winning bids go into the pool, and the 'owner' of the winning team gets (I think) 40%, second gets 20%, and so on. Some of the bids were startlingly high. With 60-odd teams competing, the pool ended up at around $12,000!
Oh, and it involved an awful lot of beer.
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1 comment:
Pity about the difficulty with adding sound. After the previous entry I was going to suggest Burt Bacharach's "Trains and Boats and Planes" as the sountrack.
Now there is a further problem.
How on earh could one include the bagpipes?
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