Blog Archive July 2013
Jeff …for our tenth anniversary.
It’s really not that bad a town. Sort of like the AOB breed, if it didn’t exist, all of those things would be unleashed on the rest of the show. It’s nice that they’re all centralized to one location.
I’ll be honest with you, I kind of like musicals. I’ve only seen four but I haven’t been to one I didn’t.
Oh come on. Seriously? You think that’s weird?
This blog is read by a predominantly show steer oriented crowd. Don’t tell me you don’t know at least one or two guys that “like musicals”.
Book of Mormon
Me and the two guys that lead my Sunday school class actually had a conversation about whether this play would be too far over the line, in part because the traveling version of it will be here in a few weeks.
It was funny and entertaining but no, I didn’t give it anywhere near a seal of approval yesterday morning. If I didn’t know that Trey Parker and Matt Stone wrote it, I would have wondered if they did. It was almost exactly what you’d expect knowing that it was a play done by the creators of South Park.
At one point, you are sitting there in $200 seats watching satan sing while the protaganist, Adolph Hitler, and Kengis Kahn stand by and watch the protagonist’s father get raped by Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s a comedy.
I promise you that somebody (not sure who, but somebody) who reads this blog will be watching that musical someday, see that scene, and think to themselves “by golly, that chap was spot on; he really doesn’t make that stuff up”.
Letterman Show
Did you notice this sexy beast when you watched the Letterman show last Wednesday night?
Yes? Well, that was me.
Queens
Queens is an experience. They don’t even bother putting stuff in english…sorry…ingles. We needed bus fare to get from the 7 train to the LaGuardia and my wife told me to just walk into a store and get some while she waited on the sidewalk.
No.
I love her and I wasn’t going to let that happen. That, and if I’m going to be a single dad, we need to sell some of these things.
Speaking of Which
Just because you fly in to LaGuardia, don’t assume you aren’t flying out from JFK. Making that mistake could cost you a trip through Queens, $26 in shuttle tickets, and an hour in transit.
Not that I’d make that mistake, just sayin, you know, in case you’re ever in that situation.
The Subways
Did you know that 55 people died in the New York subways in 2012? No, I’m being super serious. More than one per week.
Hipster Hit
You know that game “slug bug” that you played when you were a kid and saw a VW drive by? You know, before VW’s became something that early 20-something white chicks think are cool cars?
Me and my wife play that but basically I hit her on the shoulder when I see a hipster. I feel sorry for the girl after that trip.
Speaking of Fashion
I don’t know who, but there’s some comedian who told a joke about how rural people make fun of current fashion trends about two years before they’re all wearing it.
Well, if those darn rompers become fashion in rural America the way they are up there, I quit. I’m done. That’s it. I’m building a cabin and living in the brush.
There are some people who believe this in reference to a show having four rings of cattle.
That is false, it's actually instructions for the judges of those four ring shows...
A lways
B e
C onsise
&
D ecisive
...so the exhibitors can go home before midnight.
Typically used in reference to a full or half sibling of the animal you are considering buying.
It means it was a really good calf that didn’t live up to the expectations of the owner/breeder once it got into the ring, if it ever did make it to a ring.
Don't you just love looking at the art work of other people's kids?
Yeah, yeah, it's annoying when other people show you that stuff but you all know you love to see it when it comes from MY kids.
Here's a Dinosaur Encyclopedia my boy entering kindergarten this fall wrote in a little under 24-hours for you...
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $8,500 - Bred Heifer sired by Hoo Doo son
- $7,000 - Bred Heifer sired by Hoo Doo Prince
- $6,500 - Bred Heifer sired by Whiskey Business x Char
- $6,500 - Bred Heifer sired by Grey Goose
- $5,750 - Bred Heifer sired by Unforgiven
- $5,500 - Bred Heifer sired by Paddy Omalley
- $4,750 - Bred Heifer sired by Whiskey Business x Char
- $4,750 - Bred Heifer sired by Leather Punch
- $4,750 - Bred Heifer sired by Chunky Monkey
- $4,750 - Bred Heifer sired by Heat Wave
...if all of these summer cow and bred heifer sales were held the Saturday of the Belt Buckle in West or even the ?
A while back, I mentioned the steak test to see if one of your friends judged meats in high school or college.
What if you want to know if your friend coached a chapter conducting team? Welp, here’s an even easier method to tell…
Say the pledge of allegiance and annunciate the non-existent comma between “one nation” and “under God”.
He or she will NOT let it slide.
This test has a 100% accuracy rate.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $16,000 - Bred Cow sired by Milk Man
- $12,000 - Bred Cow sired by Monopoly
- $7,750 - Bred Cow sired by Jakes Proud Jazz
- $6,500 - Bred Cow sired by 563
- $5,755 - Bred Heifer sired by BK Top Secret
- $5,500 - Bred Cow sired by Yardley Prowler Pinonn 319
- $5,500 - Flush sired by Solid Gold
- $5,000 - Bred Cow sired by Heat Wave
- $5,000 - Bred Heifer sired by 804
- $5,000 - Bred Cow sired by KC
If you use Twitter or watch any sort of media, you’re likely going to hear about Sharknado today. Knowing that you folks are too mature to watch it, I bit the bullet for you and watched it myself.
I hesitate to write this because there’s actually a pretty good blog post right below it. This is written purely as part of my mission to make sure you hicks are up to date on current popular culture.
Let's be clear, there WILL be a bull named Sharknado in Denver next year. That's not a prediction or a request. That is a direct order.
Here’s a basic summary. All of this actually happened.
Warning: SPOILERS
A storm hits Los Angeles and Steve from 90210 packs up everyone and heads inland to find his family.
The storm causes flooding though and that obviously brings sharks along with it. While in a traffic jam, they somehow get stuck in water with sharks swimming all around them. One of the dirty cops from the Sopranos is eaten by a shark.
When they finally make it to Steve’s wife’s (Tara Reid) house in Beverly Hills, she refuses to let them in because she’s mad at him. A shark comes flying through the air, Nova (a waitress Steve brought along) shoots it out of midair like she’s shooting skeet. Tara lets them in.
Tara Reid’s new boyfriend is a big d-bag and is being rude while standing by the window. Predictably, a shark flies through the window along with flood water. The shark grabs on to d-bag and is eating him so Steve and the rest of his crew attempt to walk into the now flooded living room and save him. They can’t save him and are almost eaten by a shark in their living room.
They get out of the house to where there isn’t a flood, the front lawn, and the house explodes due to the pressure of the water from the flood inside the house.
They drive along and the storm starts to die down. How do they know the storm started to die down? “There aren’t as many sharks in the sky.”
Steve sees a bus is the drainage lines below a bridge they drive over. He stops their vehicle to repel down and save each of the kids on the bus one by one. The bus driver is later killed when one of the Hollywood letters flies around and lands on him.
They drive along, having saved a busload of children, and his SUV starts sputtering. They smell gas so obviously all run away from the car right before it explodes. After running from their vehicle, they see water spouts filled with sharks heading for Los Angeles and realize they need to hurry.
While at a liquor store, they decide they need new transportation and manage to steal a decked out Hummer type vehicle from a movie set. They cannot leave town though because there was a car accident and the police have a side street blocked off. There is no other choice but for them but to go monster truck and drive over police vehicles while they attempt to flee the city. A high speed chase ensues and they manage to evade the police.
They drive to an airport to find his son. They manage to find him shortly before the tornado hits. The tornado sucks a woman out the top window of the airplane hangar.
After the tornado passes by, they go outside to nothing but destruction and one completely untouched helicopter.
The scientist in the group tells them that since tornados are caused by the difference in air temperature, they can eliminate them by throwing bombs made from small butane bottles into them. While making the bombs, Steves son falls in love with Nova.
Steve’s son flies the helicopter next to each of the tornados and throws the bombs into them, it works and it stop the first two shark infested tornados.
On the third tornado, the bomb fails and Nova is sucked out of the helicopter and eaten by a shark in midair. Steve's son cries.
After saving some elderly people from a swimming pool that a shark was thrown into, Steve loads the SUV up with bombs and drives it into the tornado, thus ending the last of the tornados.
Unfortunately, all of the sharks that were in the tornado start falling from the sky. Steve sees a final shark flying from the tornado toward his daughter. He starts his chainsaw, pushes her out of the way, and is immediately consumed whole by the great white shark.
After about 10 seconds of people crying, he is able to cut himself out of the shark with the chainsaw and then reaches back into the shark to pull out Nova who is still alive.
In summary, steer prices this spring were up. Way up. Like, what the heck is going on up. I already talked about how the steers that sold in just that one Schroeder/Black weekend sold for more than every single placing steer at Houston brings.
It’s just plain old crazy.
Just when you think it can’t keep going, half a dozen new six figure show strings show up.
The average price of steers sold in online sales was $3,964, up 26% over the previous year.
The median price was right at $2,750, up 22% over the previous year.
Sales Represented
In 2012, we counted 95 sales with 1,171 steers sold. In 2013, we counted 119 sales with 1,484 steers sold.
The top ten sales in 2012 averaged $5,150 or more. In 2013, that cut off jumped to $6,188.
Bull Representation
Changes to the list of bulls that made the top 10 for both averages and steers sold include…
- Solid Gold is top five in both this year, after missing the top 10 for average in 2012.
- Overkill made both lists for the first time due primarily to the fact that Airhart sells more steers online now.
- Believe in Me made both lists as his first wave of Texas aged steers hit the market.
In 2012, both Heat Wave and Monopoly had twice as many calves sold as the next highest bull, Milk Man. This year Monopoly was the only bull to really separate himself in terms of volume.
Last year, Heat Wave was the sire of 8.8% of the calves tracked, the highest of spring 2012. This year, Monopoly was the sire of 12.7% of the calves counted.
Last year the top five by average were pretty much all in the top five for volume. This year, Solid Gold was the only bull to be solidly within the top five for both.
Percentiles
It’s not just the top end steers that have jumped in price. In fact, the spike in prices was the lowest in the top 5% of calves, only jumping 17%. Everything further down the food chain was up 20-30%.
| Percentile | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | % Change 12-13 |
| 95th | $8,213 | $8,500 | $9,950 | +17% |
| 90th | $6,250 | $6,100 | $7,500 | +23% |
| 80th | $4,250 | $4,000 | $5,200 | +30% |
| 70th | $3,250 | $3,250 | $4,250 | +31% |
| 60th | $2,740 | $2,700 | $3,500 | +30% |
| 50th | $2,250 | $2,250 | $2,751 | +22% |
| 40th | $1,800 | $1,800 | $2,301 | +28% |
| 30th | $1,500 | $1,600 | $2,000 | +25% |
| 20th | $1,200 | $1,350 | $1,700 | +26% |
| 10th | $1,000 | $1,200 | $1,500 | +25% |
No, don’t follow them because of their cattle, although you wouldn’t be wrong to do so.
Like them for the pretty pictures.
Every stock show I’ve ever been to I’ve looked through those arts and crafts displays trying to find a photographer or artist who is capable of catching the essence of an actual working ranch. I don’t mean the clichéd and overly romanticized view of a ranch raising a bunch of hatchet assed Longhorns and Corrientes in the 1800s. I mean an actual ranch that produces actual cattle that actually get eaten.
I’d dare say that Kelli Brown is the best example of that you will find.
It’s not a bunch of cowboys posing for pictures. It’s a bunch of cowboys breaking horses and collecting weights for an extremely well managed working cattle ranch. Real cattle. Cattle that sell for substantial money to commercial cattlemen.
I think I would have taken a slightly larger hit on my yield and given the fire just a touch more buffer...
The Belt Buckle Bonanza felt almost like the old days this past weekend. It was so active you’d almost think you still need to be afraid to drink the water**. Classification on Thursday took 5+ hours even when they were moving the steers through at a 100 head/hr clip.
One interesting thing that happened that morning was a kid had a perfect score at the livestock judging contest. Not only did he not drop a point through six classes, he got 15 of 15 questions correct. You’ll see quite a few kids drop only a few points but actually pulling in a perfect score though every class is pretty rare. It requires skill and frankly a lot of luck.
It got me thinking; just how common should it be to see a kid get a perfect score on placing classes?
If you take it by dumb luck, there should be a 1 in 24 chance of getting a 50 on any given class. That assumes that nobody knows anything and everyone is just playing a lottery. To get a more accurate view, you’d need to know just how often kids get perfect scores in real life classes.
Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, the frequency with which that happens tends to agree with each other whether you take several thousand results from Judgingcard.com or a complete sample of the over 60,000 classes that have been judged on Livestockjudging.com.
Kids get a 50 approximately 14-15% of the time.
With that in mind, if you have the following amount of classes, the likelihood that any particular kid from a generic sample of kids will get a perfect score for all of the classes…
- 1:7
- 1:49
- 1:342
- 1:2395
- 1:16,751
- 1:117,176
- 1:819,685
- 1:5,733,949
But what about “skilled” kids? For this purpose, I’ll define skilled as kids competing in a state contest in the past two years with results on Judgingcard.com. There are over 2,000 classes judged in that sample set and on average they earned perfect scores 35.0% of the time.
So, for a generic, state qualifying skill level kid, the likelihood that he or she will earn a perfect score for an entire contest based on the amount of classes judged is…
- 1:3
- 1:8
- 1:23
- 1:67
- 1:190
- 1:544
- 1:1,554
- 1:4,441
This is one of the very rare opportunities I have to force the fact that I scored a 298/300 at our county judging contest my freshman year.
The catch? Only one kid got a 50 on the class I dropped two points in and that was was a 9 year old. It was actually a pretty straightforward class and every kid in the county that knew how to judge lambs scored a 48 on it. You don’t get many shots at a perfect score through an entire contest and I made sure the guy that did that official placing knew he had messed the class up pretty bad. He took the appropriate “get the heck out of my face” approach that was to be expected. But he knows. I bet it still haunts him to this day.
It’s been twenty years. You know you messed that top pair up. Admit it.
**Due to non-dangerous remnant flavoring from algae related to the upstream dairies, Waco had some of the most foul water a person could imagine until about two years ago when they installed a new filtration plant.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $12,000 - Heifer sired by Heat Wave
- $7,500 - Heifer sired by STAR TCF SHOCK and AWE 158W ET
- $6,750 - Heifer sired by BBBN X 3
- $3,250 - Embryo sired by Solid Gold
- $3,250 - Heifer sired by Indian Outlaw
- $3,050 - Heifer sired by O SU Currency
- $1,800 - Embryo sired by Lovin the Business
- $1,350 - Embryo sired by Born Free
- $1,300 - Embryo sired by Born Free
- $1,300 - Embryo sired by Walks Alone
And now Netflix seems to think I have a slight preference for...
I’ve said this many times before, but you can’t go on a programming binge and expect to be able to write in anything resembling a creative manner. The two thought processes are diametrically opposed to each other.
So why haven’t I written for a little over a week? Because I’ve been productive is the long as short of it.
It’s not that there hasn’t been stuff to write about.
I could have written about the first time I’ve ever heard of a calf, the first pick of our Brahman crosses this year, dying during cosmetic dehorning.
I could have written about how quickly a mini-Hereford that had a relatively rough start will die in the summer heat of Texas after overextending him at a show.
I could have written about my five year old’s cold blooded response to hearing that news (“well, at least I got to show him”) that simultaneously horrified his mother and made all of us guys let out a brief “heck yeah”.
I could have written about the fluffy cow backlash turning ugly.
But I didn’t, because I’ve been punching myself in the face with a layout update to a ten year old highly interactive site with a more mature user demographic. If you’ve never done that, don’t. It makes you want to punch people in the face when they complain when Facebook updates their look. Nobody likes layout changes to community sites.
So any way, sorry. I’ll be better.
Past Posts
- 8/2020 [1]
- 10/2019 [18]
- 9/2019 [35]
- 8/2019 [32]
- 7/2019 [33]
- 6/2019 [35]
- 5/2019 [34]
- 4/2019 [34]
- 3/2019 [36]
- 2/2019 [32]
- 1/2019 [35]
- 12/2018 [36]
- 11/2018 [33]
- 10/2018 [35]
- 9/2018 [35]
- 8/2018 [35]
- 7/2018 [36]
- 6/2018 [33]
- 5/2018 [31]
- 4/2018 [10]
- 3/2018 [4]
- 2/2018 [3]
- 1/2018 [4]
- 12/2017 [5]
- 11/2017 [4]
- 10/2017 [5]
- 9/2017 [6]
- 8/2017 [4]
- 7/2017 [9]
- 6/2017 [16]
- 5/2017 [8]
- 4/2017 [7]
- 3/2017 [10]
- 2/2017 [19]
- 1/2017 [23]
- 12/2016 [4]
- 11/2016 [8]
- 10/2016 [7]
- 9/2016 [12]
- 8/2016 [9]
- 7/2016 [9]
- 6/2016 [12]
- 5/2016 [9]
- 4/2016 [13]
- 3/2016 [17]
- 2/2016 [18]
- 1/2016 [18]
- 12/2015 [10]
- 11/2015 [11]
- 10/2015 [12]
- 9/2015 [15]
- 8/2015 [10]
- 7/2015 [15]
- 6/2015 [16]
- 5/2015 [13]
- 4/2015 [22]
- 3/2015 [17]
- 2/2015 [18]
- 1/2015 [23]
- 12/2014 [13]
- 11/2014 [16]
- 10/2014 [23]
- 9/2014 [13]
- 8/2014 [10]
- 7/2014 [16]
- 6/2014 [19]
- 5/2014 [19]
- 4/2014 [15]
- 3/2014 [17]
- 2/2014 [20]
- 1/2014 [27]
- 12/2013 [23]
- 11/2013 [18]
- 10/2013 [21]
- 9/2013 [23]
- 8/2013 [24]
- 7/2013 [17]
- 6/2013 [19]
- 5/2013 [22]
- 4/2013 [24]
- 3/2013 [27]
- 2/2013 [24]
- 1/2013 [73]
- 12/2012 [24]
- 11/2012 [29]
- 10/2012 [21]
- 9/2012 [27]
- 8/2012 [21]
- 7/2012 [17]
- 6/2012 [32]
- 5/2012 [31]
- 4/2012 [42]
- 3/2012 [51]
- 2/2012 [34]
- 1/2012 [115]
- 12/2011 [19]
- 11/2011 [18]
- 10/2011 [27]
- 9/2011 [30]
- 8/2011 [44]
- 7/2011 [21]
- 6/2011 [32]
- 5/2011 [21]
- 4/2011 [30]
- 3/2011 [23]
- 2/2011 [28]
- 1/2011 [48]
- 12/2010 [21]
- 11/2010 [12]
- 10/2010 [16]
- 9/2010 [16]
- 8/2010 [18]
- 7/2010 [10]
- 6/2010 [11]
- 5/2010 [8]
- 4/2010 [15]
- 3/2010 [13]
- 2/2010 [11]
- 1/2010 [64]
- 12/2009 [24]
- 11/2009 [13]
- 10/2009 [10]
- 9/2009 [9]
- 8/2009 [11]
- 7/2009 [11]
- 6/2009 [18]
- 5/2009 [15]
- 4/2009 [16]
- 3/2009 [9]
- 2/2009 [13]
- 1/2009 [40]
- 12/2008 [14]
- 11/2008 [19]
- 10/2008 [25]
- 9/2008 [11]
- 8/2008 [11]