Sunday, July 5, 2009

Frog

You just never know when some crazy piece of trivia that somehow embedded itself into your brain when you were a child will turn out to be incredibly important for impressing your wife.

For some reason there was a guy shoeing horses downtown yesterday, presumably for the benefit of the tourists. Such guys are called farriers, which the magnificent Online Etymology Dictionary tells me is from the Middle French for blacksmith, from ferrum - iron. Sweet! But that's not what we're here to talk about.

No, we're here to talk about what happened when the farrier asked the assembled crowd of dweebs, punks and losers if anybody knew the name for the triangular bit at the back of the horse's foot. It was the greatest moment of my life, because I knew the answer. I didn't squeal it out in an excitable, girlish voice, like I do at university when I know the answer. No, I took a breath, paused, and murmured nonchalantly, "The frog".

The crowd exhaled in admiration at my mastery of equine anatomy. The farrier tried to play down his disappointment that I'd stolen his thunder by saying, "There's usually someone here who knows it." But we all knew the truth - I was the star there that day. Even my Smaller Half said to me (after much prompting), "No, I wasn't surprised that you knew that, that's exactly the kind of bizarre thing that you know."

All those hours that I spent when I was a whippersnapper reading about how to shoe horses in The Handbook of Australian Bushcraft were well spent. Now, who wants to know how to make rope?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

PTR,

Is that your smaller half at the very front of the crowd in the red jacket.

No, not that one, the one directly (and alarmingly,) under the horse's tail.

If so, then she's a very small half!

PTR said...

Ha ha, no that's not my Smaller Half. That's one of the dweebs, punks and losers.

Anonymous said...

PTR,

Are you moonlighting in the print media? Are you really John Birmingham?

Check this out and tell me if it's not a PTR style blog-musing.

http://blogs.brisbanetimes.com.au/thegeek/archives/2009/07/post_18.html

jamie said...

My grandfather was a farrier. But that doesn't mean that I knew about "the frog". Nice one smarty pants.

PTR said...

The chief characteristics of JB's writing are nerdiness, bias, deep but narrow background research, arrogance, and childish petulance. So yeah, I guess it is pretty similar to mine.

Jamie - that's pretty cool that your grandfather was a farrier. He didn't happen to be a medieval Frenchman, did he?

jamie said...

Why yeeeessssssssssssss.....

PTR said...

aaah you made me laugh - well done.
:)