Pouring money into the murky wet thing

Current mood: Conversational
Current music: The orchestra of the mind has been playing Beethoven all day

I heard that recently, there was a workplace 'Dress Causal Day'. This news left me slightly bemused as I would have thought they meant a 'Dress CaSUal Day', but as the aim was apparently to raise money for a cause (i.e. for charity), then it could in fact be argued that 'causal' is appropriate. Even so, it leaves me wondering how one is supposed to dress 'causally'.

It's funny how people manage to raise lots of money, and somehow lose it again. I'm referring to the popular local sport of gambling, which fortunately I avoid like the plague (retail therapy being bad enough on its own). Horse-racing is still the prevalent form of gambling in Hong Kong, despite the fact that these days the Government officially frowns upon gambling in general. There have been TV and radio ads describing how "gambling is like pouring your money into the sea" - not something you'd want to do in Victoria Harbour, considering the state of the - for want of a better word - water. Casinos and so forth are outlawed in the territory, which means that anyone wanting to open one would have to scurry off to Macau (a neighbouring ex-Portuguese colony with oodles of casinos, or so I've been told). It also means that the perfectly legal Hong Kong Jockey Club (formerly the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, in those good ol' colonial days) pretty much has a monopoly on the gambling front. They're absolutely loaded, but I suppose they're generous with their, ahem, donations, so they've not been outlawed. There's a nice bit of hypocrisy for you.

Some time ago I passed a racecourse and noticed, in its adjoining car-park, a number of mysterious tarpaulin-covered shapes that I can only describe as... horses. Each shape had a big body, a moderately long neck, and pointy ears on a roughly rectangular head (the pointy ears are rather conclusive evidence). They certainly cannot be mistaken for ordinary tarpaulin-covered motorcycles, which, due to their jutting handlebars and mirrors, tend to resemble tarpaulin-covered giant gerbils, or possibly pygmy elephants. However, as the tarpaulin-covered shapes lacked the vitality and joie de vivre of real live horses, I deduced that the horse-shapes were probably made of wood, or perhaps even metal and plastic. So - what would a racecourse be doing with a bunch of life-sized model horses?

My first thought was that the Jockey Club people had hidden a nice carousel somewhere, which I hadn't been told about. The mind being prone to all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theories, however, I then took a flying leap to the conclusion that the live horses you see strutting proudly on racing-night telly programmes are just there for showing off. The real racing is done by jockeys sitting on mechanical horses, which race around a metal track on four little wheels. It's like a race between Thomas the Tank Engine and his buddies. This arrangement benefits the horses, who get to relax, and benefits the Jockey Club, whose costs are diminished as they don't have to buy quite so much food for the horses (you only need 3 or 4 horses to actually parade about - from a distance, no-one will notice the same horses pop up more than once). The poor chumps who watch the races won't spot the difference as the whole thing is a bit of a blur anyway. It's all to the good, eh?

Of course, following this argument, the races must necessarily be rigged... (Shock, horror!)

I'll leave you to chew on that. If you decide henceforth never to gamble again, so much the better!