People are so helpful where I live (Alabama) to friends, and strangers. However, when I lived in Colorado it wasn’t very friendly at all. When I lived here before I lived in another town, but had to come to my current town for shopping from time to time. There is a long stretch in the middle of the 4 lane highway, about 10 miles or so long, with no gas stations, or any help. On a very hot day, there was a man walking along the road, on the other side from where I was traveling, carrying a gas can. A bunch of people pulled over to give him a ride. I’ve lived places where no one would have pulled over.
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Not necessarily a daily dumb, but definitely a daily funny…
I’m following a zoning appeal in a neighboring county that has been going on for a while and like to read the meeting minutes every now and then. The property owner making the appeal was asked who taught riding lessons on the property. I believe he responded that his wife, a “blue ribbon dressage rider”, taught the lessons, however whoever was recording the meeting must have misheard, because the minutes read “Blue Ribbon Massage rider”. Both statements made me laugh for different reasons 
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During the blizzard of '78, I was trying to head home from Harvard Med, where I worked in a lab, in my pickup truck. A dude in a Cadillac pulled out of a sidestreet in front of me as I was going uphill, and I lost traction and got stuck when I had to stop to avoid him.
He also got stuck trying to make a right turn in front of me.
A couple of college kids were zipping around in a Jeep, and they stopped to help. (turns out they had been spending the whole afternoon doing this sort of thing for fun.)
Caddy dude, in expensive clothes and shoes, gets out, greets them and says, oh I’m glad you showed up, can you give me a hand?
Kids said, hey man, we saw you cut her off. If you want us to help you, you have to help us get her out first.
I got going, got across the BU bridge, and picked up a couple of women who were struggling to walk home in dresses and heels because their bus had gotten stuck. Dropped them off, then headed home.
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haha! Kids: they’ve got their eyes open a lot of the time.
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My dumb today is my dressage instructor feels I need a 4.75" bit in exactly the same bit as we are currently using. Which means I either need to buy it new at $100+ or search for it used. Send help.
Can you wait a week or two and then say that the existing bit is the 4.75"? Bet he/she won’t notice…
What’s the reasoning? Pinching? If it’s a three piece, they don’t take the length out of the center piece I don’t think, so that shouldn’t be the reason…
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What size is your current bit? Is it a 5"? If so, maybe a cheap solution would be to buy a pair of rubber bit guards for about $3. That would make the bit fit slightly smaller. Then if it’s a big improvement you can consider spending $$$ on getting the 4.75" version.
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Great idea! I’ve got some velcro neoprene ones that are a little thicker than the rubber ones if a little more beef is needed, I think they’re under $10.
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Your story reminded me of a zoning hearing I went to.
Old railway tracks were proposed to become part of a multi-use trail system already in existence.
Proposal included a section that would divide bikers, runners, walkers from (horseback)riders with a berm.
A long, narrow strip of land, privately owned, would be purchased from the homeowners by the county to make this happen.
We’re talking a maybe 50’ wide strip that ran along the back edge of properties.
Homeowners objected - probably hoping to increase the purchase price - but one guy voiced his objection to “Horses urinating” on what would become his new property line. 
Apparently he believed horses were just big dogs, in the habit of frequent stops to mark their territory.
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That’s too funny
I have mixed feeling on this one because the property in question is 10 acres in a residential area and their list of proposed activities to the township did not include what they showed intention to host on their website - ie the website said they plan on hosting weddings, but they kind of danced around that in the meeting and have since removed it from the site. There are other horse properties on the road, but I think most are personal use vs hosting camps, yoga classes, and BYOB events so I am not surprised the neighbors and town are pushing back.
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I think you’re referring to a 10ac plot.
The land in my example was just an unusable stretch that ran from lot lines to the RR tracks. County wanted to widen what already belonged to the tracks by purchasing pieces from homeowners.
I might object to what you described, but to a piece of land I wasn’t using anyhow?
In the end, the proposal here fizzled, so Horsepi** Guy is safe 
Great idea! It will work in the interim until I can find a smaller bit. I wish I could get away with a 5 in but it has too much play left to right and my horse is figuring out how to evade it while dressage-ing.
This happened a number of years ago but the car getting stuck in the snow reminded me of it. After a large snow storm which left about a foot of snow on the ground and with the Cascade Concrete we tend to get, it brought down some power lines. I was on the street connected to my street and traffic was stopped because 1. The power company was repairing lines, and 2. Some moron got stuck in the ditch opposite the power company vehicles.
So repairmen were trying to get this guy out and not having much luck. I was in my 3/4 ton truck and happened to be at the head of the line when one of the repair guys asked if I could help them out. I said sure and started backing my truck to get near the stuck vehicle and I look to my side and the idiot in the next car in line had moved forward close enough that I almost hit him. He finally backs up a little after waving my arms at him in a WTF manner, enough to give me room to maneuver. I pop the guy out of the ditch with a tow chain and go to turn around again to get back in line and there’s the same guy right on top of me! I managed to back into a driveway so I could make a left and continue down the street and you would think the line of traffic would have let me pull out but oh no, I had to wait until almost the end before someone stopped so I could leave. I clear the road for them and they wouldn’t let me out so I could go home. What a bunch of entitled pri-ks!
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Russian Equestrian Federation; What war?
FEI; We’re not idiots.
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For those who are able to find amusement in legalese, the transcript of the Russian Equestrian Federation’s appeal to the FEI tribunal contains several moments that had me smirking, when not actually laughing.
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I was watching AGT last night and a guy had his mini-horse on stage for his act. The horse wasn’t keen on performing and after about 1 minute had had enough and trotted off stage. Howie Mandel, I guess thinking horses were like big dogs started calling “here, here” like the horse would come to him. 
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There’s been lots and lots of dumb around here lately, so much so that I don’t even want to talk about it.
I will say this: If your horse is eliminated before an event because the vet on site believes he is too lame to continue, it is in VERY bad form to imply that the vet is a nincompoop.
Lick your wounds. Prepare your horse better next time (ie, try riding at least a few times over the winter before entering him into a 50 miler). Don’t disparage the vet.
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I was a ride vet some years back w/ Art King as Head Vet. there was a woman w/ an OTT STB stallion, whom I had encountered at least once before. Her horse was off at the pre-ride vet-in.
She tried to convince Art it was because he was a pacer. No dice.
He asked me to jog the horse so he could show her what he was looking at.
She couldn’t see it.
So he took her hand, placed it over the horse’s patella, and moved it from side to side.
“Do you feel that?”
“Yes’”
“It isn’t supposed to do that.”
Several weeks later, I was at the Vermont 100, again working the ride. Art and I had been put up at the same B&B.
He asked me, “did you get a letter from ECTRA?”
(Eastern Competitive Trail Riding Assoc.–previous ride was both AERC and ECTRA sanctioned.)
“No.”
“Oh, probably because I was the head vet. Remember the woman w/ the STB?”
“Oh, yes.”
“She wrote to ECTRA to complain about my pulling her horse, and told them I obviously didn’t know much about horses or lameness.”
I was laughing, and then the president of ECTRA, who was a ride volunteer walked in.
Art mentioned the letter to her, and she started laughing.
Apparently every time the woman’s horse was eliminated from a ride, she’d file a protest, and they were used to it.
We guessed nobody had bothered to tell her that Art was the veterinarian for the Canadian Endurance Team.
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Not a daily dumb but a funny about lameness and a competitive trail ride I did …
I think the word “abused” is more commonly applied to horses who are spoiled rotten rather than actually abused, but the gelding in my avatar had been literally beaten on a regular basis before I got him so he had some odd quirks.
We did a 25 mile competitive trail ride when he was 5 and I was 14. He was nervous at the pre-ride vetting and he kept trying to sit down like a dog when the vet attempted to touch his hind legs. The vet kindly told me that she thought that he was unsound and not able to do the ride, but I respectfully explained his behavioral issues and after watching him trot out, she let me do the ride with the caveat that she’d be very critical at the midpoint check. She actually scored him 3/5 lame so in retrospect, she really shouldn’t have let him go. But she did.
He passed the midpoint check so we completed the ride. At the final check, he was too tired to act too silly so he ended up with a 1/5 score for lameness and we placed second in our good-sized division. Who’d have thought that a horse could end up sounder after doing 25 relatively fast miles than he was at the start?
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