FLASH: everyone should go read AugieDog's Ponyville and Other Poems. . Vignettes, etudes and character sketches done in traditional rhymed poetic forms. Brilliantly witty concept, brilliantly and wittily executed!

Chant Royal for Rarity! A villanelle for Granny Smith! And I've only scratched the surface--I'm still reading. It's like Christmas all over again!

Go, go! Take and read, take and read.

One of the things that drew me to the fandom was the quality and quantity of music written by the fans. To someone who remembers fannish music as three cords on a six-string late Saturday night in the Con suite, learning about composers like Night Breeze and Evening Star was something between a revelation and an epiphany.

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Everyone knows Dante, right? Because Dante wrote the Inferno and even if you’ve never read it you know it’s about a trip through Hell. It’s part of big long story arc called the Divine Comedy and the sequels are the Purgatorio and the Paradisio but nobody reads them because really, how do you top a trip through Hell? Fire and brimstone, lakes of pitch, damned souls turning into giant lizards, blood and guts and shit and piss and Dante giving all his enemies embarrassing

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As it turns out my friends' draft horse will, unfortunately, lose the eye. This doesn't necessarily mean he'll be put out to pasture: they've had prior long and favorable experience with a thoroughbred that they got cheap because she'd gone blind in one eye. She was a perfectly good riding horse (I even got to ride her a few times), and very good-tempered as well.

Aramis should do alright: he's a huge blonde Shire, very placid and sweet-natured. So, imagine Big Mac with an eyepatch.

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"...We must be careful."
"I'm ready for anything!"

The artist is Equestria-Prevails, whom you may visit here.

My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs
I offered him to the Church - the buyers
Were little men who feared his unusual airs.
One said: 'Let him remain unbid
In the wind and rain and hunger
Of sin and we will get him -
With the winkers thrown in for nothing.'

Then the men of the State looked at
What I'd brought for sale.
One minister, wondering if
another horse body would fit the tail
That he'd kept for sentiment -

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My horse-owning friends up in Colorado just took their big Shire to the vet. Seems he was running around in the paddock showing off (why or for whom--who knows?) and managed to smack his head into the gate, resulting in an eye infection and a course of treatment that involves medication every four hours round the clock. They concluded the story with the affectionate yet heartfelt exclamation, "Dumb horse!"

And I just couldn't...I mean I should have resisted but...oh well...

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For thirty years they'd been falling in and out of love but never quite falling out as friends--nor yet falling out of lust, despite the odd marriage here and there.

"Yes," she said "the set of the jacket's admirable, if I do say so myself. But is it comfortable?"

"Eeyup" he said.

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Because Bad Horse has been doing something similar and it looks like fun:

"--Tell me, was Phil always such a fool, back in the old days?"
"No, he wasn't. Isn't now, either. His was the curse of a half-talent. Now he is considered the last of the Romantic poets, and he's gone to seed. He pushes his mysticism into nonsense because, like Wordsworth, he has outlived his day. He lives now in distortions of a pretty good past.

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Ah, Queen Chrysalis: quite the creation. Surprisingly grotesque and sadistic for what’s supposed to be a kids’ show. And the only first-rate villain not yet reformed (Luna, Discord) or annihilated (Sombra).

The fandom seems to want the Changelings reformed, but there’s an obvious problem with that. How do you “reform” an entire species that’s evolved to prey solely upon your own? It’s not like you can teach them to be vegetarians.

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