Sunday, June 5, 2016

Active rigs:

	6/5/2016	06/05/2015	06/05/2014	06/05/2013	06/05/2012
Active Rigs	25	82	194	191	213

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The Humor Page

A few days ago (May 31, 2016), UPI had a headline -- North Dakota rig count increases 10%.

With about 27 active rigs right now, a 10% increase would be about 3 rigs. In fact, the number moves up and down in a range, right now, between 25 and 30.

From the story:

Data from the state government show 28 rigs in service early Tuesday, up 16 percent from last week. The increase follows a slow march toward $50 per barrel for West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark for the price of crude oil. WTI is up about 4 percent from last week.

And note the "typical" North Dakota tractor the UPI manages to stick in the photograph that accompanied the story.  I'm not even sure the story was taken in North Dakota: see if you can see the anomaly:

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Breakfast of Champions

This is an old story. Don sent it to me when it was "topical" and I delayed posting it. I guess I just got too busy.

So, let's go back a few weeks. Back to the Kentucky Derby, 2016. The winner: up until then, and including the Kentucky Derby, the undefeated thoroughbred, Nyquist. 

It turns out there is a North Dakota connection. The Dickinson Press is reporting that the breakfast this champion eats is from a feedstore in Dickinson, North Dakota: 

For undefeated thoroughbred Nyquist, some of his success can also be attributed to a successful performance horse feed created by Dickinson business Woody’s Feed and Grain.

After Nyquist’s win at the pinnacle of horse racing -- the Kentucky Derby on May 6 -- he was decorated with a sash of red roses.

Underneath the flowers that adorned his body and the jockey who pushed Nyquist to his limits were a sack of nutrients that gave the horse the power.

“This particular diet, Summer Heat, was one of our first beet pulp feeds that we came out with,” said Woody’s manager Alan Woodbury. “The trainers of today work with so many horses, like Doug (O’Neill) trains over 100. He wants all of his nutrition in one bag.”

O’Neil and Woodbury have been working closely with each other for more than two decades.

Woodbury said O'Neill was one of the first trainers who used this certain mixture of feed and it proved a good choice for him. He has continued to use the Summer Heat mixture since. 

Was Nyquist the only horse to eat the breakfast of champions? Nope:

Not only did their feed go into the stomach of Nyquist but also of 11 of the 22 horses that competed in the Kentucky Derby this year.

And of those 22, eight of the top 12 horses were also fed with Woody’s feed.

More on Alan Woodbury's background here and his upcoming semi-retirement. From a June, 2015, Dickinson Press story:

Alan Woodbury, owner of Woody’s Feed and Grain Co., is retiring. Well, semi-retiring is the better term.

The horse feed mill on Villard Street, which Woodbury has worked at for 46 years and has owned since 1983, has been sold to Scranton Equity and will officially transfer over on July 1, 2015.

Woodbury said he will stay on for six months to a year on a full-time capacity to smooth out the transitional period, and will work part-time for an unspecified period in the national racehorse market to help maintain the business’s clientele there.

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Getting Ready To Work

"Papa gave me a type-written page of instructions on how to draw a face, and a bunch of crayons, but what I really need is a YouTube video with instructions and some Faber-Castell artist pens. Sheesh."