Things You Might Not Know About The Triple Crown

The Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing in the United States consists of a series of three races: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes. You probably knew that.

Do you know what a Thoroughbred is though? Only Thoroughbred horses are allowed to enter a Triple Crown race. Many people have the misconception that “thoroughbred” is a description, a synonym for “purebred.” Nope. It’s a specific breed of horse developed for racing. All Thoroughbreds are descended from three foundation sires, the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerley Turk. Those three stallions were imported into England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and bred with English mares.

A horse must be three years old to enter a Triple Crown race. All three races must be won in the same year. But what if the horse turns three years old, say, after the Kentucky Derby, but before the Preakness? It wouldn’t be possible for that horse to win all three races the same year. That doesn’t seem fair.

It turns out, though, it doesn’t work that way. All Thoroughbred horses have the same birthday, January 1st. That’s in the Northern Hemisphere anyway. It’s August 1st in the Southern Hemisphere. Regardless of what day a Thoroughbred horse is actually born, it’s considered to be a year older every January 1st (or August 1st down south.) So a horse must be three years old by this reckoning to be eligible for the Triple Crown races.

A third interesting aspect of the Triple Crown races concerns how much weight each horse must carry, 126 pounds for male horses, 121 pounds for fillies. Race officials called stewards will weigh what a horse is going to carry, including the jockey, saddle, and equipment, and add weight if necessary. In the old days, this extra weight was in the form of lead weights placed in a pouch under the racing saddle. More recently, these have been replaced by weighted gel pads that fit under the saddle.

England, Ireland, Canada and Australia each have their own version of the Triple Crown, with England’s being the original. Very few horses in England are bred for both speed and stamina anymore, so there hasn’t been an English Triple Crown winner since 1970.

You can memorize these Triple Crown facts and more, including all thirteen U.S. Triple Crown winners, with Bzzwords University Trivia Training.

Image: Honeybees with both speed and stamina.

April 19, 2025

Trivia Training

The first part of Bzzwords.com to be revised and functional is the Trivia Training portion of Bzzwords University. These aren’t cute little multiple choice quizzes. You have to engage your brain and actually come up with the right answer. The first four letters anyway.

Why not multiple choice? First of all, we only want to visually associate a single, correct answer to a question, not a list that includes incorrect answers. Secondly, it forces you to engage your brain and actually try to recall (or figure out) what the correct answer might be. Making a guess, even one that is incorrect (but plausible), will help build your recall of the correct answer.

Why only the first four letters? Because we want to be able to repeatedly drill a lot of questions quickly. Four letters is enough to differentiate the vast majority of possible answers, and enough to keep you from being correct simply by chance.

Why do we use a bizarre, onscreen letter/number selector instead of the standard keyboard? To prevent recall through “muscle memory.” This is the phenomenon where your fingers remember say, a password, but your language center does not. You probably won’t have your keyboard available during a trivia contest.

Why is only one form of an answer accepted? For example, why is “ABRAHAM LINCOLN” accepted as correct, while “ABE LINCOLN” is not? Because during drilling, you need to pick one form of the answer that you will see exactly the same way over and over again. We picked for you. You’re welcome.

What if you have no idea what the answer might be? Just guess. An incorrect letter will be corrected automatically. Try to guess the rest.

Here’s a tip: Don’t try to memorize. Just drill over and over and over again. Once you have a topic down perfectly, go do something else for a while. When you come back, you’ll have forgotten quite a bit. Drill until you’re perfect again. The next time you come back, you won’t have forgotten as much. At some point, you’ll stop forgetting.

So that’s it, all you need to become a fully operational death star of trivia.

Image: A honeybee professor teaching gibberish.

April 18, 2025

Bzzwords is Back

Back in the Long Ago, before the Terrible Times, there lived a quixotic software engineer and his precocious nieces and nephews. Brimming with creativity, this crew liked building things with words or with interlocking plastic bricks, exploring remarkable ideas, and playing the sorts of games that were both fun and made you smarter. They built a website that tried to put a lot of these pursuits together.

Even back in the Long Ago, before the Terrible Times, most of the best domain names had already been taken. The creative crew came up with some random, fun-sounding nonsense names, and the grown-up on the crew looked on the internet to see if they were available. They weren’t. Worse yet, he discovered that what seemed to be a random, fun-sounding nonsense name could sometimes turn out to be a nasty euphemism. You had to be careful. They eventually settled on the domain name Bzzwords.com. It’s more of an inside joke than a great name for a website.

The site took form, parts of it anyway. Unfortunately, the quixotic software engineer wasn’t specifically the type of software engineer who built websites. He implemented most of the functionality using something called the Adobe Flash Player, popular at the time, which basically allowed you to run a desktop-type application in a web browser. This turned out to be a mistake.

Several years later, the Inexorable Powers That Be¹ took a dislike to the Adobe Flash Player. It was Deprecated, which meant that everything that used it stopped working, including most of Bzzwords. The site sat forlorn and barely functional for years. The quixotic software engineer put, “take down Bzzwords” on his to-do list. He never got around to it. That’s good, because Bzzwords is back.

All of the original functionality will be revised, updated and improved. New stuff will be added. The Trivia Training portion of Bzzwords University is already up. This site is never going to be slick, but it will be good for your brain, and unlike anything you will find anywhere else on the internet.

Enjoy.

Who are the Inexorable Powers That Be? Here’s a hint: one a day will keep the doctor away. ↩︎

April 12, 2025