My Weblog: Wikipedia as a writing avoidance tool

by Donna Andrews.

Wikipedia's Recent Deaths page holds a curious fascination for me. I check it a couple of times a week, not because I'm obsessed with death and dying—well, no more than any mystery author is—but because behind each day's random collection of notable deaths lie a thousand fascinating bits of history.

Take the story of Fine Cotton and Bold Personality

Fine Cotton was an Australian racehorse of “limited abilities.” In August 1984, a crooked syndicate hatched a plot to profit from his mediocre track record. The plan was to enter him in a race, bet heavily on him, and at the last minute, substitute another, faster horse and rake in the winnings.

They'd found their ringer—a much faster horse that looked almost identical to Fine Cotton. But at the last minute, their intended substitute was injured. They'd already invested so much money in the scheme—the entry fees, the bets, and the cost of the now-injured ringer—that they decided to find another horse and forge ahead with the plan.

Bold Personality, the new ringer, didn't look a whole lot like Fine Cotton. Fine Cotton was an eight-year-old brown gelding with white markings on his hind legs. Bold Personality was a seven-year-old bay gelding with no white markings whatsoever. But the syndicate members touched up the color of Bold Personality's coat with Clairol hair coloring and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, they didn't realize until the last minute that they should also have applied peroxide to the new horse's hind legs to imitate Fine Cotton's white stockings. They made do with white paint.

Also unfortunately for the conspirators, the racing world was already suspicious of their horse before he set foot on the track. Fine Cotton's track record was so abysmal that he started out at 33-1 odds. But by the time the conspirators had finished laying their bets, his odds had fallen to 7-2. Still, if the fake Fine Cotton won—and if they got away with it—they'd triple their money.

Bold Personality won the race by half a head. (That's him on the inside in the picture above.) But he'd worked up a nice sweat doing so, and the white paint had begun to run down his hind legs. Bystanders noticed. Track officials stopped payment of bets on the race until they could verify the winner's real identity, and the conspiracy fell apart.

Six people involved in the conspiracy were banned from racing for life, and several served jail terms. The jockey, a newcomer who was not involved in the conspiracy, was exonerated, and had a long career as a rider and eventually a trainer.

And the horses? I couldn't find a death date for Bold Personality, so as far as I can tell he is still living in retirement somewhere in Australia. An Australian movie producer bought Fine Cotton, hoping to have the horse play himself in a movie about the scam, but legal complications kept the film from ever being made. So Fine Cotton had a second career as a riding horse, and eventually died at the relatively advanced age of 31 on the producer's farm outside Brisbane.

February 20, 2009. His demise was duly reported in Wikipedia's Recent Deaths, which is how I heard the story. I can't help but wonder if Dick Francis ever used the Fine Cotton scandal as the basis for a book. Or even if he has . . . doesn't that sound like the sort of ridiculous caper one of my characters might try to pull off? Hmm. Tucking that away to marinate.

It's a mixed bag, the Recent Deaths. Some days it's nothing but elderly politicians and bygone athletes. Serbian singer. Australian prelate. Nothing worth clicking through.

And then: Joe Medicine Crow, 102, American Crow historian. While serving in the 103rd Infantry Division in World War II, “he wore his war paint beneath his uniform and a sacred eagle feather beneath his helmet. Medicine Crow completed all four tasks required to become a war chief: Touching an enemy without killing him, taking an enemy's weapon, leading a successful war party and stealing an enemy's horse.” And then came home to become a tribal historian and anthropologist and eventually, in 2012, receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. If not for the Recent Deaths, I might never have heard of him, and that would have been a pity, because he sounds like a person who made the world a better and more interesting place by living in it.

If my fascination with the notable death page sounds like yet another awesomely effective means of writing avoidance . . . why, yes, I suppose it is. And what of it? Granted, following data trails across the internet isn't as immediately useful as cleaning, another of my favorite forms of writing avoidance. But it's a lot more productive than cyber-solitaire--and how many more books would we all have written if that had never been invented. And on a good day, I can even convince myself that perusing the Recent Deaths is kind of like research.

And now, back to my outline . . . unless anyone can suggest any other compelling online places where one can procrastinate . . . er, perform free-form research.