Saturday night bull riding.

I have a pretty open couple of weeks coming up, my last shift for about five days was yesterday. The Blazers are out of town on an extended road trip and there aren't a ton of big concerts coming up, although March will see both Justin Beiber and Bruce Springsteen, not at the same time though, that would actually be sorta awesome, Bruce will still be awesome of course, but I do not have high hopes for the Beiber.

Anyway, as I mentioned I worked yesterday, it was something of a mystery as to what I was doing, my schedule said only "PBR" so I was expecting some Portland friendly music festival or somethin, I was as wrong as it is possible to be. you see, PBR actually stands for Professional Bull Riding, which is something I did not know anyone cared about, like at all. Especially here in Portland where half the population won't even eat kale unless it can be proven to have been painlessly harvested.

I have mixed feelings about any entertainment involving live animals, and after watching this I still do, on the face of it the animals don't seem too terribly treated, but I have little knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes and how they are taken care of during transport and so on, when Barnum and Bailey were in town I had no such problems figuring it out as they stored the elephants in the parking garage right next to the employee entrance, and let me tell you, I don't think a small covering of straw over a concrete floor underground in a 30x30 pen is the ideal living arrangement for an elephant. They sure as hell looked unhappy, but the cows? Hell if I know, pretty sure they didn't care much for yahoos jumping on them, but they seemed pretty pleased with themselves when they got the chance to attempt to hurt them terribly, so perhaps they view that as a wash.

The idea of bull riding as near as I can tell, is to ride the bull for a certain amount of time and not get murdered by the displeased beast in the process, it goes something like this:

The rider is introduced, they come from all over the world and are usually quite young, at least they were in the event yesterday, many of them weren't even legal drinking age, they all get a theme song, which can be from any genre as long as it is country or classic rock, less than thirty seconds of the song is played, thus putting the use of the music into fair use and avoiding licensing issues.
Then, the young man is loaded onto the bull, this requires help as the animal must be in a narrow pen to avoid the attempted murder process starting too soon, a new country/classic rock tune is started and the penis opened, bull tries its damnedest to give the rider whiplash so it can gore his tender bits, rider hangs on with legs and one hand clasping a rope.
If he survives eight seconds then people run out to distract the bull and the rider nimbly drops off an flees for his life, somehow the bull is persuaded to retreat back to a pen or something and resetting for the next one begins.
The rider is scored on a scale of what I think is one to one hundred, and style counts for a lot I guess, what style looks like in this context I do not know, but it is safe to assume that falling off and getting a horn up your ass counts as lost points.
Profit?

The point of the whole ordeal escapes me, and the crowd is pretty fucking annoying, being fans of belt buckles large enough to stop a future presidential candidate from stabbing you, as well as shitloads of beer and complaining about prices.

Weird night.