Tent pegging ?

[toad]

Reading about the German lancers reminded me of an article on tent pegging that I read on a dead tree before the Internet. There was an outfit in the US that was doing this and I can't remember who they were. The had hats that reminded me of the Australian style , one brim pinned up. They were doing it as a sport. You'd ride your horse at speed and use your lance to pick a tent peg out of the ground.
In ye olde days the horsemen would do this to drop the tents on their enemies. In cold weather this would sometimes start fires. I wonder if anybody in the US is still practicing this?

[evan price]

It's a very necessary combat skill in the modern battlefield........

[D5CAV]

Never heard of that.

However a friend attended a private school in Southern California called Thatcher.

In the bad old days, you were issued a horse as a freshman, if you didn't already have one, and your first task before breakfast was to tend to your horse. Dorms were heated by wood stoves and the residents of the dorm had to work out the how, who and when to get wood into the stoves.

He told me central heating arrived shortly after the school became co-ed. Regardless, I'm sure the wood stoves would have gone with the current Global Warming fashion.

The school fielded a polo team (naturally), and my friend was a good enough horseman to be on the team.

One of the senior competition events was the faculty would place silver dollars on the mid-field line of the polo field. Seniors who were inclined to compete would gallop down the field and attempt to pick up a silver dollar with their hands while at a gallop. My friend was one who managed to get one of the silver dollars, which he now has mounted in a belt buckle.

I have to ask him if this competition survived the change to co-ed and the current helicopter-parent/ safety-litigation environment.

[Weetabix]

My first thought was, "Oh, no. Not another Rule 34 thing I didn't want to know existed!"

[toad]

Ouch, I hadn't thought about rule 34 implications. I might ought to tiptoe away from this. Anybody else feel free . …..I've never seen a vampire killed THAT way before !

[SoupOrMan]

I immediately went to Anne McCaffrey's very awkward explanation of how one of her close friends turned out to be gay...