As movie promotional stunts go, the heartland bus tour Jim Wilson has planned to generate interest in his Kentucky Derby fairytale “50 to 1” is pretty tame stuff. Unless, of course, at some point the bus breaks down and is rescued by the cast of “The Walking Dead.”

For the 2013 release of the Colin Farrell thriller “Dead Man Down,” the producers hired a viral ad company that staged a fake strangulation murder in an elevator and compiled a video of people reacting to the scene as the elevator doors opened. The ad was hilarious. The movie was a dud.

The time for the second race on Jan. 11 at Gulfstream Park did not seem to fit in with the times on the rest of that card. If the one-mile time of 1:35.07 for Revolutionary’s win that day had been taken at face value, the horse would have earned a 103 Beyer Speed Figure.

In the 17 years Will Schwartz owned horses, he had never won a stakes race. When he woke up on Saturday, Feb. 1, he was eager to sit by a television and watch a few of his horses perform. But he had no idea what he was about to see.

Perhaps, the omen came when his mare, Code Variance, a half-sister to Justin Phillip, Keyed Entry, and Algorithms, gave birth to a Pennsylvania-bred colt by Big Brown at 3 a.m.

At 1:25 p.m., one of Schwartz’s homebreds from his SMD Stable, Charm City Dancer, left the gate at Park Racing in a maiden race and romped home by 4 1/2 lengths.

John Nerud turns 101 on Sunday, but before you load the car with balloons and birthday cake and head for his home on Long Island, better check with the man himself.

“They gave me a real nice party last year at a local club,” Nerud said earlier this week. “Nothing doing this year, though. Too much snow and more on the way Sunday night. I wouldn’t ask anybody to go out in this.”

Not even his gin-playing buddies from the club, who did venture forth not long ago to visit Nerud upon his return from a two-day hospital stay.

LAS VEGAS – The Seahawks surprisingly dominated the Broncos 43-8 in the Super Bowl last Sunday. Denver went off as a 2.5-point favorite after Seattle opened as a 2-point favorite at the LVH, a smaller favorite at most other Las Vegas sports books, and pick ’em at most offshore books.

More than 70 percent of the point-spread wagers came in on the Broncos during the fortnight of betting after the conference championship games, and some books went to –3 on Denver on Super Bowl Sunday to help balance their books.

To a certain extent, over the past couple of seasons, John Shirreffs has had to reintroduce himself to the Thoroughbred-racing public as somebody other than the man who trained Zenyatta. This has not been easy. As an act, Zenyatta qualifies as impossible to follow.

Shirreffs has picked up a few new clients, added a New York division to his California string, and even increased his activity to a point where, one month into 2014, he is on a pace to flirt with 200 starters this season, a number he’s never hit before.

When I finally sat down this week to watch the first three episodes of “Horseplayers,” the reality-television show about handicappers that debuted on the Esquire Network on Jan. 21, I expected to despise it. An hour a week of listening to a bunch of bettors proclaim themselves the world’s greatest handicappers sounded like a recipe for headache and annoyance, and given the genre’s propensity for fakery and inaccuracy, I figured it would get everything wrong to boot.

That big smile on Richie Migliore’s face displayed this Sunday during the Fox Sports 1 broadcast of the Donn Handicap from Gulfstream Park will be 100 percent sincere. Never mind that it’s Migliore’s first serious shot as a racing analyst on a major television network, or that it’s a chance to share his passion and knowledge about the game he loves with the largest audience of his newfound TV career.

For all of that, Migliore will just be glad he’s finally warm.

Want to see something wild on the track or even on a nearby road? Come to Maryland. Remember the loose horse on Route 1 near Laurel Park or the amazing journey of Spicer Cub last April at Pimlico? Last Thursday at Laurel, Chi Chi’s Pride and Trevor McCarthy completed the bizarre trifecta.

McCarthy’s feet came out of the stirrups immediately out of the gate when his mount bumped with Carnbrea’sdestiny. He never got his feet back in the irons. And somehow, Chi Chi’s Pride came rolling down the stretch to catch Carnbrea’sdestiny at the wire and win by a nose.

The hostage crisis has ended.

Thoroughbred racing in California at long last has been freed from the passive/aggressive captivity imposed by the owners of Hollywood Park. As of Friday, Jan. 31, the remaining few horses were being vanned out of the spacious, relatively modern backstretch that was used for nearly a decade as leverage for the owners of Hollywood Park to maintain their cynical stranglehold on the sport.