ARCADIA, Calif. - There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that the entrance to the Santa Anita jockeys' room has been replaced with a revolving door. However, this exchange heard recently between racetrack wiseguys should hardly come as a surprise:

"You hear Desormeaux is going east again?"

"You mean he's going back to Japan?"

"No, the other East."

The peripatetic Mr. Desormeaux - he of the two Kentucky Derbies and Hall of Fame plaque - has become the poster child for a restless generation of stellar West Coast riders.

TUCSON, Ariz. - The obituaries last week for Oleg Cassini, who died at 92, described him as you would expect: fashion designer extraordinaire and legendary lover, the man who dressed, and undressed, some of the most spectacularly beautiful women in the world.

ARCADIA, Calif. - John Shirreffs was rubbing elbows with the grandstand crowd as A. P. Warrior and the rest of the San Felipe Stakes field moved into line last Saturday afternoon. An acquaintance wandered by and noticed that Shirreffs was in the right church, but the wrong pew.

"Isn't that your lucky spot over there?" Shirreffs was asked.

"Yes," he said, "and I'll be moving over there in just a minute."

NEW YORK - The one thing everyone can agree on about the future of New York racing is that the state's archaic racing laws need to be revised before any progress can be made. No one will bid for the franchise currently held by the New York Racing Association without such changes, and even NYRA itself has said it will not seek to continue its own existence past 2007 without these revisions.

ARCADIA, Calif. - A tip of the Irish topper to TVG for providing a full dose of the Cheltenham Festival from the English countryside this week.

ARCADIA, Calif. - If the end of this particular racing epoch is reached without Richard Mandella winning the Kentucky Derby, something will have gone terribly wrong.

ARCADIA, Calif. - A filly like Round Pond, fast and brave, is bound to have friends in all sorts of places, from the Delaware neighborhoods of owner Rick Porter to her winter playground of Oaklawn Park, where she added last Saturday's Azeri Handicap to her victories in last year's Fantasy and Honeybee.

ARCADIA, Calif. - It is mid-March again, time to channel the madness and turn up the heat on those colts and fillies who are starting to look like first-class tickets to Churchill Downs. In California, the winter has produced two of the best.

Of course, calling Brother Derek the top 3-year-old in the land isn't exactly a stretch, at least as long as long as Private Vow continues to lurk in the background and Bluegrass Cat remains content to be the king of Tampa Bay.

ARCADIA, Calif. - The man who has everything - knockout wife, loving kids, fast car, Hall of Fame nomination, Kentucky Derby favorite, and good health, as long as you don't count the titanium plates holding his spine in place - descended from one of his lung-busting runs in the mountains above his Glendora home late Friday morning with news that made him truly excited.

NEW YORK - The road to the future of New York racing took a couple of strange turns this past week with the introduction of one group's swan-song proposals to reform the state's racing laws, and another group's appointment of itself as not only a successor to the first group but also a potential bidder to wrest the franchise away from the New York Racing Association.