There are two ways to look at the guilty pleas entered this past week in a Saratoga County courtroom by two more New York Racing Association mutuel clerks.

If you're a strict law-and-order type or a booster of state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's all-but-official gubernatorial ambitions, the pleas are another notch in Spitzer's crime-busting belt and yet more evidence of rampant criminality at New York's tracks. The clerks were nailed for forgery in what prosecutors described as an identity-theft scheme to defraud the federal government of rightful tax revenue.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Russ Harris, the respected turf writer and historian, was sitting at the sports desk of the Miami Herald early on the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, working on a Sunday piece about the opening of the Tropical Park meet a few days hence.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Alert the peasants. Light the torches, and get the children out of the woods. The Mad Genius has left his castle in Maryland, and is wandering about the land, with sightings as far afield as the stables of Hollywood Park.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - The news that petite Megahertz will be running against the big, bad boys on Saturday in the $250,000 Hollywood Turf Cup is one of those stop-the-presses kind of stories. A man has just bitten a dog.

TUCSON, Ariz. - The Battle of New Mexico will end this week after two years of bitter fighting.

It has been the most savage contest in the Land of Enchantment since July 1878, when Billy the Kid and the McSween Crowd shot it out with a sheriff's party that included 15 paid gunslingers. The sheriff won, burning down McSween's house after a three-day standoff, but Billy the Kid escaped.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Now that the three groups associated with the Eclipse Awards have streamlined the voting process, perhaps there's hope that more industry reforms will follow. After all, it took only 30 years to scrap the absurd bloc voting system. Imagine how quickly such knotty problems as medication, licensing, and access to the Pimlico backstretch can be solved.

High marks go to the peacemakers at the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, the National Turf Writers Association, and Daily Racing Form for their Eclipse compromise. Believe this - it wasn't easy.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - On Sunday, the best race in North America will not be in New York or Los Angeles. Nor will it be in south Florida, Louisville, Ky., or any other place where Thoroughbreds are asked to perform the simple task of running on flat ground and turning left.

Sunday's best race, full-blooded and meaningful, takes place in the little South Carolina town of Camden, on a spiraling course of 2 3/4 miles, over 17 tall, brush-topped fences that require both horse and rider to exhibit a bravery normally associated with pitched battle.

The skirmish between the Churchill Downs Simulcast Network and the Southern Racing Cooperative may be over by the time you read this, but the war over fair rates for simulcast signals could just be starting. Its outcome will dictate the economics of the racing industry going forward.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - It is starting to get cold, and wet, and dark long before dinner. Time to snuggle down with a hot toddy, a warm dog, and a good story - something ripe and mysterious - because nothing puts the world on hold like a fine work of fiction.

Horse racing fiction occupies a corner of its own. The game is strange enough anyway - why make stuff up? - and yet some great writers have spun their own racing fables, from Ernest Hemingway's "My Old Man" to D.H. Lawrence's "Rocking Horse Winner" to the "Black Stallion" series of Walter Farley.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - On Friday night, Hollywood Park will offer the first of two special evening programs, featuring a postrace concert by those refugees from the 1980's, Bow Wow Wow. For those who like their irony served cold, please note that Hollywood Park, a Churchill Downs Inc. track, does not allow dogs on its premises.