Horse Sense: Chemistry professor Peggy Kline might take comfort from Oscar Wilde’s pithy comment that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. An accomplished equestrian, she recently made it into the Chronicle of the Horse (what, you don’t subscribe?) not for winning a competition, but for, as she put it, “simply having weird animals.”

How weird is weird? Well, she thought maybe her thoroughbred Cool had a sixth sense, seeing things no person could. Here’s what she told Chronicle of the Horse: “Cool has a tendency to shoot his head straight up in the air with his ears pitched forward, every muscle tensed, and stare at things that aren’t there – or at least that I can’t see. One day he simply wouldn’t go near one corner of the ring. He gave me the whole routine with the head up, heart pounding.

"Finally, I got off to lead him into the evil corner to prove to him that there really wasn’t anything there (but) I discovered a small toy car, maybe an inch or two long, sitting just inside the arena fence. . . My guess is he really does see things, it’s just that I can’t.”

Well, guess what, Peggy? You can see things in chemistry formulas that I never could, hard as I tried, in high school.