Soapbox

Sloppy Doughnuts

     "This food is not nearly bad enough" Ted commented as we sat in the shade and ate our Bourbon chicken. "This is the State Fair: we can do much  better."
      By which, of course, he meant 'worse'.
      Well the state fair is nothing if not filled with opportunities for bad food. I'm told there are deep fried Doritos this year. Aren't Doritos already fried? Are these batter dipped and fried again? Wait- don't tell me. I don't want to know.

      Because the donut burger they came out with a few years ago is not quite disgusting enough, this year the Krispy Kreme (never trust a doughnut that can't spell) folks offer a "Sloppy Doughnut" too: manwich between 2 glazed doughnuts. 
      Also on my "WTF?" list: the dairy barn now offers "Sweet corn" as an ice cream flavor. Yes, this is a thing. I'm not sure it should be. No, I did not try it, being (in my old age) something of an ice cream snob. Perhaps it is quite yummy.
      But I don't think so.

      We don't do rides or games, but if you poke around, there's lots of stuff to see, even though it's usually always the same stuff. Tradition! I enjoyed looking at the native Ohio prairie flower exhibit and the whole tent about bee-keeping, where I bought some heirloom seeds which I was assured bees like.
    We waved at Smokey the Bear and reminisced about bygone years when the kids were so amazed that Smokey knew so much about them. As we walked on I heard someone behind us say "Wait- Dad, how did Smokey know my name?" and smiled.

    There were a couple of signs where fair urged visitors to take a selfie with the Butter cow and post it to Instagram. Like this is going to go viral, and soon people at other state fairs will be bummed because those wild and crazy folks in Ohio get a butter cow to take selfies with. Maybe it will: life is just that weird.

    We skipped the fair last year and while I'm sure it will always be one giant freak show that smells like a french fry left out in the sun too long, I wondered if there had been some changes. There were.
     The Sky glider seems to have been shortened by at least one giant pole. Since this is the ONLY ride we ever do, I felt a teensy bit cheated.
    The big-ass Bar-b-Que place with the entire dead pig with an apple in its mouth is gone. (As a kid I finally decided that the pig was plastic, because it looked the same every year, and how long could a dead pig- even a cooked one- sit out in the sun? That reduced the gross-out factor every time I walked by quite a bit.)
     At the horse show they did not have anyone playing that weird, "Take me out to the Ballgame" organ. Instead, they just played recorded music, including, while the guy in the John Deere zambonied the ring, "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy". I don't know if this is a permanent change or if the old lady who plays organ was out sick today. At first I loved the change. Then I began to feel nostaligic for the organ. Tradition! Such is the perverse nature of the human heart.

     I definitely saw some new events at the Horse show. When we walked in, they were running Mule team agility. Only one hitch was actually mules, the others were draft horses. They had to navigate an obstacle course and I swear one team did weave poles! OK- weave cones. And it was really slow. But it was a thing!
    As we watched these teams performing what was once a useful skill, I remarked that, when society collapses, the folks who own draft horses who know how to pull and turn and back up with be sitting pretty while the rest of us dig up our front yards with our hands to plant potatoes.

     A competition was announced called "Unicorn hitches" which I was excited about. But, it turns out this is NOT teams of unicorns pulling wagons (which was a massive disappointment) and was just teams of 3 horses with a single horse out in front.
     And then we saw– a horse dressed like a unicorn. This was an exhibition of 'reining' which basically consisted of the horses twirling around in circles and then running around the ring and then stopping quickly. And the first horse had a golden horn strapped to its forehead. It looked a little bit embarrassed, frankly.
    The second horse in that exhibition had a ton of glitter all over it's rump. Like 'a 3 year old decorating a picture for mommy' ton. Ted wondered, since the first horse was a unicorn and this one was all sparkley, maybe he was supposed to be a vampire horse? But the song he ran around to was about being a star.
    We also saw break-dancing on horseback. It was a bunch of fearless kids doing something called "vaulting" – somersaulting and hanging sideways and jumping on and off the backs of some incredibly patient horses.
     The last competition of the afternoon had only one entrant and one horse. She trotted around the ring a few times and ~surprise!~ they gave her a blue ribbon. I totally called her the winner as soon as she came in. Do I know my horses or what?

    I don't remember the NRA being such a big presence at the fair before. They had a booth and a tent. Yay guns. There was also a booth selling 'humorous' signs to put on your house, a large number of which proclaimed the owners absolute right to shoot you dead and bury you in his back yard, which is totally hi-LARious because it's not like people in this country ever shoot innocent folks who come to the door asking for directions or anything.
    There was also a booth selling really disturbing… ok, I'll go ahead and call them "Religious" t-shirts, even though they were more sado-masochistic fettish-ist than Christian. One featured Christ's flayed and bloody back and said "Read Between the Lines". Another showed 3 men dying in the most god-awful way mankind ever dreamed up with the caption "Public Display of Affection".
    Right.
     Another vendor was selling personalized flags to hang by your front door. The example they had up showed a bottle and said,                            "It's 5 o'clock somewhere! The Johnsons"
Which tells people driving past, "No matter when you knock on our door… we're probably gonna answer it drunk." Awesome.

    After we had digested lunch we got a cup of french fries. Probably about once a year everyone should have a cup of State Fair fries: the long thin ones that hang out the top of a cup- greasy, salty and crisp and volcanically hot, then dipped in a ton of ketchup. This is necessary for medicinal purposes. Sure your arteries take a hit, but when you bite into the first one, the endorphin rush is incredible.
   After we had digested them, we got a funnel cake to share. I know- more fried food. But I was careful to select a booth that also sold deep fried twinkies, deep-fried Snickers bars and chocolate covered cheesecake on a stick. I figured, with so many calories in them, there would be very few left over to be in our little funnel cake. (Though at the fair, "light on the powdered sugar please" turns out to be 3 giant shakes of the sugar sifter instead of 6).

    I always like to hit the craft exhibit: quilts and cakes, etc. I would say that quilting will also be useful after the societal apocalypse, but these amazing creations weren't Amish quilts- they were machine made, and not with a treadle machine. But the knitters and crocheters and heck yes the gals who still spin wool: they'll be a hot ticket!
    There was a case of things made from 'repurposed materials' and featured a wedding dress made from- and I am not making this up- used dryer sheets. Unlike the cute belt made from aluminum can pop-tops or the purse made from the top of a pair of jeans, a wedding dress made from dryer sheets is not actually a useful thing, even if it does have a slip made from grocery bags so it's not completely transparent. Obviously, "useful after the apocalypse' was not a requirement for the category.
    I guess this year's 'wacky' category was shit made from Brillo pads, because there was a display featuring everything from  a dolphin sculpture to shoes and a coat, all made out of Brillo pads. The coat used pads without soap but the dolphin was all pink and wooly, and if there was a sprinkler incident, it would probably start to foam.

   Well, people can make things with anything. I haven't figured out why- but then, with so much of the fair I haven't figured out why. Like those sloppy doughnuts.