"I'm studying for the math fair. If I win, I'll get a brand new protractor." - Lisa, The Simpsons

This is a huge cabbage from the fair. The state fair? It's all about the huge cabbage that you need a forklift to move, yet which still tastes like . . . cabbage. When is somebody going to give me a steak larger than Texas?

The 75th Annual Tanana Valley State Fair started on Friday, and our first foray was on Saturday. Part of the fair is seeing people you know. Since living in Fairbanks is pretty close to living on an island, going to the Fair means running into oodles of people you know.

Even people you don’t know tend to be nice. The people at the Alaska DOT were excited to see The Boy amble over to them and begin to talk with them about roads. As a five-year-old, he probably knows more about road design and the various pros and cons of different material (asphalt versus concrete) than most adults, and had a great conversation. We went further down the line and people were falling all over themselves to give The Boy things. He ended up walking away from the Fair with a flashlight, a dozen pencils, five comic books, three coloring books, a dozen buttons (various governor candidates) and enough stickers to patch Bill Gates’ roof.


This is a combination of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam. He'll leave you coal in your stocking if you're bad, or maybe indict you on Federal charges.

We hit the midway. The games were fun, but the big attraction for The Boy were the huge hydraulic and electric solid steel contraptions whose primary intent was to flip a human body around at about half the speed of barf. I should know, since my older self is much more barf prone than my eighteen-year-old self. The Boy and I hit two rides, and we quit after he found the Tilt-A-Whirl just a bit too challenging.

The Mrs. put up with this, despite an increasing level of boredom. The Mrs. was stuck with our 15-month old, Pugsly. Pugsly and The Mrs. sat and waited while The Boy and I made each other miserable by riding in rides that made us want to hurl. This drove The Mrs. a bit nuts, and made Pugsly hungry, but opening his eyes makes Pugsly hungry. If your job were to stand around with a baby while other people went and had fun, well, you’d feel like Madonna’s employees. The Mrs. just felt a bit chapped having to sit around while her men went out twirled.

All of us (queasy or bored) then flitted off and went to the livestock show barns. As we were entering, the sign indicated that this barn held “Lambs, Goats, and Cavies”. The Mrs. was pretty sure that they’d misspelled “Calves”. No.



This is a cavy. It's not a prize from the fair for putting a wooden ring around a bottle, but a real animal. I squeezed this one and it did not squeek.

A Cavy (plural, Cavies) is a real animal, though I can’t see how something that so resembles a ball of trembling fur could have ever stayed alive in the wild with, well, a tame toothless 22 year old mouse not eating it. That a cavy exists is perhaps the best argument for creation science that I’ve ever seen, even though I’m thinking that he pointy clawed animals of the world would argue for evolution, after they’d finished eating me.


Notice that a cavy has no hind legs, which makes it even more of a bed-covering stuffed animal of a creature.

I looked on Google, and couldn’t find any use for cavy fur, nor could I find any recipes for cooking them. I think that’s because a cavy is essentially just a pet. That’s okay, I don’t (often) think how my dog might taste if I were really, really hungry, but when I did have that thought the recurring theme was “barbeque sauce.” Maybe that would be good for cavies, as well. Mmmm, bbq’d cavy.

We finally decided to leave. As the Fair receded in our rearview mirror, I reflected on the day. We’d had fun, seen cavies, and ridden rides, which is what the Fair is all about. Now if I could just figure out how to cook a cavy.