Featured Guest Writer(s): Grammar Nazi

CR may be sick as hell and trapped in responsibility hell, but other people still love you!

I have gone to the Iowa State Fair every summer since before I can remember. I go multiple times every year and I can’t remember ever missing one, although I suppose it’s possible that I did. Regardless, I plan to attend the fair every year until I die, because it is fantastically wonderful. There’s even a musical about it, unless you count the movie version where they changed it to Texas for some reason. Ignore that movie. It’s Iowa. Stupid movie.

But If I Ruled The World, there are certain aspects of the fair that I would change, and I’m going to rant about them here, even though I’m relatively sure that none of you care.

So here I go!

1. THE FAIR WANTS ME TO BE FATTER
The main attraction at the fair is always the food. The mini-donuts, the pork chops on sticks, the honey tubes, the icky little free samples of cheese that are always stale but people form lines to eat them anyway, the freakish ice cream pellets that freeze to your tongue painfully before melting and releasing a split-second burst of vanilla flavor before becoming tasteless and drizzling down your throat (these are inexplicably popular), and the pizza slices of varying quality that are scattered all over the fairgrounds are all there, taunting me, saying “Eat me! Be fat! Be fat!” And I do. And I am.

The only problem with removing this aspect of the fair is that it would reduce the size of the fair by half and reduce the appeal of the fair by three quarters. Without the food, the fair would become a twenty minute “Let’s look at tractors!” kind of thing, as opposed to the day-consuming “Let’s eat! Ooh, tractors! Oh, I have to take a shit! I’ll take a corndog to the bathroom with me! Hey, there are tractors in the bathroom!” kind of thing it is now.

2. THE FAIR IS RACIST
There was some singer this year who sang an old song called “Don’t Go Near The Indians,” or something like that. It was the touching story of a father advising his son to avoid Indians, and then it turned out that the son is actually an Indian himself and the father stole him when he was a baby from the Indian warrior who murdered his actual biological son (yes, it’s confusing, I know). I just stared at the musician in horror. The old people in the audience cheered.

Also, every year there’s a new sculpture made out of butter, and this year it was the cast of Peanuts. Franklin, the black character in Peanuts, is among them, and the butter they used for him is brown. The problem with this is that everyone thought that he was supposed to be Pig Pen, the dirty character from Peanuts, even though Pig Pen, complete with smudgy butter, was directly behind Franklin. I can’t decide if Iowans think that black people are actually just people who don’t bathe or if the butter sculptor is just really bad at depicting race, but something’s really fucking amiss here.

3. THE BIG BOAR IS A BIG BORE (HA HA PUNS)
The “Big Boar” is a huge draw at the fair–the year’s most gigantic pig, confined in a cage so we can stare at. It used to be interesting, but it isn’t anymore because a few years ago, the big boar had diseased testicles that were swollen to the size of watermelons. After having seen such painfully gargantuan testicles, I can’t help but be bored with normal-sized ones. The big boar cage should be replaced by a “Boar With the Most Aesthetically Interesting Disease” cage.

Thank God I’m not doing illustrations for this article.

4. THE UGLIEST CAKE CONTEST
My father and I discovered this about a decade ago and were delighted with the disturbingly awful creations some of these people make. This year’s contest featured a toilet-shaped cake with yellow frosting and chocolate bars in the bowl; it was pretty hideous. There was also a giant cake face vomitting out all sorts of nasty stuff.

But there’s something wrong with this contest. The cakes aren’t edible.

Not that I would want to eat them, mind you. Tasty vomit is still vomit. But shouldn’t a cake be edible? And wouldn’t it be more of a challenge, and thus more contest-worthy, to make a cake both edible and disgusting? You can put a fake plastic spider on a cake to make it creepier, but if you tried to eat that mother, you’d choke! It’s not a fucking cake!

5. CREEPY PERFORMER PEOPLE
My most recent fair outing included a visit to Pioneer Hall, which is a boring antique building. But it also has the best lemonade I’ve ever tasted, so we got some of that and sat on some benches and watched a trio of pretty decent musicians play some old-fashioned shit. And it was nice.

Then the guitar player decided it was time to dance. So she puts on a tape of some generic folksy dance music and starts frolicking across the stage and clapping with a big dopey grin on her face. This is why Iowans shouldn’t breed, guys. It was truly frightening. My mom turned to me and said “I think we need to leave now.”

Then the guitar player said she was going to bring her kids onstage and dance with them, which was potentially cute. You know, kids trying to dance is cute. It’s got the “aww” factor and stuff. Mom and I left anyway. But my aunt stayed. This is what apparently happened next:

The woman called for her children. Then she opened a box. Then she scolded her children, who were apparently living inside of the box, for fighting.

Then she pulled out puppets.

Puppets.

Scarred for life by merely hearing about it, this is Elliott Hoffman, filling in for poor widdle sick CR.