State Fair 2014

We went to the State Fair yesterday. As always, the sheer scale of the thing was stunning. Literally. Maybe a city exists, somewhere in the Orient, as crowded as the Minnesota State Fair, but I haven’t been there:

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The Midway is where the rides are. Also the hairy lady, some sort of dwarf, and other oddities used to be exhibited there. Are they still? I don’t know. But the Midway is still a haven for society’s fringes. A couple of years ago, a (true) report spread among workers on the Midway–carnival guys–that the police were coming in the morning to arrest somebody on an outstanding warrant. Most of them disappeared over night. We only skirted the Midway since, as I noted on Instagram, I would rather get a root canal than go on most of the rides:

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We don’t go in for the weirder sorts of fair food–deep-fried alligator on a stick, chocolate-covered bacon, and so on–so I stuck with beer and brisket:

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The Seed Art exhibit in the Horticulture Building is always popular. Oddly, seed art leans toward the Left, politically (in Minnesota, anyway). I believe several Ph.D. dissertations have explored this phenomenon. I am glad to report that this year, there were no anti-George W. Bush works, nor any pro-gay marriage ones, either. I guess both of those battles are over, for different reasons. I liked this one a lot: it transports a familiar work of art, executed in corn and other seeds, to Minneapolis’s St. Anthony Falls:

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Why would anyone carve sculptures out of butter? If you have to ask, you don’t live in a dairy state:

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The Fair is beautiful at night. This is the horticulture building:

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More fair at night, with the grandstand in the background. Kid Rock played the grandstand last night. He seems like a state fair kind of guy:

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And, finally, Love From Minnesota, with my wife and youngest daughter (barely) visible in the foreground:

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The fair is open for 12 days, and one year they went on seven of them. That won’t happen this year; my daughter has a job. Time marches inexorably on. But not at the fair, where those in search of lost time can generally find it.

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