You never sausage a fair

Yesterday, I made my annual trip to the Timonium State Fair, and it was as great as ever to strut around the midway and exhibits.  The great thing about a fair is that there is something for almost everyone...the kids like the rides, almost everyone likes the food, crafters and domestic engineers like the jams and jellies and needlepoint, and there are booths and kiosks selling everything from aluminum siding to political philosophy.  And, for crying out loud, there's a chance to sit there in a tent and play bingo.  Everyone's happy at a fair.  Give a kid some Coca-Cola, some cotton candy, candy apples and deep-fried Twinkies, along with some sausage sandwiches for ballast, and you have a happy, bouncy kid.

By the way...manufacturers of Roma Sausage...your chow is far better than your spelling.

I like to walk around and see it all, but year after year, I get the biggest kick out of wandering down to the livestock barns, where farm kids bring the sheep, hogs, goats and what-all else they have raised and groomed all year and enter them in exhibitions.  The kids even bunk right there, and you see their cots and their laptops and their cans of Red Bull and bags of Doritos right there two feet from the living quarters of their four-legged friends.  This, to me, is America at its finest: farm kids working and being proud of their work, and farm animals doing their thing in the late August sun.

When I was there, I felt like I was a million miles away from a land where people throw peanuts at a human being and claim that this is how they feed animals down there.   I wish the people who did things like that really were a million miles away.