Welcome to October Edition.

One thing I learned about the Durham Fair this year is that you don't, or shouldn't, ask the bus driver about the best way to sneak in. They tell everyone to park in a lot located roughly a half a mile from the actual event, then everyone boards school busses that take you to the front gate. The problem with that is there's no opportunity in that time to find a place to sneak in. But what we figured out is if you get there late enough, they let you in for free anyway.

There are a few key points to the Durham Fair, and I think they're best summarized as 4. The first on this list is the farm animals on display.

If you have a problem with animals in cages, it's going to bother you. But if you get over the fact that they're in captive, and if they could roam around they'd probably just run in circles anyway, it bothers you less. If you're an animal, and people are staring at you and poking you with their fingers, it bothers you more. But if you are an animal with the capacity to understand that some people are there just to admire you, then you're probably pretty happy.

This is some kind of animal. The trouble with not being familiar with animals, beyond my illustrated wildlife treasury and an 8th grade understanding of the classification of species, is that you never know what you're looking at unless there's a label. This thing looks like a cow, but it could also have been some kind of llama. Let's try something easier.

This looks like a hamster, but it could just be a rabbit. Because of the perspective, it's really hard to say. The point is, it doesn't look like us, but it has a nose, and eyes, and for some reason it's funny to me because animals sometimes remind me of people I know.

This one is a Llama, for sure, and I remember because it had the weirdest bucktooths you ever seen a llama have. It seemed honestly perturbed by its teeth, and I saw no other llamas with the same orthodontal situation.

The next weird thing about the Durham fair is the rides. They have all these peculiar carnival rides which probably somehow have been made to fit onto 18 wheel trucks and probably make appearances all over the country. I find it hard to believe that this thing sits in a warehouse every year all year, only to come out at the Durham Fair. These rides are odd, because there's alot of very obvious hand-painted art stuff on them, like flames and what not. But I've seen this same thing before, so unless it's the exact same one, which is a possibility, these were mass-manufactured at some point in time. Probably the seventies.

There was this guy who was actually kind of bad at guessing people's weight, but got people's age fairly consistently. Part of the reason he was bad at guessing people's weight was there was this pattern. Girls always asked the age question, guys always asked the weight question. There is a statistical possibility that the weight question is more difficult, since people weigh, usually, between 100 and 200 pounds, while no one really is older than 100. The weight question has to be correct within 3 years for the guesser to win. The age question, 2 years. Whenever girls asked the weight question, though, the guy would just get it wrong, guessing way under, to keep everybody happy.

Then there was a building full of art produced by kids younger than 14. This drawing was done by Ryan Murphy, who is ten. It won first place for his age group. It was interesting to see art produced by kids that young because some of it was really impressive for their age.