Month: September 2020

So, The Fair being what it is, it’s in your blood if you’re from Spencer, Iowa. Everybody goes to the thing, or if they don’t, it affects them in some way.

In 1995, it affected me in an adverse way and I’ve rarely returned, with the exception of a meet-up or two with my grand-kids and one trip with my buddy Phil, who had been out of the area for a long time.

Then, this YEAR being what it is, they cancelled the Fair, except they replaced part of it with an “un-fair”, meaning some food stands from Bryan’s Concessions (Argos, IN) and two nights of auto racing.

They might have mentioned that you could buy food at the concession stand at the races, but if they did, I missed that.

We went to the un-fair; it only seemed logical that if nobody else was going to be there, we should be, and while we were at it, get Tom Thumb donuts and as far as I was concerned, a funnel cake instead of our usual hiking in nice safe county parks.

I tried telling Joy at the donut place that we were Internet Live Bloggers With Influence and I felt that was worth a dozen donuts, but she of course was merely working there and couldn’t be giving away donuts even if I weren’t lying.

Reassured that at lease one familiar landmark was there, we ventured into the rest of the food stand area, which was concentrated in the center area south of the grandstand, one of the busiest intersections on the grounds. This was the middle of the afternoon, by the way, and it was a beautiful one.

It wasn’t really hard to negotiate the crowd…….

I opted for a funnel cake, a poor choice for a guy with a beard and black pants.

I decided to livestream on Facebook:

We left to regroup and agreed that it was such a novel experience that we should return in a couple of hours and attend the races in the grandstand and I could get the corn dog that I almost got when I got the funnel cake.

When we came back, there were more people, and the funnel cake line was too long and we got the nine dollar burrito instead which proved to by my master from hell about three o’clock the next morning, hence my reference to wishing I’d known the grandstand concession stand was even there and had pork burgers. And, I think, caramel corn.

But I got to shoot some video with my phone to see how long my battery would last if I did that, and I streamed as much of the races as I could. That proved too much for the data I have available (for some reason), so I switched over to wi-fi from the mobile hot spot I’d brought along for just that purpose. I failed to figure on using more than the 1GB it had available, so I missed the feature race of course; again, this year being what it is.

Here are the videos from the heats. I know nobody will ever watch these, but just pretend they’re some band that’s incredibly good and also friendly to Internet bloggers:

Facebook got all huffy about my first attempt to stream, pointing out that I was ripping off Lee Greenwood’s (who?) “Star Spangled Banner”, which I imagine the racing association itself was also doing.

After getting over the shock of getting caught in a criminal act like that in front of the entire planet, I got down to work until my phone summarily informed me that I had used just about enough dats and I did two “lives”:

So, I switched just plain video on my phone until it said something about having seven minutes’ worth of power left and shut off, meaning I shot all this stuff and then didn’t get the feature.

It’s a long story best not told here, but this whole thing completed a circle for me. Whatever it is I was referring to as a bad experience in 1995 took place at exactly the same grandstand location from which I was shooting. And oddly, the guy who won the feature (not shown here because who knew?), was the SON of the guy who won the last feature I attended here, probably 50 years ago.

So it was a pretty good day.