Beck on a stick

Yesterday I hit that "suddenly free" state at about 1:30--all of the ants were fed, the undergraduates were taken care of (for a little while, at least), and I did not have any immediate, urgent reading to complete. All I had was a stack of exams to grade, so I shoved them in my backpack and went over to Mill's End Espresso for a while. 3 Roots coffeeshop is just around the corner from our house, but it keeps irritating me recently. If it isn't a meeting of the Phoenix Anarchists, some dude or another is playing crazy music that makes it impossible to concentrate and steals all of the tables in the place to set up his ridiculous equipment. Plus they've been closed for a bit. At Mill's End, the only complaints I had were the crappy piped-in music (conveniently drowned out with headphones and better music) and the lack of reuseable dishes. Oh well. I got some grading done and then met up with kihle, figment80, teague_o and D to go to the Arizona State Fair and Beck concert.

One of the definite highlights of the fair was trying to see how many items one could get served on a stick: cheeseburgers, fried twinkies, fried Snickers, fried Oreos, corndogs, potato balls, fried cheese, etc. etc. We went to check out the livestock barns, which were a bit on the disappointing side overall, though there were some crazy-looking fancy pigeons with all sorts of feathers on their feet, and the pygmy goats were cute as usual. One of the coolest parts was a set of giant butter sculptures--a desert scene carved out of butter. The cow looked like a serious structural feat in butter. After that, we got lots of fried fair food (man did I ever miss Fisher Fair Scones at that point) and wandered through the rides, admiring the many ways that one could be induced to vomit or have an epileptic seizure.

Then concert time arrived. The opening band, the Islands, was terrible. D commented that it seemed like I was shivering a lot (which would have made sense since the place was overly air-conditioned), but it wasn't shivering--it was shuddering at how horrifyingly awful the music was. The one redeeming feature was when some guy came out wearing what looked like a long, thin diaper draped over the top of his head and started rapping. Besides that, I was appalled to hear such a wretched band.

Fortunately, Beck was a whole lot better. I think my favorite song involved band members playing on dinnerware--cups, plates, the table. They put on a great show. My one complaint was regarding the free glow sticks that were passed out before the concert. They looked cool while people were holding them or waving them around, but of course that had to escalate to people throwing them around the arena and then at the band. Those things can be pretty formidable projectiles.

I felt a bit woozy after the concert, but decided to ride on one of the vomit/epilepsy things anyway. The ride was called The Experience, and the announcer asked us all if we were ready for The Experience before it all started. It was fun, but a bit too short. I think my favorite part was how much my hair flew around as we were whirled around and around and upside down. Then we walked around the fair a bit more, checked out some insanely tacky toilet seats (sparkly gold!), and that was that.

So. The AZ Fair was fun, but made me pretty nostalgic for the Puyallup Fair. Oh well. The Beck concert was still smashingly fun.

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This has to be one of the funnier "I, Anonymous" posts of late.