Stray Hawkeye

If you’ve been reading the site for a year or more, you may remember the State Fair Bingo cards I posted last year.  If not, go read that and come back.  K, back now?  Good.

As you may notice on reading the cards, a few (read: almost all) of the squares on that version are vaguely to really, um, not so nice.  And, the squares are mostly the same across cards, just a little shuffled.  Well, Lazy Lightening to the rescue!  (via Because Emily Says So)  Lazy Lightening made up a whole, whole bunch of new ones, with way more options.  Also, there’s a kids edition, which, though less amusing, would seem like a good option for those who don’t want to keep them tucked away for most of the time.  Don’t worry, the new grown up version has some new squares that fit well with the old style ones too (I believe “Cougar on the prowl” is new, among others) though on the whole, it’s a bit more tame (for better or worse, depending on your view).

There’s now a part of me that, knowing these cards are at least reasonably well known now, wants to get together about 5 to 10 people, and dress up to make a complete blackout of one of the cards of the old version and walk around the fair for a day together, just to see how many people get it.

The Minnesota State Fair started today.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the fair by any means.  I went for the first time last year, and I will say the various fried whatever on a stick was wonderful.  I’m pretty sure I spent as much on an afternoon / evening of food there as I would have at a fancy restaurant, and I would totally do it again.  The deep fat fried pickles were way better than I expected, and the deep fat fried candy bar on a stick is much better if you let it cool just a little to a more gooey state if you get it fresh right out of the fryer.  Everything else is just sort of a blur of fried wonderfulness.

The other great part of the State Fair is, of course, the people watching.  Last year some co-workers and I took an afternoon off to go, and one of them forwarded us people watching fair bingo cards (pdf).  I have no idea where it came from originally, so I unfortunately can’t credit whoever it was that originally came up with it, just got it as an email forward.  It’s great, terrible, but great.  Not having been to the State Fair before, I mostly thought it was a joke.  Not so.  We forgot to print off cards before we left, but by the end we were pretty sure we were playing for a black out card instead of a simple line, and I think we all would have won pretty easily.