i forgot to lower my expectations

we went to the state fair last night to watch the demolition derby. you may remember our trip to the state fair rodeo last year. the rodeo was pretty fun, partly because i'd never been to a rodeo. i had high expectations for the demolition derby. my only previous DD experiences were at the monroe county fair in bloomington, so i expected big things from a state fair one!

of course, i was let down. how could i forget that things here are always less exciting than i think they should be? the place was totally packed, but i don't know why. probably because there's not much else to do here? first they had three "qualifying rounds" that we thought might be the whole thing. they took all this time to get about 10 cars in the arena, then let them smash each other up for 1 minute. after that, if your car was still working you could go in the "main event". but its kind of hard to totally ruin these cars in only 1 minute. so there were 32 cars in the main thing. that is just too many. there were some good hits, and one car got flipped on its side, but pretty quickly most of the cars broke down in the middle of the arena. then there wasn't enough room for the remaining 5 cars to get up good speed for smashing the others. so we got bored and left before it was over.

the most impressive part was car 747. it was some kind of station wagon when it started, but its back end got totally crunched up so that there was nothing beyond the rear axle by the end. and it lost a tire pretty early on, but kept going on that bare rim!

there were also some fires. in bloomington, the volunteer firefighters are on hand and immediately put out any fires. here, there's a guy with a fire extinguisher and they only stop the action for him to do his work when they really, really have to. so i was sort of worried a car would explode or something.

the other amazing thing was that the drivers were totally retarded. they'd stop all the cars for some reason, and tell all the drivers they should get out NOW if they want to get out. then they'd let the cars start going again. THEN the drivers would decide to get out. umm, they just told you to get out while there are no cars smashing into each other but you decided to wait until it's totally unsafe????? and towards the end, there was about dead 20 cars all together in the middle, and the drivers were getting out and sitting on the car roofs, even though the remaining cars were still smashing into the pile sometimes. yeah, smart folks we have here at the state fair.

one highlight of the trip was my chili relleno dog. its like a corndog, but the hotdog has chilis in it and there's a pepper between the dog and the breading. it was pretty tasty. i didn't have any of the deep fried desserts because you just can't convince me a deep fried twinkie is worth $3.50 when i can make one at home. we also got free single-serving sample packs of spam.