This morning, at Byerly's Restaurant, Dad says,

So, you know what'd be great, right?


Let's say you decide to go out as a can of Dutch Boy paint, right? And we build a frame at the top, and the rest can be cloth hanging down from the lid, except for the front, which is cardboard or something. And so you're this can of paint, and when you ring the doorbell, you see, the people come to the door, and all of a sudden--you're listening, right?


All of a sudden, the front of the costume pops open--we build in a hinge--to reveal you inside, dressed up as the little Dutch Boy! You're a little Dutch Boy inside the can of Dutch Boy paint! And you're in overalls, and have that little hat, and I don't know; you say some phrases in Dutch, y'know, "Tiki doopee bippi bappee hookee mikki fikki fakki," something like that. Ha, "Beepee doopaa mubbi bubbi dokka wokka misha masha!" That isn't Dutch, but you could find something in a phrasebook.


Here's another one! You're an outhouse--


--No no, wait!; you're an outhouse, and you have the little moon carved into the door and everything. You get up to the doorstep, ring the bell, and lower to the ground, so it just looks like there's naturally an outhouse there. And when the people come and answer their door, you pop out of the thing and say "Trick or Treat!" Wouldn't that be hilarious?


Wouldn't they get a kick out of that?


Or you could be a can of spraypaint!


Like a can of Krylon spraypaint! Something cylindrical wouldn't be that hard to pull off. Or you could be a German beer stein, and the thing with the beer stein would be that out of the top, right below the rim is a bubble-blowing machine! You walk down the street with a bubble-blowing machine! And there are all these bubbles everywhere you walk. Geez louise!

Sometimes, in life, I just stand very still and contemplate motives. Every single time I see this thing looming in front of me is one of those times.



Magnum: the Ride has been, for me at the very least, one of the staple draws to the Minnesota State Fair. Not that I really want to ride it; the notoriety that shitty rentable rides tend to have of being deathtraps has killed my desire to do that in the past years. For me, the attraction isn't in the three-and-a-half degrees of motion granted by the little carts. Rather, ..well,

look at it.

There are three note-worthy exceptions to the basic motif of the State Fair rides. Magnum is the first and most important; amongst a sea of rides with hot bikini chicks airbrushed so haphazardly as to make their heads look like fungusy lipsticked peanuts (thus rendering the hot bikini chicks decidedly not hot), the unexpected likeness of Tom Selleck descending from the starry blue and yellow heavens is a strange respite.

His hat is so huge!; the hair sticking out beneath it looks like it could be a viable set of wings. In the middle of the ride for some reason, there's one of those dancing/sunglassed Coca-Cola cans that you could have bought somewhere like Spencer's Gifts somewhere like the late-eighties. I don't know. Not at all.

Now, I lack the pictures for these, but the second note-worthy ride is themed after Moby Dick, which is cool I guess, but not nearly as cool as a theoretical Bartleby the Scrivener ride I envisioned thirty seconds ago. Of course, people would prefer not to go on that one, I suppose, ahahahaahaaahaha.

No. Three is a scary Chubby Checker ride. Scary in that red-eyes-and-creepy-smile-folds-on-Chubby's-face-when-you're-up- close-to-him-and-spinning-in-a-metal-death-chariot kinda way. The only other thing that has that peculiar kind of scariness is, of course, a ride in a school bus with Louis Anderson.

In other news, this is the loneliest thing in the world, and also,

Litter is a slap in America's face. Please.