Fair is foul and foul is fair

Another work of art from our cynical (and increasingly elitist!?) cheerleader, Occam’s Razor. (For the record, Occam fessed up to me this morning that he wrote this in a fit of pique, AFTER seeing a carny ogle his 15-year old child. Occam says he’s “very, very sorry to have sounded like a high-minded Manhattanite”. )

Take it away, Occam. The title is from Macbeth, spoken by the witches, who could have been prophesying a phenomenon of modern times. See, it’s the time of year – at least where I live – for the county fair to roll into town. I’m certainly not breaking any ground here by positing that the fair is a terrifying place, which I suspect is not the goal of fair organizers, but is an inevitable result of their efforts. Whether it’s the the nails-on-chalkboard shrieking of swine; the putrescent, earthy smells floating from port-a-johns and livestock areas; the food offerings that all seem to come on a stick; or the infamous-to-the-point-of-being-legendary carny himself, whose licentious and lugubrious existence makes for a character so rich you’d think he emerged from the pages of literary genius. The place seems designed to have something horrific just around every corner, not unlike Macbeth’s Dunsinane. One certainly not need enter the fun house to get a twisted view on reality here.

What is most striking about the existence of the fair where I live in particular, is that my county has the highest percentage (29.2%) of residents over 25 years old who hold a post-graduate degree in the entire country. But when I go the fair a different populace oozes out of their hiding places and I find observing them to be fascinating. There’s a simple equation to use when gauging the level of sophistication of the crowd at any public gathering (and thus, perhaps, the event itself). If for a given person the number of Nascar-logoed clothing items + tattoos + cigarettes smoked per hour > the number of teeth that person has, the sophistication is low. The fair has this person in spades (and in wife-beaters). After all, a fair is just a rebranded carnival, and root of that word, carn, is shared with the pleasant-image-making carnage and carnal (and means “flesh,” And flesh you will see at the fair, generous piles of it spilling out shamelessly from under tube tops and such).

I bring this up as a science-relevant topic because a recent study from the Netherlands now makes me fear for the safety of fairgoers who choose to ride the rides there. I should note that I already assumed it was a risky proposition to ride a structure that is erected and dismantled weekly, by folks who are not exactly mechanical engineers, and though I’ve ridden the tallest roller coasters in the world, will not step onto a fair ride for all the horse meat that goes into a fair gyro. Researchers are now telling us that speaking to a pretty woman – or trying to impress her, more to the point – makes men dumb! Apparently, when confronted with a pretty woman a man devotes so many cognitive resources to impressing her (trying to get her to agree to have sex with him, really, when the niceties are peeled away) that he temporarily loses cognitive ability to function in other areas (“Just temporarily?” my wife skeptically asked when I read her this story). So the old pop culture image of a man walking stupidly away from a pretty woman, eyes glazed and with a stupid look on his face, was grounded in something real going on in men’s heads.

And if you’ve been to the fair you realize that the carnies find most any and all forms of female life open game for obvious ogling and fifth-grade-level double entendre (few things cause the bile to rise faster than watching a carnie check out your teenage daughter). They put significant amounts – it would appear – of already meager mental faculties into trying to impress anyone from the beer-bellied lady to the bearded lady. THEN they take control of the rides and are expected to operate these massive metal structures of grinding gears and screaming metal…do you really trust them – even under the best scenarios – with your well-being??

(Oh, and do the carnies ever get lucky with their incessant come-ons, you might wonder? Well, here’s another interesting finding from science: females don’t always choose the best sperm!)

Something wicked this way comes, folks, and it’s the fair. So if you have to go, stick with something safe. Like not getting out of your car in the parking lot.