Mallory's Camera

We’re on the outer bands of what I guess is now Tropical Storm Irene – a very wide storm, if nothing else. I put all my plants outside to get watered and am cooking pasta with Alfredo sauce so I’ll have something to eat in case the power goes. I must say as a major weather event, this is something of a wash – ha, ha, ha – but then again a 5.9 earthquake isn’t very big so I didn’t get all that media hype last week either.

I have tons of candles and books if the power goes out, although I most devoutly hope the power will not go out as I have a shitload of work to do and am finally in the mood to do it.

I suppose it’s only common sense to prepare for the worst.

Faithful readers will have figured out by now I don’t have much common sense.

Personally, my favorite news story right now is the planet made of diamonds…

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I did end up going to the Trumansburg Fair with B yesterday, and we had a very low key, good time and I remembered why I like him so much – he’s excellent company.

The T-burg Fair is quite tiny and of course, coincides with the mega-giant New York State Fair so as attractions go, there ain’t much. Ithaca used to have a state fair I believe – it is the seat of Tompkins County, after all – but then people decided they’d rather have a Walmart and a Lowes so the fairgrounds gave over to Big Box stores.

But the T-burg Fair has been going on for 160 years. Their specialty animal judging category is workhorses: Teams of draft horses that pull carriages. They had maybe five teams who take their surreys very seriously, and various competitions involving esoteric reign holds including something called the Unicorn Hitch (see above.) The prancing Belgians and Percherons were very impressive.

Just so odd to see these teams, relegated to a tiny, obscure niche, and to know as recently as 100 years ago, they were the dominant mode of transportation. All history is really the history of transportation, you know. Personally? I think humans made a big mistake inventing the car, and Henry Ford is every bit as evil as Adolph Hitler. Just think of what a better world this would be if we’d gone straight from horse-drawn carriages to the airplane – you’d still be able to explore exotic places but you wouldn’t have to fuck around with ground pollution and Arab oil.

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After the T-burg Fair I did my Dollar Store rounds. Dollar Stores are something I didn’t know existed until approximately three years ago. They’re an integral part of the Poverty Porn lifestyle and have their own hierarchy which I’d like to write about at length some time, but not today, not today. Suffice it to say I ended up finding some incredibly interesting items but didn’t buy any of them. No, I stocked up on scented candles – five for five bucks. They’re just as large and smell just as good as the ones that go for $14.99 apiece and Bed, Bath and Beyond, another one of those box stores they ripped out the Ithaca Fairgrounds for.