I went to the animal fair... the birds and the beasts were there...

Finally, I can write. I'm going to separate these into different posts, instead of one long one, because I find it easier to read that way.

Starting with Friday...

After I checked my Daphnia experiment in lab I met Shrewd at my dorm, and we got directions and headed to the Deerfield Fair. The Deerfield Fair is held every year, never really changes, and is a lot of fun. Shrewd and I always like to go.



We were planning on meeting Mummy and Daddy there, but the cell phone reception was bad (isn't it always?) so we wandered around a bit. First stop was the sheep barn:



Which is one of Shrewd's favorite places. Then there was the goats...



And the pigs. We caught a bit of the pig show:



And then met up with Mummy and Daddy at last, as there was reception by the swine barn. Also by the swine barn? A sausage stand. Sketchy.

We moved on the poultry barn. There were ducks that looked like Arthur from Sheldon,



and drag queen chickens. Fabulous.



We got soup in a bread bowl for lunch, then the next stop was the draft horse heavy pulling show. Basically we watched giant horses, over seven feet tall, drag 3000+ lbs across the ring. Each team had to be backed up carefully towards the weight (which was put in place by tractor). This was sometimes a bit challenging, as the draft horses were all too eager to go. The first team was called Redneck Express, which amused me.



After watching that we swung over to where the Teamsters (4-H types) were competing with their oxen. The first kid looked about 8 and his oxen responded to him like puppies. Adorable. But not very obedient. The second kid had a little better luck with his.



The oxen were so sweet, but very big, and there were two cute little kids (can't take pictures of kids not your own, that makes you a predator, or I would have gotten one of these guys) playing on the fence and, for a little while, IN the oxen ring. One of the mommies caught this and freaked out, racing over to rescue the little kid.

One of the competitors was the regional champion oxen-raiser. These are hers. She's adult-sized, compare to the little ones before.



Then the draft horse barns! Ah, horsies...



And oxen, which I actually had to look on Wikipedia to figure out that pulling oxen are basically just steers. I always figured it was like the difference between a dairy cow and a beef cow but turns out that a neutered male dairy cow is an ox. Actually all cows/domesticated cattle are oxen, but these guys are the only ones we call such. I'd show you a picture from that barn but the only one I have has family members in it.

But here, have a dairy cow. That was our next stop:



And we saw them get milked:



By this time it was getting late. We went and got a Blooming Onion to share, then looked at the shops on the fairway, including a cowboy hat shop where Shrewd got a cool fancy hat, and then got fried dough, fudge, and decided to leave.



That was fun. Then we went to the Olive Garden all the way in Manchester, and I wound up getting back to campus really late. But it was okay, in the end.

Foods of the Future, as predicted by Basio

More Floralia. Thus more flowers:



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So maybe, if you were paying attention to the news a month or so ago you heard that they compared the proteins from the bone collagen of a dinosaur (some proteins escaped fossilization) to that of a chicken, thus proving that chickens evolved from dinosaurs, after all. Up until now the whole "birds from dinosaurs" hypothesis was mostly based on the appearance and the transitional forms; this offers DNA proof of the connection.

Of course you know what this means.

Dinosaurs taste like chicken.

Now, you may not know this, but I really want to start moving away from eating birds. I'm not completely opposed to them, but at this point my mild discomfort with their consumption is tempered by the fact that this school can't seem to cook fish right and if I don't eat chicken my anemia will come back and I will become pale and sickly and prone to dramatic fainting spells at inopportune times, or maybe I'll just have to start swallowing iron pills again.

Anyway, the issue with birds are that they're basically as evolved as mammals, just up a different lineage. They're about equally intelligent and all, so my only arguement is that they're not that closely related to me and the ones I eat-- chicken and domesticated turkey-- are pretty damn dumb. But now I won't eat octopus for their intelligence and chickens aren't that much dumber than cows so...

Back to the dinosaurs. Here's my theory. They're trying to find a way to reverse-engineer chicken DNA to create dinosaurs. Awesome, no? You know it's awesome. Don't lie. See, all we have to do is get two dinosaurs, a male and a female. Then we breed them. Then we raise their offspring for meat.

Think about it. Dinosaurs are lizards so I wouldn't mind eating them. Plus for everyone else, they're either the size of chickens or turkeys anyway, or they're MASSIVE. You serve a Neuquenraptor for Thanksgiving and you have leftovers for at least a week, even if you live in a house like mine where a 25-pound-turkey is gone in three days. You might need a bigger fridge though. Plus that drumstick would be MASSIVE, so the kiddies wouldn't fight over it, they'd kinda HAVE to share.

Plus, that's all healthy meat, right there. Lean, white. Good eatin's. You could raise them instead of cows and feed them eggs, which I don't mind eating anyway on account of they're basically chicken menstruation (Just doing my part to lower your cholesterol). And you know, you give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Give him a Utahraptor and some salt or refrigeration and he eats for like THREE MONTHS. Plus there's nothing in the Jewish or Biblical regulations against eating dinosaurs on account of them not being things that "crawl on the earth." Just can't cook them in milk.

Then you get the eggs, which would make killer omelettes; and you can raise like, a T-rex for meat and feed whole towns when he's killed. T-rex meat would be awesome. And then there's the ultimate factor, the thing I noticed in my Bio book while studying that prompted this whole line of thinking:

T-rexes have wishbones.

And I'm pretty sure that if you could find a way to BREAK a T-rex wishbone, and you got the bigger piece, you could wish for God himself to appear and perform a flamboyant musical number with Ernst Mayr, Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche and not only would it happen, but it would be FABULOUS.