Perfect Fair day. If you go, don't forget to stop by the Star Tribune booth for Pickle-flavored lip balm. Warning: supplies are limited. Sometimes they run out, and have to wait a while for a fresh delivery. Reports of rioting when they run out are generally overblown, but it can get a little tense. This happened when we ran out last year:
Some people postulate that the piquant pickle flavor could have more pucker power, and I'll admit that if you just came from the Pickle on a Stick booth you might find it underwhelming. I'm just surprised it took them this long to come up with Pickle. Hope they weren't saving this for a year when no one could come up with a flavor idea. You'll know they're running out of ideas when they offer Spin-Art Flavor (horrible, chemical taste of paint) or Horse Barn (not really a horse taste; more like polished saddle leather) or some other questionable idea.
People make a point of coming to the Strib booth for the lip balm. A few years ago, no one associated a major American newspaper with lip emollient. Now it's hard-wired into the Minnesota brain.
Here's what the booth used to look like, by the way.
That's George Grim shaking hands; he was one of the paper's marquee columnists. He was the foreign correspondent, back when every paper had such things, and he also started Santa Anonymous. He died earlier this year in Florida - at the age of 99.
What the Fair really needs, though, is a Lion Drome. Or two.
Well, I'm off to the Fair, so I'll just do the cheap easy thing and fill up the blog with video.
GEEKThis came out over the weekend. Expect it to get a small surge of popularity as it desperately struggles to attain "viral" status by repurposing Star Wars characters into unexpected situations. That's about 37% of the internet today, it seems. Tighten it up to 30 seconds, and they might have something.
