Lame/cool month continues. There were those who said I couldn't keep it up. Those people underestimated my ability to take on the impossible. The impossible like improving a joke. Which I did. Here's the original joke:
Q: What's green and fuzzy and has four legs and if it fell out of a tree on you would kill you?
A: A pool table.
Funny, right? My nephew thought so. My six-year-old nephew and I overlap a great deal in our senses of humor. But I made the joke even better:
Q: What's green and fuzzy and has four legs and if it fell out of a tree on you would kill you?
A: A moldy cow.
Now THAT is a good joke. So don't bet against me. I can do anything if I set my mind to it.
If you are or have ever been part of a family, then you probably have gone to a family event. I'm not talking about holiday parties like Christmas Eve. Based on my own experiences, those are not in any way "family events." Christmas Eve and other holiday get-togethers are hours-long excursions into tedium and/or bragging and/or fishing about for information on how much you earn, and I don't find it particularly festive to look at pictures of my brothers' boat while being asked how much I pay in property taxes. That's why I long ago gave up on holiday gatherings and instead annually Sweetie and the kids and I play board games and watch a horror or monster movie. Ah, good times.
The family events I am talking about are those things that occasionally parents will try to drag a group of kids to in hopes that the kids will have memories of fun times when they were kids, memories that will carry over to that day when the kid earns the big bucks and the parents are getting a little older and want to have the kid pay their property taxes instead of put them into a home. That kind of family event. Those family events pretty much boil down to sporting events, amusement parks, or State Fairs.
And those three options nowadays boil down to State Fairs, so it's a good thing that they are, in fact the Best Family Event That's So Lame It's Cool. Families don't really have the option of taking kids to sporting events anymore, given that more and more of them are taking place overseas and that tickets are starting at something like $100 to get anywhere near the field. I took Middle and The Boy to a Brewers game a while back, and between parking and tickets and t-shirts and a couple of snacks, the day ran me something like $200. 
Amusement parks are still an option, I suppose, but you pretty much run into long lines every day, except, I assume, Saturday. I've never been to an amusement park on a Saturday. I don't think anyone has, because of the way we all think. The way we all think is this: The amusement park is open every day of the week. But most people work Monday through Friday. So they don't want to go on Sunday when they have to get up and go to work the next day. So most people will go on Saturday. Therefore, I will not go on Saturday. I will take a day off of work and go on a weekday. But what day should I go? Not Monday, nobody goes anywhere on a Monday. And if I go on Tuesday or Wednesday, I've still got to go to work for most of the week. Then again, if I go on Friday, everyone will probably be there that day because everyone likes taking off on Fridays, since, hey, three-day-weekend. So I will take off Thursday because nobody will think of that and then I only have to go to work Friday and I don't really have to get anything done that day, I can just kind of look busy and surf the internet.
So we all end up going to the amusement park on Thursday, and, as a result, the place is packed that day and you wait forever in lines so you get to go on maybe 2 rides all day.
I bet amusement parks aren't even open any day except Thursday. What a racket they've got going.
Plus, amusement parks are also phenomenally expensive. We took the kids to Universal Studios once on vacation and had something like $200 budgeted for the day and we spent that in the first hour. True story. I was actually the one that spent it all, too. I should not be allowed near stands that sell giant sodas in "Souvenir" cups that are shaped like dinosaurs and which will not be allowed on the plane.
State Fairs are a different breed of cat, so to speak. I am going to talk about all State Fairs, for all 50 states, even though I've only been to Wisconsin's State Fair. I can do that because I've been to Wisconsin's State Fair, and I've been to other states, albeit not to all 50 and not to any of their state fairs. But I noticed, when I went to those other states, that they were very similar to Wisconsin in that they had grass and trees and Chili's restaurants and people. Plus, all State Fairs are called the same thing ("State Fairs.") So I am able to deduce from those facts that all states are more or less the same, and that therefore all State Fairs are more or less the same.
(That, my readers, is called science. Remember it.) 
The Wisconsin State Fair is indescribably lame, and all the more so because I once played a small but lame role in making the State Fair the great family event it was. As a lawyer, I was asked to put on a mock trial that would be judged by actual State Fair attendees, a mock trial that had all the hallmarks of a real trial except that the lawyers really put no time into preparing their cases, the witnesses were not really told what they were witnesses to, it took place on a rickety stage in the auditorium where they also sold all those things that you usually can only buy on late-night TV, and also in that the jury was made up of people who happened to be walking by and included my wife.
But we put on that mock trial and the jury convicted the mock criminal of his mock crime, and to my amazement, people sat and watched us do that for over an hour, on a beautiful summer day when just behind them were mops that never need wringing out and that little fuzzy caterpillar thing that you can make crawl around your arm like magic.
That's one of the beauties of State Fairs -- people really do attend it and look at things that they otherwise have no interest in. Like mock trials. And like roosters, which we looked at that day, walking through a hot, dusty barn filled with roosters in cages. Ordinarily, if you asked me to look at a rooster, I'd probably demur. But at a State Fair, I'll look at hundreds of them. And have interesting conversations about them, like so:
Me: Sweetie, look at this one!
Sweetie: Hmm.
State Fairs seem lame at first glance, and they are. They're populated by lawyers trying to teach you civics lessons through mock trials judged by their wives, and farm kids showing you that you can get used to almost any assortment of smells if you stand in them long enough and if the animals are big enough and right in your face and are award-winning pigs and rabbits and sheep. They have a carny section where there's games that really are rigged and you can't win. They have a midway that was put together by the guy who's now running the Clown-Water-Balloon-Pop and who hasn't slept in three weeks. They have food stands where you can get Deep Fried Twinkies and popcorn flavored like bacon and even worse stuff for you. They take place in the summer so you're hot and tired before you get in the door. 
But in the midst of all that, they take a turn and become cool. It might be the pig races. Or the giant slide. Or the giant foam visor. Or the line for cream puffs that makes you think you want a cream puff, too, only then you get it and realize that cream puffs are really a very bland food and you wish you'd gotten the footlong corn dog, and then you realize that it's the State Fair and if you want that footlong corn dog after the cream puff, you should get it, because nobody's judging you or the fanny pack you wore to carry your money.
And then you realize that even the kids are kind of having fun. They won't admit it, but they thought the ponies were cute and they appreciated that you let them try the ping-pong ball toss even though if they had won (which they couldn't) you'd have to carry around a goldfish all day, and they even sort of looked like they enjoyed the high-dive act that somehow set up in the parking lot. 
Any kid growing up will tell you that families are lame, and family events are lame things for lame groups of people. Any parent will tell you that taking kids anywhere to do anything is an exercise in futility because if they're old enough to not like it, they won't, and if they're too young to complain then they'll just end up barfing or running around a lot and you won't get to relax. So any event that requires that parents take kids to that thing and then puts a lot of terrible food and unwinnable games and dangerous rides and stinky animals in front of them...
... ends up cool, because while nothing says lame like watching a bunch of piglets race around a track while you eat a footlong corn dog and hope that you don't get sick going on the Whirligig, nothing says cool like expecting something to be lame and having it turn out to be a fun day after all.
Read what else is so lame it's cool -- ranging from nonfiction books to superheroes to music crazes to candy to teen movies.
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