Saturday, September 8, 2012

a veritable smorgasbord


really cute future farmer showing his first-place winning goat

a couple of things learned at the utah state fair today:  


1) if you think piglets are cute on the internet, you should see them in real life!

sorry for being such a voyeur, mama!
2) deep-fried snickers are slightly disappointing.

3) i'm really sad i never got to do 4-h and show a goat at the fair.  did you know they're judged on, among other things, their dairy characteristics and how well their mammary apparatus is attached?

 also, utah is number 14 in the nation in pork production.

piglet, irl.
found this state fair poem and lifted it from the poetry foundation website in honor of today's outing:

Butter

BY ANDREA COHEN
I’ve never seen the land
of milk and honey, but at

the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed
a cow fashioned of butter.

It lived behind a window
in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.

I filed past as one files
past a casket at a wake.

It was that sad: a butter cow
without a butter calf. Nearby I spied

a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-
sized, a mechanical afterthought

I thought the cow might have liked to ride.
You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.

But not if you’re a butter cow, not
if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if

not the land of milk and honey, the land
of milk, and dwelled within it.

It had a short life span, the butter cow.
Before it died, I looked

deep into its butter eyes. It saw
my butter soul. I could

have wept, or spread myself,
for nobody, across dry toast.

4 comments:

  1. Nice post! Pork is sad given how cute the pigs are. :-(

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  2. S had a rabbit in the state fair one year. We had to keep it in our room in a cage. And then she had to stand there in a ring and auction it off. I'm not sure she entirely enjoyed the experience. I remember her rabbit went for a low bid and we were convinced it was because we didn't have strong Yuma political ties.

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  3. People on this VT dairy tour I took kept asking how long cows lived and the guide shrugged and said, "nobody really knows the answer to that."

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  4. yes, but the full grown swine seem so exhausted by their sheer volume, as if they are begging to go to their final rest. that's funny about S. was she in 4H? and really? know one knows how long cows live? how can that be? or was your guide just smoking too much weed?

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