State Fair

On Saturday we attended the South Carolina State Fair.
As one would expect, we learned a lot about the state's advances in the technology of frying food. Well, food and anything not mobile enough to escape the battering/grease immersion process.
Seriously.
Fried Pepsi?
How does that even work?
Internet, I went to the trouble of researching this for you. My organs take the damage so you are free to destroy your own body in different ways.
See, most dough is made up of flour and water. This is not the case with fried Pepsi. According to the people working in this particular booth, for fried Pepsi, one would mix flour and Pepsi, then float the dough balls in boiling grease for a period of time, only removing them (and their handy toothpick handles) in order to pour Pepsi syrup over them and (as quickly as possible) hand them to a stranger for ingestion as quickly as possible in exchange for $4.
It tastes a lot better than it sounds. Of course, that is as close to saying nothing as a person can actually get without entering politics full time.
The people at this stand were all too happy to batter and fry all kinds of things.
This is a fairly horrible thing to do to, say, chicken. Chicken is generally pretty healthy until it gets battered and fried.
But when you take peanut butter cups or Oreos or cookie dough as a starting point for frying, basically you are looking at spending the next few hours with the uncanny feeling that your mouth has been coated in wax and you can actually hear your arteries hardening.
The State Fair also had some interesting signage around the petting zoo.
For the record, we did not even attempt to feed our child to the animals. Since this was after our initial experience with fried dough things, I figured the goats would see their cholesterol levels shoot through the tin roof if they so much as licked any one of us.
The whole mood got mostly killed when work called and I had to abandon my family at the fairgrounds to attend to some broken stuff for a few hours.
At least it got killed for me.
I feel fortunate to be able to bill mercilessly for that kind of junk.
I also feel fortunate that it will probably be almost a year before fried cola sounds like a decent idea again.