Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/11/first-ever-virtual-oregon-coun.html
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Frog is a Eugene institution. On one of my recent trips to Eugene, I tracked him down and bought a joke book.
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Bonus: You won’t come home smelling like the 4-H pavilion.
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My favorite sections of a state or county fair are the tractor pulls (especially the ‘antique’ class), the 4H dog obedience and agility trials, the goats, and the one air-conditioned building with the award-winning food and crafts sections. All of that can be streamed.
Meanwhile, there’s the whole avoiding the heat and terrible junk food part…seems like a win-win to me.
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I don’t like the heat, but there’s something about that food that you can only get at the fair. Like, someone recently invented deep fried deep fried. What’s inside it? God only knows. Come for the mystery, stay for the thankfulness that you only eat that crap once a year.
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The Oregon Country Fair is a bit different from a county fair though. It’s a hippie festival with a carnival feel usually held on private land with children’s tree fort-style architecture booths, costumed attendees, bodypainted topless people, and a dude in the parking lot selling mushroom balls. Just google image search “Oregon Country Fair” and you’ll get the idea. It’s closer to a forest village version of Burning Man.
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Marin County, CA is providing this emergency fix:
You still won’t get a chance to barf up your deep-fried twinkie on the tilt-a-whirl, but better than nothing.
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Also… I kind of want to try it…
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I’ve got a barstool that spins around. Maybe I could just spin myself really fast.
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As @CarlMud said, the OCF ain’t no county or state fair with the 4H barn and the carnival rides and fried dough. It’s a whole other ball of wax.
Behooves anybody not familiar with it to check out their website and some of the virtual content this year. And if you’re ever in Veneta, Oregon in July, in a “normal” year, it behooves you to attend!
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My family couldn’t resist giving the Marin County Fair Food Drive-Through a go.
I can report that you can actually enjoy the queasy feeling that comes from a bellyful of deep-fried SugarFat even without the carnival rides.
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Burning Ewok?
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Yeah, all of that will be missed. But maybe they could have a place where folks can post pics of the costumes and/or bodypainting they would have worn, at least.
We got in the habit of buying tickets for the fair just to get camping spots at Darling Reunion.
Fair is fun and all…Darling is where the cool kids are 
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