Saturday Adventures

As I said yesterday, I had plans for today, and I actually followed them. I feel weird saying that the day was kind of a bust, but it turned out to be not very exciting and, in the end, a little annoying.

My plan was to go to the Marble City Comic Con downtown, and to the Rossini Festival, also downtown. Further complicating this plan was the fact that today was also the Orange and White Game, a free football exhibition game on campus that attracts around 60,000 people. I had to drive past campus to get to both of the other things, and figure out where to park. A little planning solved this problem: I left the house early, parked at one of the public garages while they were still setting up the festival, and then walked the couple of blocks back to the convention center for the comic con.

The downside to this is that I might have gotten to the Comic Con a little too early, because it was boring as hell.

Some of the vendor booths weren't open yet when the doors opened, and the ticket booth opened late. There weren't many people in costume when I was there, and really there just weren't that many people in general. Some of that may have been due to the Orange and White Game, but I still think I was just too early. I got a good price on a few issues of "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane", including one so bizarre that I've read it twice and am still not entirely sure what happened, but didn't find any of the specific things that I was looking for, which was a little disappointing.

I did see some famous vehicles:





but eventually, like Wonder Woman, I got bored and left:



I walked back uptown to the Rossini Festival, but I was disenchanted with that as well. There was dancing:



and singing:



but also a lot of crowds:



and, honestly, the festival is badly organized. Instead of having an area for food and beverage booths and one for craft and art booths, all of the booths are mixed together at random. Even worse, they now have some kind of food ticket system, and most of the food vendors are ticket only even though they have signs that have prices in dollars printed on them.

This culminated in me, thirsty and a little hot, being told by the girl at the Rita's Italian Ice stand even though the sign said four dollars they only took tickets and the nearest booth to get tickets was five or six booths away, but I could totally come back after I had tickets.

You know what else I could do, girl with misleading signs?

I could go in the Union Avenue Grocery and just buy a drink, which I did.

I saw this cute art on my way back to the car, though:



so the day wasn't a total loss.

I just feel overall disappointed, like it was a waste of effort to leave the house.

Double Festing

It's been a few years since I went to two festivals in one day, but sometimes the local festival schedule lines up just right (or wrong) and you don't really want to choose. This happened to me yesterday, when I was planning (as I have been all year) to attend the International Biscuit Festival downtown but was then invited to also attend the Smoky Mountain Highland Games, which I have never been to before. Unable to choose between the two, I decided that I would hit the Biscuit Festival as early as possible in the morning, and then meet up with Kristin, Logan, Becky, and their friends for the Highland Games in the afternoon.

The morning dawned a little rainy:



but that didn't keep people away:





I had a good time at the Biscuit Festival. I met the Biscuit Queen:



and was informed by the man standing next to me that, "I think her hair is a wig."

Really? Next you're going to tell me that the biscuits in her wig are made of plastic.

I got to walk around the festival vendors and the Farmer's Market vendors:



(I love that Pepsi case display for the bouquets; awesome vintage repurposing)





and, most importantly, I got to eat biscuits.

Bella Luna's Pepperoni Pizza Biscuit:



was good, especially since many of the other competitors went with sweet biscuits. It was nice to have something savory in there. The festival winner was also a savory biscuit, so I may not have been the only one who felt this way.

The gluten-free biscuit:



was better than I expected, although a little chewy.

I was rather disappointed in Tupelo Honey Cafe's Green Eyed Monster Pimento Cheese biscuit:



which was a biscuit sandwich with fried jalapeno peppers. While the restaurant is kind of locally famous for their biscuits, and they've always been good when I ate them there, I think they were trying to put out too many too fast yesterday, because my biscuit was underdone and doughy in the middle. This was disappointing, because this was the only competitor that I waited in line for, since they have such a good reputation. Sadly, they may have been coasting on it yesterday, which may also explain why they didn't win.

Once I was all carbed out, I went home to rest for a few hours (it was only supposed to be an hour, but everyone was running late yesterday), and then Kristen picked me up for the Highland Games, at nearby Maryville College. I don't really know anything about Maryville other than that they are private and are rumored to pay employees well, but their mascot is apparently the Scots:



so I guess it makes sense that the Highland Games would be held there.

The games were interesting, if a little rainy. We saw a lot of people in kilts:



and some traditional Scottish food, like haggis...



...and deep fried candy?

I'll never forget the scene in MacBeth when the three witches gather around a bubbling cauldron of deep-frying Snickers bars. It's good to see those modern traditions carried forward to the present day.

And hey, speaking of MacBeth, it turns out that I am a descendant according to wikipedia. Yesterday at the festival all of the Scottish clans had their own booths, so Kristin and I went looking for the MacMillan booth, since the Scottish part of my dad's complicated ancestry was of the Clan MacMillan. Initially, we had trouble locating them, and it seemed like we were walking forever, especially since the booths were not in alphabetical order. Eventually I made a suggestion:

"They'll probably be in a booth all by themselves because they can't get along with any of the other booths if they're anything like Dad's family."

Sure enough, all the way down past all of the other booths and separated from the next closest booth by an empty booth we found the MacMillans:



and our traditional tartan:



which none of the vendors were carryng. According to wikipedia, the clan was at one point banned from Scotland (no surprise there), so that may eplain the lack of MacMillan popularity among the vendors present.

Once we got tired of researching my ancestry we watching some of the games, including caber tossing:







with the goal being that the caber (the log/telephone pole) tumbles end over end, but the most often result being that it just splats onto the ground in the mud.

I also saw an adorable dog herd some adorable sheep:









rounding them up each time they drifted too far from their trailer.

I also saw some Civil War re-enactors who apparently came to the wrong festival:



but it's possible that they were two festing, too.

The National Cornbread Festival

I never realized until after I moved to the south just how much of my impressions of it had been formed by repeated viewings of "The Golden Girls". Even though we lived in Tennessee and Kentucky when I was little, I still somehow had the picture in my head that the south was an endless stretch of verandas and cornbread and charming old men named Big Daddy and ladies with lace handkerchiefs delicately fanning themselves in the heat. Blanche Devereaux, nee Hollingsworth, colored my entire perception of the region south of the Mason-Dixon Line despite the fact that I had actual life experience that should have disproved it.

Now that I live down here, I have to report that I have, sadly, not met anyone named Big Daddy. I have also, to my knowledge, not spent any time on a sweeping veranda, although that may be because I still can't tell a veranda from a porch. (I'm also somewhat unclear of the difference between a veranda, a porch, and a lanai. Blanche had an impressive vocabulary, but wasn't much of an educator.) I rarely see people delicately fanning themselves, since most of us just head for wherever the air conditioning is, but there is, very often, cornbread.

Yesterday, in fact, there was an entire National Cornbread Festival, and Kristin and I drove to it so that we could meet my friend Sandy there and eat delicious cornbread.

The National Cornbread Festival is held in South Pittsburg, Tennessee. I had never been there, but from what I saw around the festival tents they have kind of a charming, slightly nostalgic downtown:







Yesterday it also included an old-timey antique police car, but I feel like that was just on display for the festival:



Either that, or they have very little crime in South Pittsburg.

Anyway, we were greeted at the gates of the festival by the Mayfield Dairy's giant cow statue:



I love that cow statue, as I always love giant, absurd, tacky things. They used to set it up in the Kroger parking lot every year when school started again, and I used to stop on my way to work to take pictures of it:





but they stopped doing that, and it's been a while since I've seen the giant cow statue. Kristin and I decided to have our picture made with it:



and then we headed into the festival, where we saw so many things. In addition to the antique cop car and a lot of vendors, there were people dressed as chickens:



the creepiest clown show I've ever seen:





and that includes watching IT when I was younger. Seriously, what the hell was up with the creepy dirty dolls around him? They didn't dance or move or play instruments like an animatronic nightmare. They just sat there being creepy.

Blocking that out for a moment (the way I'm going to block it out for the rest of my life if I ever want to sleep again), we also noticed some odd signs in the arts and crafts area:



I didn't think anything of it when I saw that first one, other than, "That's kind of an odd way to emphasize that they are homemade, or made in America, or whatever,", but then there were more. Multiple vendors had signs that could probably be described as anti-China, except for this one that was probably intended to be anti-China but instead appears to be a double negative:



By saying that they're Not No Made in China, aren't they actually saying that everything in their booth was made in China?

More importantly, did we go to war with China while I wasn't looking?

We were too busy playing games and sampling cornbread yesterday to dwell on it. We waited for a while to take a free spin on the Martha White prize wheel:



where Kristin won a spatula:



I won a measuring cup, Sandy won a timer shaped like a muffin, and then we sampled their free cornbread:



Later we ate carnival food for lunch, sampling a wide selection of bad things and marveling that we could, apparently, have eaten anything deep fried:



and then we played a giant Operation game for charity:



Kristin and Sandy did pretty well, but with my shaky hands I was a guaranteed loss.

Eventually, Sandy and I got in line for Cornbread Alley, where we could sample nine kinds of cornbread for four dollars:





but Kristin decided that the line was too long and she didn't want any more cornbread, and went to go play games on the midway instead:







while Sandy and I took our plates of samples to the tents to eat and judge:



You'll notice there are only seven kinds on my plate. I gave my Butter Pecan Muffin to Sandy (she said it was dry) because I'm allergic to pecans, and we both ditched our Pineapple Cream Cheese Cornbread Cake immediately upon exiting the alley because the guy handing it out was coughing, sneezing, and wiping his nose on his arm (not his sleeve; his bare arm) right before he handed it to us. I'll stick to cornbread that won't leave me in quarrantine, thank you.

In the picture, the Toasty Hushpuppy is in the center (loaded with chopped jalapeno peppers; it was good, but really spicy since all I had to drink was water), and then, clockwise from the far left: Sour Cream and Onion Cornbread (my favorite, but I didn't vote for it because the Boy Scouts made it), Razzle Dazzle Cornbread (a sweet cornbread with raspberries, which was really good but a little sticky), the Rodeo Pup (made with Ro-Tel and canned corn mixed in; it tasted pretty good), the Deep Fried Sweet Potato Tot (which was good and full of nutmeg and cinnamon, but Sandy said hers was way too greasy with fry oil), the Cornfetti (also good, but the grated carrots were a weird texture in the rest of the bread), and the Cornbread Pizza (which was kind of gross; I couldn't taste the cornbread at all through the thick layer of tomato sauce).

I picked up the recipes for all nine types, and after we finished we walked around a little more and then headed home.