A Fine Day For A Fun Fair

I shouldn't really be in the mood for it, but for some reason, I've had the annual fun fair that happens on the Hampton Court Green about this time every year in mind. It snowed a good part of yesterday and I understand that the weather in Surrey has not really been all that great either, but for some reason, the call of the midway has been tugging at me for the past couple days.

I've got this strong desire to ingest strange, unidentifiable (and almost exclusively deep-fried) food stuffs, climb aboard machines that spin, twirl, or otherwise seem to have been intentionally designed to save you from food poisoning )by relieving you of all the midway foods you've eaten), and generally act as if I were ten-years-old again!

My friend, Angie, has this love of carousels and I have ridden as many of them in the past couple years as I had in my life previously, hopping on them at every opportunity with Angie and Terry. They really do bring-out the child in one!

Of course, that experience made me miss a question in a general knowledge quiz I was competing in with some colleagues here at the office. I got the question "wrong" (by which I mean I didn't give the answer that the questioner expected) and had to petition to have the question disqualified. I succeeded on the grounds that the question was ambiguous and I was not the only one who got it wrong.

The question was: "What direction, when viewed from the top looking down, do merry-go-rounds spin?"

Okay, it's a 50/50 chance. I answered clockwise. (The answer desired was counterclockwise.) I produced pictures of the ones I had been riding on in the UK and there was not one that spun in the counterclockwise (anti-clockwise) direction. Doing further research, I did discover that over half the carousels in the US do, in fact, spin the other direction, but in Europe, they are much more likely to spin clockwise. Why? Who knows!

I didn't win the competition, but the point (as is with the point of the Fun Fairs) was to have fun, and that I did!

Wherever you are today, I hope you're having fun!

Don Bergquist – May 02, 2008 – Lakewood, Colorado, USA