G'day Roy,


 RM> GG> I'm confused. Octopus at the show?    You mean the Royal Show??
 RM>
 RM> I know this might come as a shock to you, but in this country, some
 RM> people actually live outside those overpopulated sources of massive
 RM> light pollution that you frequent. Yes, over here, there is

When I referred to the Royal Show, I meant the bloody event in
Adelaide.  The one held here was called "The Saginaw County Fair" and I
won 2 red ribbons this year for my needlework.  It (the fair) was
pretty pitiful in comparison to Adelaide's Royal Show though. About a
quarter of the size of Adelaide's, with less to look at and less to do.


Why is it I get the feeling most Ozztralians assume all of USA is
nothing but concrete and city??

It's every bit as annoying as bloody Yanks that assume there's nothing
but outback and kangaroos in Australia.

Everyone told me (Ozztralians that is) that Adelaide is a "small city".

Yeah, right.  It takes up two bloody phone book volumes.   By contrast,
this area I'm in here in Michigan has a 1-volume phone book (smaller
than the Adelaide A-M volume) and that's for THREE cities and a about a
dozen rural towns.   Some people would think the cities ARE rural towns
too.  (20,000 population in Saginaw compared to over a million in
Adelaide).


 RM> light pollution that you frequent. Yes, over here, there is
 RM> actually open space in between cities! There are even enough people

Get real, Roy.  I can drive for miles between towns here too.

Someone took me to the state capital this past week (Lansing, home of
MSU, where Magic Johnson got his start).   It's about 100 miles away
from Saginaw - 2 lane roads almost the entire way... with nothing to
see but fields, farm fields, fields (ie, paddocks) and more
fields/paddocks.  Once there, I got "excited" because I saw a book
store where they actually give you a shopping cart to browse with.
It's a metropolis in comparison.


 RM> Sorta like a small city block, only with fresh air (spooky, I
 RM> know...)

Take your US assumptions and shove 'em, Roy.

 RM> Anyway, the occupants of these "towns" got a bit bored without the
 RM> flashy entertainment complexes available in cities. As such
 RM> businesses wouldn't be viable full-time in such small communities,
 RM> they hit upon the time-sharing idea. A group of businesses,
 RM> including mechanical rides, agile or strong people, unusually
 RM> shaped people, and interesting mechanical games of chance and
 RM> otherwise, were encouraged to group together and make annual
 RM> visiting tours of these remote outlying "towns". A visit by such a
 RM> group is a Significant Event in a town's year, and entire tiny

We call these Festivals and the entertainment groups are called
"carnivals".   Many festivals have them.

To put it in perspective, Roy....  we have such pitiful towns they come
up with exciting names like:

The Munger Potato Festival
The Bavarian Festival
The Auburn Corn Festival
Shields Homecoming


When I was about 7yrs old, I was a Shields Homecoming Jaycee Queen. The
crown was cool, but it was a heck of a lot better than being the Munger
Potato Festival Queen, I'm sure. We never did find out why Shields
called it a Homecoming though.


 RM> communities do their pitiful best to enhance the occasion by adding
 RM> their own quaint ceremonies, such as running large quadrupeds to
 RM> exhaustion in large circles, or showing off the latest gross
 RM> mutations in barely domesticated animals and plants - from this,
 RM> these events have come to be known as "shows".

Uh-huh.   Here, the towns are too cheap for that.  They just have a
parade that goes from one end of a town to the end with the carnival
(the place with the rides) and thats about it.


 RM> An "octopus" is one of the mechanical rides, so-called because it
 RM> has eight catapult-like arms which give the unsophisticated riders

Been on one, actually.

 RM> the illusion of flight by accelerating them to near sub-orbital
 RM> speeds while encouraging the ejection of any lunch materials with a
 RM> semi-chaotic rotational motion.

It started to rain and my girlfriend and I (plus our two young
children) were stuck in one such ride as the operator went off and got
in a fight with some other "carny" and forgot about us.

 RM> Making love in one should only be attempted after a proper training
 RM> course, which can take a week or two. Experience in hang-glider

My friend and I weren't kinky.  Besides, the kids were there too.


Cheers,
Gaelyne

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