The Vermillion Festival of the Fish

This past weekend Nina and I attended the Vermillion Ohio Festival of the Fish. While generally a wholesome event with fun for the whole family there are just a few points that should be addressed for festivals in the future:

1. As far as I can tell the primary purpose of this festival was to raise the self-esteem of the local girls by including just about every one of them as a pageant queen or princess. I may not know a whole lot about pageants myself, but the last I checked there was supposed to be some level of competition involved in the process. As the festival's site notes:
"On Friday young girls vie for the coveted title of princess or queen in one of the largest festival pageants in the county."
The key phrase in that sentence being "vie" but as far as I can tell they weren't vying nearly hard enough as almost every girl I saw was in a prom dress with a sash touting their mystique as "Ms. Lorain Bean Curd Factory" or "Princess 2007 - Joe's Firewood Shack." With so many winners the whole event became absolutely boring. All I'm going to say is no one was glaring and nobody got tripped on stage.

2. The annual Firefighters Waterfight. Sounds like a great idea in theory right? Firefighters go all out by turning there high-powered hoses on one another with the last man standing after the onslaught declared the victor. However, this "long-standing" tradition actually involved a bucket hanging from a rope elevated over the street towards which teams of firegihters sprayed their hoses in an attempt to push the bucket across the line to their opponents side. Kind of like tug of war, except in reverse and more reminiscent of civil rights marches in the south.

3. Speaking of which, I've noted this time and time again, note to Ohio: You were NEVER part of the Confederacy. Hell there's a whole book about Oberlin being the town that started the Civil War. I know you guys might not like black people, and the government is totally trying to hold you down, but let's not get it confused, waving confederate flags around and talking about protecting your heritage doesn't make sense. Why? Because it's not your heritage. This makes about as much sense as me wearing a Canadian flag t-shirt around all the time and talking about how proud I am of Wayne Gretzky. Trust me, I live in Virginia where I can often be found driving down Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway--which remains baffling to me still, but that's for another day--don't do yourselves a disservice by pretending to be something you aren't.

Take these changes into mind Vermillion and we'll be back next year. Oh and be sure to add more catfish stands. Shit was dope.