As some of you may remember, Animated Meat first came to life in 2008 as a way to document some sights that managed to slip through the cracks of most popular travel websites. You may also remember that the original website was built on Apple's now defunct iWeb. From there, it migrated over to WordPress where it met an untimely demise at the hands of Russian hackers. Many of those old, pre-2012 entries have found a new home here in the Before the Now section. I would consider these posts as my starting place as a writer, probably comparable to a musician's first demo tapes. They are very rough, but I took them all seriously and wrote each one with passion. While I would like to believe that I have matured in my abilities as a writer, it is my hope that I carry this same blind passion into all of my new efforts.

Jefferson County Fair -Originally Published 2009

May 29, 2019

The Jefferson County Fair is exactly that, a real county fair. It’s small to the point that it feels so intimate it almost seems as though we were invading someone’s family reunion.

The 4H is unbelievably active in Jefferson County. There were several buildings dedicated to displaying the work of local kids.

There were plenty fine examples of little kid art. I would like to one day put together a display in New York or Los Angeles to see what the art world would have to say about them.

Somehow, Mai and I always manage to end up at places that have goats.

One of the highlights of the Jefferson County Fair is something called an Elephant Ear. An Elephant Ear is a piece of rolled dough that is lovingly fried by a bunch of women with big bazooms. Then, they cover it in sugar. Not much to it, but it’s delicious.