it was the weekend for street fairs.

yesterday, i went downtown by myself and managed to hit a dance parade. all the dance studios in manhattan and beyond were parading students down broadway. i followed mitch hedberg's advice and fast-forwarded the parade by walking in the opposite direction. there were some really neat groups and some really weird ones. i didn't have my camera with me, but i did have a cell phone! and this is what i got.

a group entirely on rollerblades:

a whole line of people on stilts:



a group of traditional dancers from somewhere (i'm going with bolivia, but i don't know why). the guy in the middle in the blue jacket had a water bottle and was emptying it onto the dancers as they walked down the street.

and we can't forget the two people with hula hoops wearing only paint.

and today mike and i hit the food fair on ninth avenue in hell's kitchen (they are trying to rename the neighborhood "clinton" but no one has gone for that yet. with a name like "hell's kitchen" who would really want to change it??). they had traditional street fair food (funnel cakes, hot dogs, fried oreos - which, by the way, go against the idea that anything is better deep fried), but the local restaurants were also selling all sorts of good things. we had indian food, tamales, maduros (yummm), fresh squeezed lemonade, and even a slice of cranberry apple pie. all for less than we've paid for lunch at other places - and we were walking as we ate so that's got to be better than sitting on our bums, right?

since it was a street fair, they also had those "perform this impossible task for a stuffed animal of comparable impossible size." while we didn't really look at the shooting the targets or dunking basketballs, we were intrigued by two booths we had never seen before: the "find the super-secret historical origins and significance of your last name" booth and the "picture with a big chair" tent.

the first seemed to us to be a guy with a laptop and a printer who would research your name and print something out for you. the second was, well, a large armchair that you could sit on and get your picture taken. mike and i were trying to figure out which was more of a rip-off. i said it was the guy with the computer - after all, we can all find information like that (says the librarian) but how many people have enormous armchairs?

we ended up not paying for a picture, though. being less of a rip-off than something else doesn't mean it's not still a waste of money.

and now for something completely different: the cats.

(fred and baxter in a rare moment of calm)