Two weekends ago: I accidentally cut off the tip of a finger while chopping lettuce, and spent my Saturday evening in the emergency room; a housemate nearly burned down the apartment when a pot of oil burst into flame; and the bathtub drain became stuck closed, leaving us with a tub filled with five inches of standing water and nowhere to shower.

Last weekend, in an attempt to recreate the excitement, I went to the 2005 New York State Fair. Before I start writing about the fair, let me just say that the topic has already been covered relatively recently in The Sun. A year ago, Alex Linhardt ‘06 wrote about the New York State Fair for Daze in arguably one of the finest pieces to appear in the section in the past decade. Linhardt discussed his reason for going to the fair, which was to discover the heart of America, to become acquainted with a country that had so long been a stranger. Ultimately, he was disappointed. Well, I harbored no such hopes of enlightenment. I went because I thought it would be goofy. And I was not disappointed.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of 90 percent of the country, as is the custom for citydwellers — it’s not the agricultural nature of the enterprise that I find amusing but the juxtaposition of agronomy and conspicuous corporate sponsorship, with buildings named things like “Pepsi International Pavilion,” “Little Caesars Pizza Talent Showcase” and “J. P. Morgan Chase Pan African Village.” I’m used to more subtlety in my solicitations, or at least some kind of correlation between sponsor and sponsored event; without it, the fair seems like a theme park that spent so much time fundraising that it had no time left to come up with an actual theme. Although there wasn’t exactly an air of glossy luxury about the place, which suggests that there wasn’t much time spent fundraising, either.

But I’m not complaining. I didn’t go there to be wowed. I went there to accomplish two goals: one, to have a good time; and two, to get the greatest fried shrimp in the world from Doug’s Fish Fry. The goals seemed well within my reach.

The obvious first destination was the food court, where I could sate my desire for fried shrimp. Unfortunately, as I wandered a seemingly endless labyrinth of stands selling corn dogs, funnel cake, sausage and all manner of artery-clogging foods — a “vortex of deep-fry,” as my roommate called it — Doug’s was nowhere to be found. I very nearly gave up and settled for a plate of deep-fried macaroni and cheese, but I decided to hold out.

My friends and I then headed to the Science and Industry Building, which featured a sizeable exhibit on fire safety, the heart of which was an educational life-sized walk-through diorama called the “House of Hazards.” The House of Hazards consists of a series of rooms, each a vignette featuring several mannequins engaged in daily activities; the viewer is supposed to identify the many fire hazards in each scene. Upon entering the house, it becomes apparent that a more appropriate (albeit somewhat less alliterative) name would be “House of Morons.” Clothes are draped over space heaters, lit candles stand inches away from curtains and the residents seem to have a propensity for leaving uncapped cans of paint thinner all over the house. In the living room, a man talking to his family by the hearth gesticulates wildly while holding an open jug of kerosene.

There’s also a fire safety puppet show for the kids, in which armless puppets — each a poorly constructed, distorted version of a Sesame Street character and opening its mouth in perfect disharmony with its speech — sing songs that alternate between expectedly trite and uncomfortably brusque lines. To wit: a song entitled “Stay Down, Crawl Out” contains the couplet, “Staying down low keeps you feeling great! / If you breathe in smoke, you could suffocate!”

From there we went to the Dairy Products Building, where we ooh-ed and aah-ed over a gigantic sculpture made out of butter. We briefly watched the “Dairy-Go-Round,” a small circular platform with three wooden cows on it that spun at a rate of one rotation every minute. A one-year-old infant sat in one of the cows, sucking on a pacifier and looking absolutely delighted to be there; he burst into tears when, after about 15 minutes, perhaps fearing that their son would grow up and be “that weird guy who rides a wooden cow everywhere,” his parents removed him from the carousel.

Then it was on to the Verizon Center of Progress, a giant building containing hundreds of live-action infomercials. Everywhere I looked, people wearing microphone headsets were pouring grape juice on white carpets, dusting Venetian blinds and cutting soda cans in half. “If this is progress, I think I’d prefer to be obsolete,” I thought, and I promptly left the building (after buying a box of “Dryer Magic” and an electronic head massager, that is).

We wandered into the Master Spas Horticulture Building, not exactly sure what to expect, and there — nestled amongst miles of flower arrangements and fertilizer booths, like a pearl glowing in the murky depths of the ocean — there stood Doug’s Fish Fry. I nearly wept. Instead, I ordered a plate of fried shrimp and blissfully ate it while weaving around blue-ribbon table settings.

Nearly at the end of our stay, we went back to the food court, where the three of us split a deep-fried Snickers bar. As we lay on the grass outside the Pepsi International Pavilion and soaked up the sun, letting the oil-crisped batter and molten chocolate course through our veins, a strange feeling of calm overcame us. In the heartland, life moves just a little slower.

On second thought, it could have been cardiac arrest.