It's annual tradition to hit the Oklahoma State Fair with friends one day, and Saturday was the day. It's always quite an...experience.

A few years ago, the State Fair Board turned over, and as far as anyone can tell, the new board is a bunch of people who had never really been to the fair before they got on the board. As far as I can gather, they went for the first time in 1999 or 2000 and appear to have been appalled by most of what they saw: lots of people, lots of vendors, too few bathrooms, too few trash cans. So they set out to fix it. The first year of the new fair board, all the ads for the State Fair of Oklahoma were about "Clean Bathrooms!" and "More Trash Cans!" I guess that's fine, but I'll bet most of the people going to the fair weren't going to see trash cans or bathrooms.

They paid for all that, though, and the new logo, changing the name to the "Oklahoma State Fair," and the rest by raising prices for admission and for vendors. They raised vendor prices so much that, the next year, the fair barely had half the vendors of the year before. It's bounced back about 20% since then, but most of the buildings still have about two-thirds as many booths as in the 1990s, and the "Made In Oklahoma" building has some kind of weird kiddie-agropolis instead of exhibits in its main hall.

On the bright side, they've completely redone the old "Modern Living" building as the "Centennial" building (preparing for the state's centennial in 2007), sponsored more exhibits, kept the good food vendors, and kept it clean. They also ditched the sponsorship of the Space Tower and Monorail and made them free rides for any fairgoer. (They told us last year was the Monorail's last year, that the track was going to be taken down, but it was there again this year. I felt betrayed.)

On the darker side, they've done this by eliminating six days of the fair. Instead of 17 days as usual (from a Friday through two weeks from the following Sunday), the Oklahoma State Fair opened on Thursday, September 16 (why?), and ends today, September 26. Only being open for two weekends (with both OU and OSU home games on the first one) makes it harder to attend, so Saturday was pretty crowded.

There were street signs up that read "Oklahoma State Fair guests are #1," and I believed it, because the parking situation was a big #2. I went in through gate #21 and they had me drive around the dirt fields and parking lots for about a mile before parking me near gate #25, letting other people merge in all the while. I wound up about half a mile from the gate, and had a similar walk back even from another entrance. A small idea: if the parking is full at gate #21, don't let people drive in there?

Other than that, it was a decent day of Fair Fun. I got a neck pillow for my chair, and a quick upper-body massage from some very strong Chinese masseurs. (The sign said it was Chinese stress relief, so I'm just assuming they were either Chinese or stressed.)

I ate some local fudge, and cheesecake dipped in chocolate on a stick. I didn't eat anything deep-fried, unlike some people I could name. I'll say this, though: I saw a deep-fried Twinkie on a stick, and I saw the stick removed, and the "creme" filling oozed out like something in a movie they'll never show on basic cable. I'll have nightmares.