Japanese Teenagers, Eliot Cutler, Franco-Maine, & The Blue Hill Fair

If you read E.B. White's Charlotte's Web as a kid, or read it to your kid, you already know something about the Blue Hill Fair, which happens on Labor Day Weekend. Maine's largest pig and largest cow are usually on display. Some of Maine's largest people too. Apart from  agricultural exhibits and the draft horse pulling competition, which are wonderful, there's a tawdry midway, and dozens of booths selling fried, wildly overpriced food. Kids of a certain age love the fayuh but the whole operation feels like a scam to me. The last time I remember money pouring out so fast was an afternoon walking around Paris. Eliot Cutler, the "Independent" candidate for Maine governor, was trolling the Fair, doing the meet & greet. He's a smart and accomplished man, but I'm afraid he's going to do the same thing he did 4 years ago--by splitting the Democrat vote he could throw the race to our Tea Party Gov, Paul Lepage. Lepage is a smart pol but wildly unthoughtful, with a lot of terrible instincts.  It's painful to watch a man as intelligent as Lepage willing himself into ignorance. It's all about anger, I guess. Some of it ethnic. There's a lot of buried anger in Franco-Maine. See my post on Biddeford. Lepage is from Lewiston, another Canadien mill town with some bad memories.  Anyway, here in North Brooklin we're hoping Mike Michaud, who has been our (Democrat) Congressman for the 2nd District, wins the governorship in November.