The season finale of Entourage aired last Sunday night, leaving me with one less thing to talk to my friends about during the week. It’s one of the only TV shows that I can relate to, other than The Hills. Entourage represents things that are easy for me to understand such as money, vanity, and being the center of attention. Commoner America is entertained by Big Brother, Survivor, Dancing With the (D-List) Stars, Randy Jackson Presents: America’s Best Dance Crew, Biggest Loser, and American Idol. It’s impossible for me to watch or relate to “reality” television since these shows so closely resemble the life of an average American. These shows typically start with a bunch of commoners trying to “make it” and end with one commoner “winning” after overcoming “insurmountable” obstacles. Winning a reality TV show is like being the coolest gel head at Around the Corner, even though you leave the show a winner you’re still coming home as a complete loser commoner. I don’t understand why someone would actually want to live in a commoner filled house with cameras that record them 24 hours a day or why someone would move to a new city to be one of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. 

Very few shows are as complex and entertaining as Entourage. When Vince got a role in that new Martin Scorsese movie during the last 2 minutes of the season finale, I was shocked. Who knew the writers would totally surprise the audience by having Vince get a huge new movie deal in a last minute phone call that Ari set up with a famous director? I never saw it coming. I really thought the next season was just going to be 8 episodes of the characters getting yelled at by their disgusting Yankee mothers while living in the shit-hole neighborhood they grew up in. Instead, next season they’ll be working on a new movie and dealing with a new writer/director that I don’t recognize but seems to be important because Ari works really hard and yells a lot while dealing with this person and any other studio heads/competing agents/co-stars that are involved in the project. I also love the complete lack of character development. Why should the characters ever learn from any of the experiences they’ve gone through or be significantly affected by any other external factors?  The way the show uses a few lines of dialogue in the first episode of each season to tell me what’s happened in the 6 to 8 month period that has elapsed between seasons is just brilliant writing. Brief references to the major events that occurred in that time period prevents me from having to follow all the twists and turns that I would normally be confused by. They just tell me what happened and I automatically like the show, no questions asked. The incredibly diverse plot lines that occur throughout each episode are riveting, especially that one episode where Turtle and Johnny Drama got into that whacky situation across town while E and Ari argued about what was best for Vince while Vince sat around and looked confused until all the guys met up again at that party/their house/a nightclub where a really hot girl walked by causing Turtle to make a sexually suggestive remark at which point Drama then took the comment out of context and used it to make fun of Turtle in front of everyone. I lost it when Ari added in that equally degrading comment making fun of both Turtle and Drama which made E roll his eyes and look at Vince in a semi-homosexual way right before the credits started to roll and the cool new song from that rapper started to play. Hilarious. Poor people just wouldn’t understand this humor, which is probably why it airs on a channel they can’t afford to watch. I can’t wait until next season when I get to relive all of those exact same moments again.

Fortunately, the State Fair ended last weekend. Apparently, the fair used to be a high-class event. However, I refuse to ever return to the State Fair after finding out the fairgrounds are located outside the beltline. For those of you lucky enough to have never attended this mass gathering of mullets and wife-beaters (both kinds), let me elaborate as to why I no longer attend. To begin with, the fair is a two week event that attracts commoners from miles around. These heathens park in a pasture near the fairgrounds, only consume foods that have been deep fried, and use cans of food as a form of payment to enter. These canned goods are then redistributed to other poor people. Sounds like socialism to me, although I’m not exactly sure what socialism is, I just know I’m not supposed to agree with it.

A standard fair-going family, despicable.

The worst part of the State Fair are the workers, or “carnies” for the purposes of this post. These carnies are basically the Harlem Globetrotters of homeless people. Carnies travel from town to town displaying some sort of “skill” that is worthless in the real world but still enables them to swindle people like me out of my money. Ninety percent of these carnies are either high on crystal meth, about to be high on crystal meth, or are just crashing down from their high on crystal meth. The other ten percent are too drunk to even attempt to do crystal meth. This means that all of the rides at the fair are death traps, literally. Having a carnie put together a tetanus filled ride after doing meth is more dangerous than me spending an hour by myself with the gel heads at White Collar Crime.

A Carnie on meth “operating” a tetanus filled ride.

Instead of learning how to conjugate verbs, carnies spend their formative years learning “trade secrets” such as slight of hand, stealing wallets, losing their teeth, and making me want to spend $150 to knock over a stack of milk bottles with a lopsided softball. This type of upbringing leaves no room for a real education. How can you possibly get a good education without going to a school where your parents tell your teachers what to do and get you out of trouble for blatantly cheating on that paper in 10th grade, your Senior English project, and every single Latin test you took? Seeing a carnie try to trailer-school (the carnie version of home-school) their kids is like watching a gel head trying to fit in at Felson’s, it’s almost sad, almost.

Rusty taking a break from trailer-schooling Rusty Jr. on how to convince fair-goers that the basketball rims are bigger than the basketballs themselves.

A lack of education combined with a mastery of the tricks of the trade enable carnies to easily swindle ITBers out of their hard-earned allowances. When I used to attend the fair, I would waste thousands of dollars trying to beat those stupid fair games just to show up the carnies. I finally realized that if I wanted to spend 3 hours getting ripped off by some commoner I should just spend a night ordering drinks at the lower bar of Felson’s. Since I never could win any of the fair games I’m proposing that a new fair be created and held at Cameron Village. Of course the games and attractions will have to be ITBified. The ITB fair will have games like “shoot scalding hot water at the commoner” to replace that shitty game at the fair where you shoot water at a target until some pathetic NASCAR replica car crosses a finish line. “Throw darts at the gel head” would be a good substitute for throwing darts at those boring balloons. Instead of carnies guessing your weight, age, or birthday month, the ITB fair would have someone guess the value of your trust fund, what year you first started going to Crowley’s, and what your zip code is. Instead of showing off overgrown vegetables, participants will be able to show off the previous weekend’s bar tabs and boast about how high they are. And finally, to avoid making the entire fair smell like a barn, instead of having livestock and animal races we would just have black and yellow labs race around the Broughton track. We would have to do something about the oversized-lice-infested-cartoon-character stuffed prizes as well. Our prizes would be much more valuable, I’m open to suggestions.

The general public loves the side shows and freak shows at the State Fair, mainly because they’re retarded and are entertained by almost anything. The ITB Fair freak shows would have to consist of things that are equally as astonishing to typical residents. Fair-goers could walk through horrifying shows that presented a day in the life of an OTB resident. Viewing a living room that only has basic cable and a non-HD television would be a jaw dropping sight. A car that costs less than $50,000 would be on display for residents to marvel at and wonder how anyone could drive around in a vehicle that doesn’t have televisions and built in DVD players. A chart of the current Dow Jones Average is sure to shock any inside the beltline resident as well. Feel free to add fair attractions that I may have forgotten about, it’s been so long since my parents dragged me out there against my will.

Note: The reason I waited until today to post this was so that I wouldn’t accidentally encourage anyone to actually attend the State Fair. I would hate for this guy to make a profit off of anyone else.