The Day of the Cucumber Sandwich (part two)

Picnic Day turned out to be more fun than I thought. Having witnessed a pretty half-arsed St. Patrick’s Day parade in Rochester last year, I’ve been apprehensive about parades. As I’ve discovered from watching student films, there’s little entertainment to be had from watching people walking.

Yesterday I discovered I may have been too harsh in that judgement.

Davis, it must be said, is home to a lot of eccentric folk. The manager of one ice cream parlour regularly sets fire to his own pubic hair; there’s a man who lives in a bike
; and a midget cop. Such concentrated eccentricity makes for a more interesting cast of characters than would normally turn up for a display of civic pride such as this.

The man in the wheel belongs to a club who gather to build whimsical bicycles. The whimcycle club, as they refer to themselves.

The old Routemaster bus was brought out here from back home and converted to run on natural gas. It’s a very common sight on the roads, but we’ve never managed to get a snap of it before.

There are the people who live in little domes on campus and conduct their business in as sustainable a manner as they can. They call their little hamlet Baggins End. No, not Bag End, before anyone gets pedantic on my arse.

This driver has a sticker on his electric car which reads "Unrepentant Nader Voter."

Not many of these around nowadays.

If there’s a rational explanation for this, I’d like to know.

Once the parade was over, the festivities continued. The four marching bands had a competition to see which one could outblow the others. The quad on the middle of campus had live music and food stands. Various departments opened themselves up for the entertainment and edification of the visitors. Davis has very strong agricultural and veterinary departments. There were beasties everywhere, and much beastly interaction on offer.

Our friend Juli wanted to see the insects. We saw insects. This one here looks like a eucalyptus leaf, and trembles as if blown by a breeze when it feels threatened. There were two big tanks of cockroaches. Enormous hissing cockroaches. I’ll spare your eyeballs, dear readers.

I finally achieved one of my lifelong ambitions, namely to get my hands on a real live goat. The queue for the goat milking was about half as long as the queue for cow milking so I didn’t have to wait too long to get some hands-on goat action. I fear I’ve forgotten her name already, but she graciously and placidly allowed me to fondle her udders. I seem to be naturally predisposed towards milking things. I squeezed out about twice as much milk as Juli – and she’s the one with the rosy milkmaid cheeks.

Unfortunately I’ve forgotten my goat’s name. Miranda, at the head of the page, is a different goat. Both are of the toggenburg breed. If I ever find myself in a position where keeping goats is an option, I’d have toggenburgs. I like their colouring and their inquisitive appearance. Goats!

There were dogs catching frisbees, which is fun to watch for a while and wears out pretty quickly. I was reminded of the opening of the mid-80’s kids movie The Flight of the Navigator.

Apologies for the poor image quality. We’re in the main basketball court. It’s almost full to capacity and the atmosphere is intense. What are all these people waiting for?

Why, racing dachshunds, of course! Did you know dachshunds were originally bred for badger hunting? The event was finally won by the tiniest dachshund, Sierra Wiener, who always started slowest and finished fastest. In the grand final he was running against a bigger dog which had barged its competition out of the way in several of the earlier heats. There was no question who the crowd’s favourite was, and he bore up well under the weight of expectation, hurtling over the line several lengths ahead of the competition.

Sierra Wiener and his personal trainer make their victory lap.

After that we hit Little Prague for happy hour and everything afterwards is a blur. I recall there was a Dance Dance Revolution competition in one of the main halls on campus, but we missed that, probably because I was swilling champagne with a hairy Spaniard in a Thai bar.

Yeah, in retrospect Picnic Day was rather good.