Jamestown Festival

This weekend some extended family members and I went to the Jamestown Festival.

At the Historic Jamestown location, the place where the fort actually existed, there was a Park Ranger who was such a great orator that he really had us all (at least 125 people) captivated with his detailed description of the questions surrounding the Jamestown settlement. Really made us all wonder as well.

What happened at Jamestown? Why were they starving with all the natural wealth around them? What causes flesh to fall off; why couldn't they identify what was happening to them? Could the spaniards have poisoned the water supply? With arsenic? Why are there Rose Crosses on the tower in front of the church, oldest english structure in the new world, at the Jamestown fort site? Good loaded questions very well presented with bunches of factual tid-bits. The guy was awesome...our group consensus was that the $30 was well spent just listening to him.

The script exchange at Festival Park bothered me on some obscure moral level. I refused to exchange my money for their stupid festival script and the only vendor that got my business was a peanut distributor in one of the tents, and then only because I overheard him saying "I'll take anything but an IOU." If he hadn't said that, I would've definitely assumed he was with the script only vendors.

In part, my objection was that the script didn't serve any purpose to the vendors or the customers. The only thing the script exchange did was make it slightly less likely that people would reconvert when they were ready to leave. The lines were long and you had to predetermine how much loot you planned on blowing. It's not a crafty way to net more money, it's immoral to put people through an emotional ordeal just to get their worthless festival script reconverted.

All I wanted was a Funnel Cake. But the Funnel Cake vendor accepted only script. My uncles, who didn't feel it was worth protesting even by boycott, offered to buy me a funnel cake. I had to politely decline...the script conversion really bothered me on a moral level.

Now, I know what one counter-argument might be. To say that the script discourages theft because the thief would have to then convert all the stolen script back to cash before leaving. I agree that this is an effective theft deterrant; almost as effective as the ten billion state troopers and other assorted police at the event...almost. Ok, no where near; anyone who could steal green from a hotdog vendor under those circumstances would probably be crafty enough to steal white and convert it before getting caught.

Seriously. There were fences and troopers all over the place. Anyone running or even looking nervous would have gotten a rubber glove. Preventing theft from the vendors was not the motiviation for the script, the motivation was accumulating a dollar here and there from people who didn't feel it was worth it to wait in line again and reconvert when leaving. Disgusting. Revolting. I'm ashamed of it.

So now I'm home again and sitting here crafting this blog entry. I've decided today to just go with blogger. There's no real reason to waste my time writing my own blogging software. Besides, I really like the look of this one.

I guess I ought to touch on the standard topics briefly. Work is fine and good. Love and sex life are not even on life support, they are just as dead as they have been for years. I'm still having trouble focusing my attention and the old internal monologue just dies off after a short period leaving me somewhat dumb. It's hard to kick start. Maybe my brain needs an oil change. I don't know. Oh well....

Finally opened that savings account and I'm thinking about realigning my 401k into aggressive growth. Hitherto it's been in the long-term growth category, which is not really recommended for someone my age.