People always remark how odd it is that Austin hold its annual rodeo at the same time as SXSW. They are the two culturally opposite yet signature events of Austin. So last weekend, Julia and I went to visit.
We didn’t go to the actual rodeo part. They make you listen to a country band and I hear that all the cowboys wear helmets now.
But we did see something much more awesome. Whiplash the cowboy monkey. My camera phone doesn’t have much of a zoom, but you can see the monkey’s red shirt and his chaps hanging over the side of the dog.
Whiplash is a true cowboy, just like George W. And by that, I mean that he’s the monkey on the back of the animal doing all the work.
Here’s Julia, my food frakking deputy, touching a caribou.
Here she is in front of a tractor.
The highlight of any show is the carny food. I was disappointed to find that the fried cheese bore no resemblance to deep-fried cheese curds.
It was more like a corndog with processed nacho cheese instead of a dog.
The deep-fried twinkie was a little more like I anticipated.
My one complaint: the prodigious quantities of powdered sugar blew off the plate and speckled my black clothes.
Here, Julia satisfies her chicken cravings with some chicken on a stick.
Only the stick kept the food from falling apart into luke-warm and soggy wads of oil.
