austin_dern

Thursday was the second and last day of the conference, and the course of events was pretty much what I described already. The most noteworthy thing besides the meals being set up better was a neat address about how the animal rights movement had changed in the past fifty years, conveniently broken into two phases, roughly 1975-2000 and 2000-present. The first half was dominated by the idea being introduced to public debate and, it seemed to me noteworthily, a focus on the importance of stopping animal suffering. The second half has seen a shift in focus to topics like how animals can experience joy and we should value that. bunnyhugger's presentation got a mention here, although just as an example of the sort of work done on this line of thinking.)

The finale of the conference was supposed to come a little past 4 pm, and we hurried thinking we might be late, only to sit through the last ten minutes or so of a presentation --- in French --- that was itself running long. At least we had good seats for when the closing remarks, including a good bit of hope that Peter Singer would be able to visit Rennes 2 for the 60 Years On conference, came on. (He must have heard that from everybody.) And then there was a little more hanging around, some desserts, the conference staff collecting all the name badges for some reason. Peter Singer walking around with his orange backpack like he was just another student taking a gap year. We didn't stick around to the very end of the gathering, but we were probably on the latter side of things.

Annoyingly we had more time Thursday night but less to do, since Le Grand Huit was doing exclusively some private event. We also were not quite hungry exactly but also not quite not. bunnyhugger found we were close to a franchise of a Belgian fast-food place named Quick and I thought I might get cheese fries or something like that, maybe a pop.

We were indeed close to it, although I managed to make the walk a needlessly longer one by going way too far north to start and getting us closer to Minimarche than we needed to be. Attempting to compensate by going over a block or two and then back down a road that wasn't precisely parallel succeeded, though, as well as letting us see a couple of nice bookstores and gaming shops and all that were closed but looked like fun places to hang out.

The policy of having giant touch-screen ordering menus has reached Rennes, France, and in this case it was actually not that bad since it meant we could look over the menu at ease, and use the [EN] button to read it and order in English. The only mistake made was that I touched the button to 'pay at register' --- I swear I thought I was going to pay at the screen --- and so I had some fumbling with the cashier, including not being completely sure they were even going to start making our food until we paid. Anyway, decent enough cheese fries. We saw they had some stuff that looked good, mozzarella sticks and something else (maybe a vegetarian burger?) that were unavailable, with the menu screens covering the pictures of the items with 'Victim Of Their Own Success', I guess indicating they were sold out.

So we had a slow night, a chance to get to bed a little early, make sure we were ready for tomorrow and the trip back to Paris and then on to Belgium. We'd could do that.

And now, some more Calhoun County Fair pictures for you.

Just checking that it's not a carved wooden horse. (I kid, although she might have been checking what kind of plastic or fiberglass it was made from.)

And just like that we have a dark sky and rides by night!

Here's much of the midway, including the drop tower and the Ferris wheel.

And here's that junior caterpillar ride.

Caterpillar looks a bit horrified at being ridden. Hope they get over that.

The balloons ride looks nice here.

Trivia: UPA cartoon studios' first television productions were a series of eight 60-second commercials for Ford Motors with Doctor Seuss. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 64: Olive Oyl's Dilemma!!, Ralph Stein, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.