Deep-fried fair-food cereal: Can it be worse than regular Trix?

Pictured: Step 5 of the P90X program cycle.

GateHouse — I am not a big eater of fair food, which you can probably tell, because I am not dead.

I am also not a very big rider of fair rides, which you can also tell, for the same reason. There was an annual fair that came through my Indiana hometown every year — it had to, because it was an annual fair, and if carnies are known for anything it’s their strict adherence to contractual obligations — and I would go every year, because it was either that or play fantasy baseball with my friends. And here is this only time this sentence will ever be written anywhere on Earth: The county fair was the much stronger option for possibly meeting girls. (It was also a much better option for eating funnel cakes, which was the far more likely outcome.)

This happened when I was in my teens, in the mid-1930s according to my hair and posture, back when my unformed adolescent body could do things like consume three consecutive funnel cakes without collapsing into a heap of convulsive stomach-clutching. (By contrast, if I eat one whole glazed donut now I must run four miles to destroy the attendant calories, which is hard, as I don’t really have the two hours to spare.)

And it is a DARNED or possible GOLDANGED good thing, too, because if I were a teen hitting up the Lake County Fair now I would have all manner of newfangled (and newdanged!) fair foods to consume while not meeting any girls. (Can I tell you that I have never understood the idea of fair foods anyway, and not just because of my aversion to throwing up into a Crazy Ball game, but because I cannot fathom why, when you’re going to be hitting 8 Gs in a rattletrap spinny contraption that was built in 1956 and contains most of its original rivets, you definitely want your waist parts jammed full of unregulated dough prepared by undocumented gypsies. God the kids are going to LOVE going to the fair with Fun Dad in a few years.)

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Pictured: Sacramento

Anyway, I direct your attention first to Sacramento, where it is generally best to avoid directing your attention unless you are a debt collector, where the California State Fair is being held in a state that is shutting down its school year in mid-February due to lack of funds but has plenty of coin to boil up vats of burbling frying oiliness and deposit into them a treasury of things that God never intended to have Fried, such as cheeseburgers! And macaroni and cheese! And cinnamon rolls! OK you know what before Idiot Write Person is going to hang out on this last one before going all Moral High Ground on deep-fried cinnamon rolls.

Yet the California State Fair is basically a three-hour bikram yoga seminar put on by actual monks when compared to the San Diego County Fair, where fairgoers can enjoy such treats as fried cereal balls made with Trix and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, assuming, of course, they can order them without collapsing into fits of hysterical 14-year-old boy laughter, which, I confess, I am totally doing right here on the couch.

“These deep-fried Trix aren’t for kids, unless you want to contribute to the obesity problem,” wrote Shauntel Lowe in the local Patch website, according to this. “The doughy ball of greasy cereal wasn’t bad, but it definitely isn’t something I’d go out of my way to buy.”

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Related, sort of

• The gospel of deep-fried Pepsi

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See, now here with all due respect to Lowe and the field of Internet-based doughy ball evaluation, here’s where I take issue with this: Under no circumstances in 2012 should the phrase “the doughy ball of greasy cereal wasn’t bad” be allowed to pass through the zeitgeist without attention, without scorn. DOUGHY BALLS OF GREASY CEREAL ARE ALWAYS BAD. BAD BAD BAD. BAD DIDDITY BADDILY BADDY BADDY BING BONG. We are never going to do anything about this obesity-problem business if we’re like “Oh you’re sucking horns of spherical grease out of a tube over by the Zero Gravity? Meh.” This food should be addressed like a spider that’s gotten into your house — AAAAA KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT — and do not pretend like spiders don’t need to be crushed when they get in your house, people, those things have babies.

Things are culinarily better over in Texas, which is another sentence that I don’t think has ever been written before, where this year’s State Fair of Texas will take place in September and features, I can only imagine, a highly anticipated keynote by President Obama. The Texas fair will be debuting deep-fried Samoa Girl Scout cookies , which are Samoas that have been wrapped in wonton skies, fried and then adorned with caramel, chocolate and coconut. Wait that sounds good, kinda. Kudos, Texas.