Pulling your proverbial leg.

As part of my job (I'm a journalist with a small town newspaper) I'm often required to go to small town fairs to get pictures of various events that are taking place. Some of the events are cute, like a childrens talent competition. Some of the events are interesting, like a chainsaw woodcarving artist. Other events are ones that I find to be completely asinine, like the tractor pull.

If you've never been to a tractor pull then you really should sometime. Then you can see what rednecks with too much time on their hands can do with a tractor. For the uninitiated, let me explain how this works. A given tractor hooks on to a special vehicle called a skid. The skid has a special sliding device that makes it harder to pull the further you go. Operators take turns pulling the skid as far as they can. There are seperate weight and category classes. Weight classes are mostly useless, as almost every operator will continue to add weight to their tractor to compete in as many classes as possible. There is a seperate class for modified tractors which usually resemble drag racers, only they're tractors so it's not nearly as cool.

Once a first round on winners is determined, the three or five best pullers in each weight come back to pull again to determine the winner. Then prizes are handed out and everyone goes home.

Now as you might imagine, many of these supped up tractors are quite loud. Not only that, they smell like shit as they burn through enough diesel fuel to get a bus from Minnesota to Texas. At a time when gas prices only seem to be going up I think it's great that we can get together and waste fuel in such a pointless exercise. Oh wait, that's not great. As a matter of fact it's the exact opposite of great, horrible. I really can't think of any stupider way to waste diesel fuel. Well, maybe just straight up burning it, but that's another story.

Also included in town and county fairs are things called "horse pulls" which, if possible, are more boring than tractor pulls. The difference is that horse pulls waste nothing but time which is actually a benefit in a small town. Again, let me digress into explaining what happens at one of these pulls. A sled is loaded with concrete blocks. Two-horse teams are then hooked to the sled. The team has 10 seconds to pull the sled 20 feet (I think that's the distance). If any team is unable to pull the full distance then the weight of the sled and the progress they do make is marked as their final score. This seems simple, but weight is added gradually and each team pull once a round. It can take over 40 rounds before a winner is declared. So really, all there is to watch is a teams of horses pulling a steel sled back and forth over the same 60 ft of ground for two hours or more.

There is also a "pony pull" which is the exact same thing only with ponies instead of horses and the distance they must pull is less. I am informed that the east has a similar contest, the "ox pull" only the sled moves a matter of inches in each pull, I'm sure that it must be even more riveting.

Now, I'm not saying that any of that is "cruel to animals" or "bad for the environment," even though I could easily make that case. The fact is that these animals have been bred and trained for exactly this purpose, so to not use them in such a way is an insult to their genetic structure. The tractors have been painstakingly rebuilt and revamped to perform their best and the pulling is probably the closest alot of the viewers ever get to having "fun."

All I'm saying is that I think it's boring. Really, really boring. Maybe I need to get drunk to enjoy the spectacle, it seems to work for everyone else.