…and I always thought a Boilermaker was a whiskey shooter/cocktail named after the workers who stoked the steam locomotives with coal. It is a shot of whiskey dropped into a beer, and drunk without removing one’s lips from the glass, eg. chug-a-lug. Sounds like a college experience, but since underage students don’t illegally drink on college campuses and certainly not ‘party hearty’ shooters, it must be…of course…the locomotive itself!

Our pal Reg is a faculty member here in West Lafayette, Indiana and gave us the grand tour, coinciding with Freshman Orientation Week. 5500 Freshmen is a lot of goofy kids on a remarkably compact and walkable campus serving 40,000 students. College campuses go all out with a designated, “Office of the First Year Experience” to ensure new student success. You could see these kids were exhausted, and their student guides told us they kept plying them with free caffeine drinks to get them through all the activities. We overheard lots of chirpy cajoling, “Oh no, you can crash later, you don’t want to miss this!”  Perhaps they are resisting indoctrination into adult life, or maybe the Freshmen were just tired of the big noisy locomotive on wheels careening through campus with a loud steam whistle…I certainly was.

Many stopped to pet Lety, stating how much they already miss their dogs at home. Hey! Be the first in your dorm to get a dog!

I guess you have to do something splashy when you live in the same neighborhood as “Samara”, the most unaltered of Frank Lloyd Wright’s furnished and landscaped houses.

Samara is a stunning mix of Chinese and Modern architecture and Prairie Style interiors. Still, the Terracotta Warrior garden sculptures seemed a bit over the top. We liked however, the way it seemed to inspire the neighbors to move beyond woodland creatures, pink flamingos and trolls. We give the “Weird Garden Art Award”, to West Lafayette: from bronze and ceramic sculpture (the featured image, “Courting”), to topiary, and painted aardvarks, boas and gorillas set amid the roses in formal flower gardens. The Terracotta Warriors have met their match.

We are in town for the Indiana State Fair too. “Everything you can imagine fried on a stick” is the food magnet at the Fair, but Reg met her match with an “Amish Donut”. Sized like one of those blow up temporary auto tires, even the donut hole pictured below, is 3 inches across. That is just scary.

… but then again, there are Art Cycles (photo credit: Dr. Regena Scott) and other weird stuff. Get thee to your State Fair, wherever you are!