Take a Free Bug Cookie! Have You Eaten a Bug Today?

[dr_pretentious]

Of the good things about Rutgers University, the best--absolutely the very best--is Ag Field Day. One of the small colleges that Rutgers swallowed up was an agricultural school, and Cook College's tradition of opening its barns to the public to show off the spring lambs, calves, foals, kids, and piglets persists. The Landscape Architecture Department and the Organic Gardening Club sell plants. The Food Science Department flaunts its latest formula for chocolate ice cream.

And the Entomology Department holds its famous Cockroach Races. Not with urbane little Manhattan cockroaches or naive southern palmetto bugs, either. Nothing but the three-inch-long Madagascar singing cockroach will do.

Oh, and they really do give away free cookies with insects baked in them.

What makes Ag Field Day even better is that the New Jersey Folk Festival (started by another of the little colleges that the university swallowed) runs simultaneously on the next quad over. This large juxtaposition gives rise to smaller, weirder juxtapositions.

You can go from a performance of Dominican political ballads to a presentation on raising alpacas in your backyard for fun and profit. If you're not up for getting a pamphlet on how to build a rain garden, you can learn how to make your own Appalachian-style dulcimer. Too young to understand the lyrics at the singer-songwriter competition? Then you're probably little enough for the children's activities hosted by the rockclimbing club--children between six and ten years of age can be belayed while they Climb the Gnarly Tree of Awesome. (Do you doubt that it is the Gnarly Tree of Awesome? It says so on the sign, right there. And now don't you wish you were ten again, so you could climb it?)

And when you have eaten your bulgogi from the Korean Presbyterian Church's barbecue booth and your Food Science Department ice cream, and you just want to sit under the apple trees in full flower around the Passion Puddle, you can watch joy go by in fifteen thousand forms: all the dogs and children in New Jersey, chasing all the frisbees; poor families from the projects on Neilsen Street and the rough blocks of Remsen Avenue, and prosperous old-school Lefties from the Princeton Folk Music Society; undergrads of every known ethnicity, aesthetic, and sexual orientation, all displaying their identities with every signifier they can muster, and busloads of the elderly from assisted living centers. They've all come to sing along, to point at lambs, to race the cockroaches, to thump the drums, to compete in the pie-eating contests. Every one of them is welcome to a free bug cookie.

It's everybody's day. And what could be better than that?

Comments

[purpledice.livejournal.com]

Oh man, that does sound pretty great. Now I want to climb the Gnarly Tree of Awesome...

[jr0124.livejournal.com]

It is truly an amazing day. KJ and I showed up early today. Another group selling plants was the NJ Master Gardener's program. Their selection was simply amazing. They had more varieties of pappers and tomatoes than I've ever heard of. Their selection of herbs was incredible - I actually purchased mandrake! We even picked up an artichoke plant. KJ spent $64 at their table.

The other perennial favorite of ours is the "identify the nuts" table where you need to match cups full of nuts with the proper names. If you guess them alll right you win a nut tree.

Right across the way from the guess-the-nut was the Rutgers Floriculture greenhouse. They were giving tours on the half hour on topics such as ethnobotany and carnivorous plants.

[kjc.livejournal.com]

I do miss the folk festival... I think it was at the '89 festival when I first saw a cordless drill being used to generate curly fries. I didn't think it was possible to make curly fries BETTER. And I was wrong. Love.

(Er, hi! Just a random lurker; attended Rutgers College from '88-'94, got a BA out of it.)

[paganpilgrim.livejournal.com]

I loved reading this... I miss Ag Field Day!
I havent been in years, but Im a COOKie

[tyellas.livejournal.com]

This does sound truly awesome.

Were they chocolate bug cookies?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I have a mortal fear of heights, and even I wanted to climb the Gnarly Tree of Awesome.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The Identify the Nuts game sounds like it ought to have a broader application. Is it a pecan, or is it Ezra Pound? Identify Ezra Pound correctly, and win a volume of Ginsburg, because the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. (I saw the best filberts of my generation baked into pies, etc.)

Ooh, the greenhouse tours sound great. I've never been on those. Something new to try next year.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Cordless drill curly fries? Now I want to run out and buy a sack of potatoes.

Random lurkers are very welcome. About a quarter of the people who've friended this blog are people I've never met. It's very heartening--gives me hope that if I ever actually got a book into print, people who don't know me might buy it.

Is that Prague in the background of your icon? Starometske Namesti?

[jr0124.livejournal.com]

Your game sounds great! Now I want to play! Could this be a game for Bad Poetry Day?

Something else I neglected to mention was a demo run by the Equine Science folks. They have a horse treadmill. They brought out a former racehorse and had her walk on the treadmill. Then pace. Then trot. Then they cranked the machine WAY up and we all got to see a stunningly beautiful horse run flat out. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Equine science students all over the room were shouting "Go, Maxi! Good girl!"

A breathtaking moment.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Cook was a great college. It's been a while since I had any formal affiliation with RU, but the big consolidation still bugs me. I mean, if the university had a run of really great presidents, a case could be made for streamlining the implementation of his/her will, but since Rutgers has only managed to trade up from a notorious racist to a notorious drunken philanderer, a notorious union-buster to a guy who thinks it's a good idea to play a doomed game of chicken with the governor over the state budget, it looks to me like maybe having more checks and balances would be a good thing. In any case, it was weird to see in the Folk Festival program that the event was sponsored by Douglass Residential College. Residential? I guess a cluster of dorms is all that's left of that legacy now.

But Ag Field Day still rocks.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

They appeared to be shortbread cookies. The bug bits I could see looked sort of like flecks of vanilla bean. I don't know if the cookies were any good, though. By the time I reached the Entomology building, I had already been waylaid by Ecology Department grad students selling various home-cooked organic things for their fundraiser.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That would have been a fine thing to see. It's been a few years since I made a priority of seeing all the animals. I figured, one year's piglets look much like the last year's piglets. Usually I'll go to the first couple of barns, get full up on cute, and then head back to Douglass for more music. But I know the Equine Science department has built a lot of new stuff in the past couple of years, and probably the other animal husbandry departments have new stuff, too. Clearly, I'm missing out.

I love that there's more to do than anyone can fit into one relaxed day.

[kjc.livejournal.com]

Is that Prague in the background of your icon? Starometske Namesti?

Good eye! You got it in one. I was in Prague in March for the first time and had a really wonderful trip despite the complete and utter lack of sunlight.

Have you been?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I went to Prague with my sister in 1990, when the fall of the iron curtain was so recent that visa requirements for western tourists to the old buffer states were changing every day. It was a wild time to be in Eastern Europe.

The week we went happened to be the anniversary of the liberation of Pilsen, so when the locals heard us talking to each other and recognized the American accent, they'd stop us on the street to thank them for kicking the Nazis out of their country. There was some other big anniversary that people were free to observe for the first time--I forget what it was exactly, but some kind of tragic suppression of dissidents was involved--and in memory of whatever it was, Vaclavske Namesti was full of candles and flowers and little shrines. Vaclav Havel's picture was proudly displayed everywhere, including in a little shrine the lavatory attendant had set up in the women's bathroom at the train station. My sister and I bought a fancy uniform hat from a deserting Russian soldier on a street corner.

I haven't been back since, but my sister went a couple of years ago. She called me from the Charles Bridge. The local bluegrass band we'd heard playing there in 1990 (complete with washboard player and multiple banjos) was still in that same spot, doing that same rendition of "Oh, Susannah" in Czech. Maybe they were still there in March?

The complete lack of sunlight seems to be a constant. That's the only reason I didn't join the expatriate exodus to live there after college. Prague is my favorite European city. Maybe my favorite city altogether.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The housing area my family lived in at Fort Knox had Rose Terrace for its official name, but of course everybody called it Roach Terrace. Not just for the euphony, either.

You definitely missed out on Ag Field Day. Any year it falls on a day without rain, it's worth crossing a state line for.

[kjc.livejournal.com]

The local bluegrass band we'd heard playing there in 1990 (complete with washboard player and multiple banjos) was still in that same spot, doing that same rendition of "Oh, Susannah" in Czech. Maybe they were still there in March?

Y'know. I was on the bridge twice. And there was a band that sounded suspiciously American.

But there was also a helluva lotta wind the first time and both wind and rain the second time, so I didn't linger much and thus could be wrong.

But... were they closer to the Old Town side? Maybe 50 feet in from the arch/tower on the left as you walk toward the castle?

Side note: There's a Traveler's Tales: Prague (edited by David Farley) that I just finished up, which you might enjoy. Stories covering the last couple of years in the main, but also with a few stories going back to the early 90s and mid-90s.

I want to go back and explore the countryside - really visit Bohemia. And see that church made of bones. And a properly gothicky castle (the Prague Castle, while historically fascinating, mostly looked like a long skinny house doubling as a big wall).

Didja know the hill where Prague Castle sits is believed to have been occupied going back 5,000 years? They found some artifacts which they're pretty sure they can date to 3,000 BCE. It's a big hill, with a huge river on one side and a ravine on another side, PLUS it's got MULTIPLE fresh springs. If that ain't the definition of defensible, I dunno what is.

But if it's cloudy like that all the damn time, then Paris is still my favorite European city. (I didn't think it would be - I'm almost manic in my avoidance of fashion, trends, and "ought to" behaviors, so given that everyone said "oh you'll just LOOOOVE Paris," I was prepared to be disappointed... all in vain; man o'man do they have fantastic gardens. Scent, color, AND shade. They won me over, they did. Them and the Seine.)

Hmm. Rivers + cities = love. The Hudson, the Charles, the Thames, the Seine, the Flume Tevere, and now the Vltava. There's something to that.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a wonderful day adn I will have to check it out next year if possible.

[oaktavia.livejournal.com]

I never made Ag Field day when I was there. :-(
sounds like I missed out on something REALLY special!

I guess I'll have to plan a trip around ag field day... (is it always the same day?)

[oaktavia.livejournal.com]

yeah, but at least you're not a bug COOKie! thank goodness!
(*wink* couldn't resist)

[oaktavia.livejournal.com]

now I'm up for plants anytime, ya know that!! but I'd love to check out the animal stuff!! the horse treadmill sounds fantastic!
I guess I might plan an ag field day trip? he he he