This weekend, I will be attending the Kansas City Renaissance Festival held in Bonner Springs, KS.  I have attended the faire almost every year of my life that I have lived in Kansas City, since my parents started taking me along when I was very young.  From good food to great entertainment and interesting shopping, there is always more to do at the renaissance festival than I have time for in a single day.  I have been to renaissance fairs held in other cities, but so far Kansas City’s is better.  Not only is it huge, spanning 16 Acres of private land, but the land they have is used exclusively for the renaissance festival and related events.  This means that they are able to have a huge number of permanent structures, rides, and attractions that would not be possible at fairs that must be torn down after each festival. 

Each of the seven weekends the festival is open, they have a different theme.  This weekend’s theme is “Celtic Crimes of Fashion - Featuring the Scottish Heavy Athletics Wargames!” I am particularly interested in trying some haggis, the horrible sounding Scottish “delicacy” involving sheep organs cooked with oatmeal in a stomach lining.  Yum!

Earlier this month, the 2007 World Beard and Mustache Championships (or WBMC) were held in Brighton, UK.  The event is held every two years and moves from country to country, much like an Olympics of ridiculous facial hair.  I have been a big fan of the event since I first found out about it a few years ago, and always get a good laugh out of some of the more bizarre beards on display. The sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing combined with the tongue-in-cheek seriousness of the contestants make the participants universally my heroes.  Check out the Winner’s gallery for some of the best examples of awesomely sculpted facial hair art you will ever see.

Last weekend while driving back from the Anime Iowa convention in Coralville, IA, about halfway from there to Des Moines, we witnessed a car fire on the side of the road.  From what we could tell, the driver was safe and the fire department were on the scene.  My roommate took a couple of impressive shots of the fire out the side window as we drove by.

The USPS has been promoting their new stamps commemorating the 30 year anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars movie.  One of the more interesting and nerdy-cool gimmicks they are using is the transformation of many mailboxes around the country into models of R2D2 from the movies.   One of those mailboxes is located in downtown Kansas City, my home town, and I got a few snapshots of it over the weekend.