With our tummies full of funnel cakes, let’s try a nice, relaxing ride on the carousel.

How about a funnel cake for dessert? What’s a county fair without funnel cakes?

Among other things, I thought the fair would be a good place for some people pictures. But despite the outward show of color and light, at ground level it was surprisingly dim unless you were right next to one of the food stands. So this is it. This is literally the only picture of a person I took that was in focus and close to properly exposed. It was taken in an indoor pavilion, the shrewdly-named “Parade of Products.”

After a dinner of deep-fried peanut butter meatballs, how about a nice ride on the tilt-a-whirl?

Prof M wanted food on a stick. How about a corn dog? Too ordinary. A sausage dog? Too much like a corn dog. Chicken on a stick? That’s just a kabob. Octopus on a stick? Blah. Ravioli on a stick? Meh.

But credit where it’s due: when I pointed out the deep-fried peanut butter meatballs on a stick, he dove in. But it was a failed mission. He ate one of the meatballs, and tossed the other two. Apparently they were as bad as they sound.

This is Nick at the peanut-butter meatball stand, aka Chicken Charlie’s. Prof M is in the background negotiating his purchase.

Mmmm, a grill full of nice, smoky, jumbo turkey legs. You can almost smell the fair already, can’t you?

It’s Saturday night, so the fair was nice and crowded. This is what the central midway looked like when we entered the fairgrounds.

I’m off all day today. Please make sure nothing too terrible happens in my absence.

However, I won’t leave you blogless. My friend Professor Marc is in town, and on Saturday night we headed out to the Orange County Fair. I went to take pictures. He went to find food on a stick. As it turns out, I didn’t get any really good photos—how’s that for salesmanship?—but I got a bunch of OK ones. And thanks to the miracle of computer technology, I can schedule these to show up every hour on the hour while I’m gone.

First off, here’s the whole fair, taken from the top of the R50XL, “quite possibly the largest traveling observation wheel in the Western Hemisphere.” Come back in an hour for another exciting picture!

With debate over health care now proceeding, it’s time to vote on actual health care bills. A few moments ago the Senate voted against BCRA, their primary repeal-and-replace bill. This is the one they’ve been working busily on for the past couple of months. It wasn’t close: the bill went down 43-57 or thereabouts.

Next up, I suppose, is a bunch of amendments and then a revote? I’m not sure. Or maybe they’ll go straight to voting on the 2015 repeal-only bill.

Eventually they’ll get to the placeholder “skinny repeal” bill and just punt the whole thing to a conference committee. They’ll probably get 50 votes for that. Senators are always in favor of punting.

UPDATE: This was just a “procedural” vote. Everything in the Senate is a procedural vote. This means that BCRA might get modified and then get another vote. But chances of passage are dim. It lost by a mighty big margin tonight.

While I was out to lunch, I guess the Senate voted to proceed with debate on the Republican health care bill. They still don’t know which bill they’re going to debate, but they’re going to debate anyway. Welcome to the world’s greatest deliberative body.