UFO Days in Elmwood is a local institution. I won't go into the long story of the event, the frequent UFO visitations, the attempts at building a UFO landing strip, or even how unsurprised that I am that a place known for alien visitations is where Isaac Weix runs his hardware business.
But this was the last major public campaign event for SD10, and was attended by Shelly Moore and Sheila Harsdorf supporters in the big UFO days parade. As with all of these events, we saw supporters of both candidates. If levels of excitement among the supporters is an indicator, Moore may walk away with this election. There were fairly equivalent numbers of supporters in the parade for each candidate, but it seemed like the Moore supporters were much more excited to be there. It again made me wonder about Harsdorf's continual claims that all of the support for Moore comes from special interests and people out of state. This looked like 60 people who really wanted their candidate to win, and none of them looked like fat-cats from big lobbying groups.[img_assist|nid=62592|title=Shelly Moore supporters at UFO days|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=100|height=75]
One of the things that made the day fun was the peculiarly rural Wisconsin flavor of the parade. It was a small-town fun day, with UFO burgers, veterans floats, Shriners in go-carts, and more. Miss every-little-town-in-the-area had a float in the parade, featuring the queen and her court. No big out-of-town lobbying parade would have had every model of Oliver tractor from 1974. I was a little taken aback by the UFO Days Wet T-shirt contest -- I would have thought I was in Cowles' district.
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I've been to a lot of parades during my life. I'm used to people throwing out candy. In New Orleans I've seen plenty of coins and junk jewelry thrown out. I was clonked once in the head with a religious medal [img_assist|nid=62594|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=100|height=75]at a parade in New York. But I've never before been to a parade where the float-ees were throwing out bags of cheese curds, or sausages - yup - Sailer's meats was throwing out little heat-sealed packs of honey-ham sticks. (by the way, they make GREAT bratwurst). Some floats were handing out cartons of milk and pudding cups, and the local EMT folks were tossing out first-aid kits (which for some reason were not a big hit with the kids - might as well have been throwing out socks and underwear from a Christmas parade). The Laura Ingalls Wilder Day float had people shooting the crowd with Super-Soakers - which I do not remember from Little House on the Prairie.I was holding out for cans of craft beer, but it never happened.
This all reminded me what is fun about living in this part of the world, and why we need to stop the continual radical changes that challenge what we all value about our state. Go out, canvass, make calls, talk to your neighbors - but most of all, go out and vote. The future of our state is at stake here - I want to keep loving this quirky, odd little part of the world. Let's fix what needs fixing, and leaver the parts alone that work. I'm gonna eat those ham sticks now.