The Fair is a fun once-a-year experience, so why not use it as a background to a once-in-a-lifetime experience? That's exactly what Story Photographers did when they had an "engagement shoot" for Jessica Newton and Jeremy Horton at the Fair on its first Sunday.

Check out the Story Photographers blog for shots of the happy couple wandering through the Fair and even riding the Ferris Wheel. What a great idea for a couple shoot. Congratulations Jessica and Jeremy, here's hoping you take a lifetime for a great time!

At the start of the Fair I took a guess at attendance, figuring that Steve Troxler would not get his million (sorry Steve) but that the Fair attendance would be over 800,000. I was way off on that one. Total attendance was 765,067. That's well over the historical average, but falls short of the 5-year and 10-year historical averages for Fair attendance. It was the lowest attendance, in fact, for the Fair since 2002. (You can see all the attendance numbers since 1986 at http://www.ncstatefair.org/2008/general/attend.htm .)

I'm sure that's disappointing for the Fair folks, especially since this year launched the new opening day of Thursday. But there's good news too -- two new daily attendance records set (I don't count the first Thursday as a "record-breaking" day) and solid attendance throughout the week.

Looking at the attendance for the last several years it seems like...

If you noticed the Dorton Arena is looking a little red, don't worry -- it isn't your eyes. Dorton's white fiber optics have been replaced with 1200 feet of red LED rope lighting. The Fair folks have noted that the LEDs use a lot less energy than the fiber optic lights, and are more visible all over the fairgrounds. Just tell your friends to meet you in front of the giant red-edged potato chip.

The Fair has taken a lot of green initiatives this year, with the electric vehicles and the big green recycling receptacles everywhere. I didn't have a chance to put much in those containers because most of the drinks I bought were in cups, not bottles or cans.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were an "official NC State Fair cup" you could buy every year, and get that filled at participating vendors? Some people wouldn't like to carry it around, of course, but if you already have a stroller or a backpack it wouldn't be an impossible addition. And there wouldn't be...

I bought a pair of inserts for my shoes this week. I have good sneakers but after ten hours or so of walking around the fairgrounds, my feet wake up and start asking what's the big idea.

As I was trimming the inserts to fit I started wondering: how far exactly was I walking? Was it as far as I thought it was, or was it just the fact that there was a lot of backtracking and weaving through crowds involved? I knew that some mapping applications let you measure distances along roads, but I didn't know if such measurement was possible for the official-road-less Fairgrounds.

After some experimenting I discovered that the application Google Earth (which is free and available at http://earth.google.com/) has a "ruler" feature. You can set two points on a map and have Google Earth give you the distance between them in yards, kilometers, miles, etc.

It's not perfect; you have to draw straight lines...

Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole stopped by WRAL's tent at the State Fair on Friday and talked with photographer Chad Flowers.