Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #2: “Sender”

October 13, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Redhead woman sits in her house, despairing amid tons of weird packages.

Helly from Severance sprouted a new innie!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: the mystery-shopper thriller Sender — the feature-length debut of writer/director Russell Goldman, which premiered last March at South by Southwest with a small yet mighty cast. It’s based on his previous short Return to Sender, which starred Fargo‘s Allison Tolman and isn’t currently available streaming, unless you count a copy I found with some YouTuber talking over all eighteen minutes of it. So I’m unable to watch it for value-added compare-and-contrast fun — all the more annoying because I just started watching Fargo a few months ago and now I’m intrigued.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #1: “Jimmy”

October 11, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
KJ Apa IS Jimmy Stewart!

Jimmy Stewart welcomes you to the Magic of Movies!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants are on a nationwide tour through the Hollywood festival circuit; others are local productions on shoestring budgets. Projects with household names screen alongside indies with big hopes — sometimes with a cast of unknowns, sometimes with a familiar face or three from pop culture’s past and present.

Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits. Some are highly anticipated and might go on to compete at the next Academy Awards, much like last year’s Blue Moon and It Was Just an Accident. Or they’ll be smaller and criminally overlooked, which sadly is how things can go sometimes. (My favorite Heartland 2025 entrant, Egypt’s heartbreaking Oscar submission Happy Birthday, never found a US distributor and is still unavailable to stream here.) Results and fates will vary. Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry, no matter how big or little. Given the viewing volume and thereby the subsequent writing volume, I might keep these write-ups shorter than usual. (I said MIGHT. Stop looking relieved.)

First in line: Heartland proudly presented the sold-out Festival World Premiere of Jimmy — a biopic of legendary actor Jimmy Stewart, focusing on his World War II service and the aftermath. It was a natural fit for Heartland — his family has maintained close ties with them since the late 1990s, even allowing them to name one of their annual awards after him. As one of the festival’s two big opening-night galas, the screening was held downtown at Scottish Rite Cathedral and welcomed cast and crew members for an intro and Q&A afterward. Accompanying me was my wife Anne, who read a Stewart biography not too long ago and was curious to see what they covered. We didn’t take notes during the Q&A, but she did her best to catch a few pics from our long-distance uppermost balcony seats.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Linkin Park: Unshatter” End Credits

October 4, 2026 By in Misc. Media, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong in concert, both singing and standing on the same amplifier stack.

Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong knocking it out of the Park, with Alex Farrell and Joe Hahn backing them up.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: In 2024 Linkin Park, the very first band that my son and I ever had in common, released From Zero — their first new album in seven years, after lead singer Chester Bennington’s suicide. I wrote in part:

Mike Shinoda finally felt ready to record a revival with his bandmates, along with a new drummer (music-biz veteran Colin Brittain) and new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong, who reaches Bennington’s octave range (cf. her belt-sander’d screams in the needlessly acroynmized “IGYEIH”) and does her part for the legacy…the band dusts off their stacks and recaptures the first two albums’ nü-metal glory days with quiet-loud-quiet showcases like “The Emptiness Machine” and “Heavy is the Crown”, though their two favorite topics remain self-aware primal-scream sessions and tirades toward unnamed offenders who suck. With the band-reset button firmly pressed, the question of where LP goes from here — i.e, venturing into new ideas or rewriting the same single every few years, like Skillet — remains To Be Continued for now.

After recently wrapping up a two-year world tour, their story continues with Linkin Park: Unshatter, a documentary that’s been rolled out as a specialty theatrical release with limited showtimes and no AMC Premiere savings allowed. It isn’t a Behind the Music episode surveying their entire history for the uninitiated — more of a From Zero making-of, charting their gradual emergence from the throes of grief and rage to figure out what comes next. (Quoth the familiar lyric on the movie’s poster: “The hardest part of ending is starting again.”) At 54 it was my first time ever seeing a concert film in theaters, or anything like one because my favorite bands never make them.

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The Road to Dragon Con 2023, Part 1: Return to Pigeon Forge and/or Gatlinburg

October 3, 2026 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The Hollywood Wax Museum with giant sign, replica skyscrapers with giant King Kong on one side. Next door is a Mount Rushmore pastiche with the heads of Elvis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Charlie Chaplin, and possibly Michael Rooker as a cowboy, but probably not.

The Hollywood Wax Museum: hopefully not the closest we’ll ever come to the real thing.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Each year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. We grew up in families that couldn’t afford out-of-state vacations. We young geeks had to live vicariously through the windows of pop culture in lieu of in-person adventures. After years of settling for everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for opportunities to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own, from the horizons of nature to the limits of imagination, from history’s greatest hits to humanity’s deepest regrets and the sometimes quotidian, sometimes quirky stopovers in between. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

2023 was a busy year for traveling and special occasions as the pandemic and its anxieties receded. In addition to our Midwest comic-con resurgence, in March we took our very first trip to Disney World as wonderstruck fiftysomethings; at the end of June we made our first foray into the Carolinas with an emphasis on the Charleston area. The out-of-town respites didn’t stop there: at summer’s end we turned the week leading up to Labor Day into a special combo package: a convention and road trip.

That Labor Day weekend marked our third visit to Dragon Con in downtown Atlanta — one of America’s longest running events for folks like us from across all fandoms, hobbies, and geek interests, which the two of us have made a biannual tradition. We already shared hundreds of photos from our three days in the thick of it all, posted as quickly as I could after we returned home and recuperated. Before reaching Georgia we made a few other stops along the way whose photos I never got around to adding to the blog collection. I could list the excuses why or I could just show them to you now. Onward, then?

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Cincinnati Comic Expo 2026 Photos, Part 2 of 2: Holy Thelma Harper, Batman!

September 27, 2026 By in Comics/Lit, Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Us doing jazz hands with Vicki Lawrence, who's in costume as Thelma Harper from "Mama's Family", holding her purse.

Mama is a bit nicer when her dopey family isn’t around.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

My wife Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in our neighboring states (and sometimes even farther). We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do. This weekend we once again drove two hours southeast of Indianapolis to attend the sixteenth annual Cincinnati Comic Expo, their own version of our usual Midwest cons. After a two-year relocation to the Sharonville Convention Center, this year CCE returned at last to downtown Cincy’s newly renovated, erstwhile Duke Energy Convention Center — now rechristened the First Financial Center. This was our sixth time at CCE, which we’ve been visiting on and off since 2016. We bought weekend passes for this occasion a while back, but by showtime they only had two guests list we considered absolute musts whom we hadn’t met before. So we deleted a Friday hotel stay from the itinerary and drove in Saturday morning for just the one day. We made the most of our limited time…

…which included the special guest in our lead photo: Vicki Lawrence! Boomers know her as one of the stars of The Carol Burnett Show, while some Gen-X-ers fondly recall her as Thelma Harper from its ’80s sitcom spinoff Mama’s Family, which ran on NBC first before jumping to syndication with a rearranged supporting cast. Anne has seen way more episodes than I have, but there were more than a few keepers among its six seasons — the one where Burnett’s recurring character Eunice sings at a wedding in a drunken rage, the one where Thelma goes on Jeopardy!, the one where they all go on Family Feud, the Rashomon homage, et al. Once CCE announced Lawrence would be attending and doing photo-ops in costume, we pretty much locked them into our schedule.

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Cincinnati Comic Expo 2026 Photos, Part 1 of 2: Cosplay!

September 27, 2026 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
costume of Wendy's mascot carrying a tray with a Dave's Single, fries and Frosty.

Considering the food options, we wish this were a Wendy’s.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in our neighboring states (and sometimes even farther). We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

This weekend we once again drove two hours southeast of Indianapolis to attend the sixteenth annual Cincinnati Comic Expo, their own version of our usual Midwest cons. After a two-year relocation to the Sharonville Convention Center, this year CCE returned at last to downtown Cincy’s newly renovated, erstwhile Duke Energy Convention Center — now rechristened the First Financial Center.

This was our sixth time at CCE, which we’ve been visiting on and off since 2016. We bought weekend passes for this occasion a while back, but by showtime they only had two guests list we considered absolute musts whom we hadn’t met before. So we deleted a Friday hotel stay from the itinerary and drove in Saturday morning for just the one day. We made the most of our limited time.

As is the MCC procedure, let’s start with mandatory cosplay photos! The humble duo here at MCC enjoys the panoply of costumes, and appreciates the makers and wearers who enliven every comic-con with their talents and their exaltation of various fandoms. We regret we can only represent a fraction of the total cosplay wonderment that was on display this weekend. We’re just an aging couple doing what we can for happy sharing fun. Enjoy! Corrections, elucidations, and plugs welcome!

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Zach Cregger Presents Literally the Greatest “Resident Evil” Film in World History

September 25, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Scared young white guy on a wintry city street vaguely points an assault rifle.

A terrible fright / We’re scrounging tonight / for weapons in a winter wonderland!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Horror won big at the Academy Awards! While Sinners and Frankenstein carted off a combined seven categories on behalf of the 2025 field, Zach Cregger’s child-abduction plot-twister Weapons darted out of its own dark corner and took home Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan — best known by Gen-X as Field of Dreams‘ Concerned Wife and Uncle Buck’s annoyed girlfriend — who was completely unrecognizable as the mysterious Aunt Gladys, a fiend who one day might be called “iconic” once enough time has passed that revealing her existence isn’t a major spoiler in itself. (I hated skating around her gloriously creepy performance in my own write-up, but knowing nothing made her entrance all the more unnerving to see.)

Like Cregger’s debut Barbarian, Weapons was a sharply crafted, time-shifting puzzlebox that didn’t even reveal the spooky subgenre at its core till you’re lured halfway inside. Its staggering box office performance was even more surprising, and heralded this year’s high-grossing horror wave that’s seen films like Obsession and Backrooms luring millions back to theaters without the sort of old-fashioned Hollywood star power that once made for reliable audience bait. It’s less surprising that some corporation would take heed and entice Cregger to inject new life and/or financial viability into one of their stagnant IPs.

The lucky winner of his undivided attention is Resident Evil, the long-running game series that scrounged up seven films’ worth of zombie-virus mayhem, some of which I watched on a DVD boxed set I bought at a yard sale for a buck, then paid it forward to Goodwill. (I don’t remember how many of ’em it had — at least the first two.) Of the games, I only played through a few levels’ worth of RE4 on my son’s old PS2 — maybe 15 years ago? — till I found myself wishing there were a Bethesda Studios-style option for Leon to shove the President’s daughter Ashley off a roof, accept the bad karma and keep playing through. So I’m not an authority on the world of Raccoon City or the Umbrella Corporation unless seeing dozens of RE cosplayers in every Dragon Con parade counts.

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My 2026 Reading Stacks #2: The Lost Marvels’ Last Stand?

September 20, 2026 By in Comics/Lit Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The first three books reviewed in this entry.

Oversized hardcover omnibuses also make great melee weapons!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read within the past year that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-eight years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place.

I’ve previously written why I don’t do eBooks. Perhaps someday I’ll also explain why these capsules are exclusive to MCC and not shared on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites where their authors might prefer I’d share them. In the meantime, here’re some reading results…

…at shorter length this time, covering the physically heaviest books I’ve read so far this year. Two of them took much longer to read than the third, and are the main reasons why my total book count won’t reach 50 this year unless I really step up my speed and/or set other hobbies aside.

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My 2026 Reading Stacks #1

September 19, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
The first six books featured in this entry.

Good things that came in manga-sized packages.

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read within the past year that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-eight years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place.

I’ve previously written why I don’t do eBooks. Perhaps someday I’ll also explain why these capsules are exclusive to MCC and not shared on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites where their authors might prefer I’d share them. In the meantime, here’re some reading results:

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Best CDs of 2025 According to an Old Guy Who Only Bought 6 of Them

September 13, 2026 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Six CDs as listed in entry.

The nominees are! And yes, one of these things is not like the others!

Hi, I’m Hungry-Man-Sized Casey Kasem and welcome to another music listicle, but not a Top Ten because I didn’t buy that many!

As part of my annual series of chronically late year-in-review entries, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves, though I finally waded into some of that last year. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website, thirteen years and counting.

In 2025 I got six brand new studio albums, omitting any pre-2025 finds or gifts. It can be fun to walk past the cool-collectors’ vinyl bins to the way-back by the T-shirt rack and pick through what passes for in-person CD sections today, though I’m seeing diminishing returns as those get smaller and dustier, sometimes not even alphabetized. More often than not, More and more, I’m resorting to online disc-shopping because all of Indy’s coolest stores are on other sides of town faraway from us, and the stores we stumble across in our road trips aren’t stocking new stuff I like. Or maybe it’s all selling out before I come in? I wouldn’t know, but I feel like these artists would be much bigger today if that were the case.

Nevertheless, on with the countdown!

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“Tony”: The Secret Origin of Why He Went by ‘Anthony’

September 12, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tony Movie Poster with Dominic Sessa glaring at us, and Bourdain's description of his own younger self: "I was -- to be frank -- a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout and badly in need of a good ass-kicking."

Uhh, this entry is rated PG for the impolite word in its poster.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: The period-piece dramedy The Holdovers was one of my favorite films of 2023 for numerous reasons, including but not limited to Dominic Sessa in his charismatic feature-film debut as a cocky boarding-school senior whose family abandons him for Christmas and who learns humility and maybe a few manners as he eventually realizes smart-mouthing everyone around him can only get him so far in life.

Ever since, I’ve been itching to see what else he can do. I wasn’t compelled to endure the third Now You See Me, mind you, so I’ve had to bide my time. Sessa finally resurfaced on my radar as the star of Tony, a narrowly focused biopic of the late author, chef and TV documentarian Anthony Bourdain. Full disclosure: I didn’t follow him closely enough to be a “fan” — nothing against him personally, but humanity has spawned tens of thousands of creators and celebrities within the past century and I can’t possibly track them all. Years ago I watched one episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, his season-3 trip to Cleveland featuring American Splendor comics creator Harvey Pekar and legendary drummer Marky Ramone — i.e., possibly its most me-targeted episode ever. I was fascinated, but I failed to stick around for more. I’ve also read two of the three graphic novels he co-wrote with novelist Joel Rose. And I was aware of his online presence from a distance, tangentially, until his untimely and horrifying passing at age 61.

By no means did I see Tony with any kind of thorough Bourdain-head foreknowledge or preconceptions beyond awareness of his forceful personality, his radically diverse palate borne of decades of culinary experience, and his passion for international travel that made our family’s annual road trips look like neighborhood errand-running. That’s all I brought with me into the theater.

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The Winning Case of “Coyote vs. Acme”

September 12, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Wile E. Coyote holds his arms wide at a negotiating table. Seated next to him is a befuddled lawyer.

Wile E, Will. Will, Wile E.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Nearly three years ago I wrote about the plight of Coyote vs. Acme, the latest Looney Tunes feature film that was in post-production when Warner Brothers announced they’d changed their mind and they’d rather throw the whole thing off a cliff, toss a boulder on it, and declare it a loss on their tax forms. And yet it lives! A groundswell of omnipartisan internet wrath erupted in protest of this craven act of corporate greed and/or executive senselessness and/or misunderstanding by inattentive cartoon watchers who thought Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd were the good guys.

The kindly third-party folks at Ketchup Entertainment stepped up and overpaid to save the day and distribute the finished work. WB overlord David Zaslav and his starchy-suited lackeys underestimated how many of us are old enough to remember all those classic shorts in their prime, back when broadcast networks and local syndicated channels could proudly display their innovative slapstick zaniness uncut and uncensored before the devil invented the helicopter-parenting lobbying cults that demanded they be ruined for the sake of undiscerning latchkey kids who might see Bugs Bunny’s antics, get sinister ideas about ordering anvils from Amazon and going on squashing sprees.

The Looney Tunes legacy lives on in the hands of director Dave Green (Earth to Echo) and screenwriter Samy Burch (May December), who shares “Story By” credit with James Gunn (!!) and Jeremy Slater (Moon Knight, Mortal Kombat II), all of whom adapt a 1990 New Yorker article that I’m surprised isn’t paywalled as of this writing. Their efforts weren’t in vain thanks to You, The Viewers at Home, who would’ve looked collectively stupid if this had sucked as much as the Space Jam series did. I’m excited and relieved to report it doesn’t, so rest assured y’all didn’t waste your time. And now you can follow through on your alleged passion and actually go see it in the theater! I mean, you already did and I don’t need to bother writing about it, right?

…right?

…

…oh, internet. *sigh*

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” End Credits

September 6, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Murderer wearing white jumpsuit and black box on head stands with spear at attention like a soldier

Little Death is watching you watching them!

Hats off to writer/director Jane Schoenbrun for contributing to one of the most convoluted entry titles in MCC history! Not that I’m complaining — tortured syntax is among my numerous writing vices, and I’ll take whatever unwitting aiding and abetting I can get in my syntactical torturing. To clarify: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the full name of Schoenbrun’s third film, after We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. I’m a big fan of creative film-titling and increasingly unimpressed by one-word titles that tell you absolutely nothing distinctive about the work, especially if six other unrelated films had that name first.

This is also only the second time in our 14-year run that the word “sex” has appeared in an entry title. (The first was, shall we say, not about “sex positivity”.) As a self-admitted prude, I’ve been pretty okay with that particular dearth. But after reading a few reviews of this most unusual film — one part meta-horror satire of slasher-flick revivals, one part slippery-reality self-discovery vision quest — I was curious to experience it for myself. I correctly guessed parts of it would be Not My Thing, but Camp Miasma‘s blood-soaked, mind-bending campground has plenty to unpack.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 9 of 9: The Year in Everything Else

September 1, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
cheese sculpture behind glass in temperature-controlled enclosure. Imagery includes cows, baseball, and self-portrait of the artist.

The annual cheese sculpture from Sarah Kaufmann, “the Cheese Lady” — another 1500 pounds of temporary art, later donated to charity.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and it all comes down to this: all the other pics fit to print. Obviously we had to lead off with the cheese sculpture.

Next up: the entrants in the annual CANstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “Oh No, We Overordered Mushroom Soup Again”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them.

Rather than the fair’s official theme of The Year of Baseball, the CANstruction competitors celebrated the Harvest Pavilion’s headline exhibit, “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. So this year, the cans are all about the movies!

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 8: Morning Midway Meandering

August 30, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Purple caterpillar roller coaster for kids on green track, no people around.

Possibly the world’s fastest caterpillar, relatively speaking.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

When I was a kid, the Midway was the only part of the fair that mattered. The food was a nice change of pace, but was more of a necessity than a highlight, at least until I discovered elephant ears. The adults wanted to see the exhibits and didn’t care if I was bored stiff. I liked animals, but our family never adapted to toxic barn stench. Sometimes the special events and scheduled entertainment were okay, but I didn’t scour their schedule for appointments and never attended a concert there until I was 29. No, far as I was concerned, the Midway was the be-all-end-all of the State Fair experience — the rides, the games, the fun houses, and especially the video arcade they added in the mid-’80s.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 7: The Year in Antiques

August 29, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A booze flask, a moonshine jar, and a Mortimer Snerd whiskey bottle.

BOOZE! Now that I have your attention, here’s a trio of old-time containers, including one based on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s other dummy, Mortimer Snerd.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

One of the fair’s regular features is the antiques competition, chiefly displayed on the second floor of the Indiana Arts Building. No one’s ever posted the rules, criteria, rankings, or anything expository beyond signage implying, “Here are some antiques not for sale.” Contestants bring in ancient items they unearthed somewhere, a secret council convenes far from inquisitive eyes, prize ribbons are placed next to some of them, yadda yadda yadda, they’re at your Indiana State Fair.

Amid the quilts and ’50s baby dolls and blue-and-white dishware, a few items with historical value and/or pop culture cachet will catch our attention, especially comic books published before I was born. We congratulate the winners of this year’s Antiques We Noticed Most Contest!

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 6: The Year in Art

August 28, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
red dragon sculpture with at least a five-foot wingspan.

Red dragon!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Anne and I are at that age when we’re more interested in visiting the exhibit halls than in rattling our bones on the Midway rides. We enjoy seeing what new works of paint, photography, building blocks, and 4-H instructional posters have been offered up for the various competitions. The State Fair holds its massive celebrations on behalf of our farmers, but Indiana has no shortage of artists, either. Whether adults or kids, the illustrators, sculptors, clothing designers, doll-makers and other artisans come from all demographics, work in multiple media, and bring ideas from pop culture as well as from their own influences and home lives. They each contribute in their own ways to the Hoosier State creative legacy.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 5: The Year in Lego

August 27, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Lego Thomas the Tank Engine bursting through an occupied Lego living room.

Lego Thomas the Tank Engine recreates the classic moment from Thomas Comes to Breakfast that taught us why nobody invites trains over for pancakes.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Lego is a frequent sight at our State Fair. 4-H kids and competitors in other art contests routinely turn in works of Lego as their favorite sculpting medium. Some submissions are store-bought kits; some are original creations. There’s nothing emphatically Hoosier about them. To my knowledge we have no Lego factory and no Legoland theme park. Indiana was not a beachhead for Danish explorers. Not even the old Lego Indiana Jones set have anything to do with Indiana per se, much as we might wish to contrive otherwise. But at our State Fair there’s always room for Lego.

This year we attended the fair so late into its run — the last day was this past Sunday — that the rest of this miniseries is now a retrospective instead of a concurrent update. Figuring in advance that that’d happen, I tried to convince myself to take fewer photos so I could wrap up our short-term State Fair memories as quickly as possible and I could get back to all the other pending posts I’ve been procrastinating. I even thought to myself going in, “You do not have to snap pics of every Lego ever.” Here we wound up anyway, having once again accumulated enough Lego works for a standalone gallery. Behold the power of bright building blocks!

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 4: The Year in Cakes

August 25, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Giant cake shaped like a small burger, fries, hot dog, chocolate ice cream bar, and caramel apple all stacked on one massive burger.

No, this isn’t a Taste of the Fair dish or a Man v. Food eating challenge. This is a single cake.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…such as cakes! Back in 2019 we discovered for the first time in our entire fair-attending lives that the main 4-H Building wasn’t their only exhibit hall. Next door Centennial Hall was formerly a dormitory — and is still inaccurately and unhelpfully labeled as such — and contained entire competitive categories that we’d never seen before. The cakes in particular were awesome sights to behold.

Then the State Fair went on hiatus in 2020, because 2020. Without that annual reinforcement of the lesson we’d learned, we totally forgot about Centennial Hall until this year. We were only pointed toward it because the contents of the main 4-H Building were restructured, rearranged, and/or relocated elsewhere. For some reason the entire second floor appeared to have been converted into an indoor driving range for 4-H golfers. Thankfully we were redirected to Centennial Hall and discovered the joy of 4-H cakes all over again — the results of hours of effort, imagination and concentration on the part of whoever was blessed with these amazing colossal talents. A shame we couldn’t eat any of their works, merely behold them. Call it the Great Hoosier Bake-Off.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 3: The Year of America’s 250th

August 23, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
White cake with icing picture of bald eagle wearing sunglasses and a US flag bandanna on its head. Next to it is written "'Merica" in red icing.

Meet the radical new Sam the Eagle from Mark Millar’s Ultimate Muppets reboot.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and one splashy theme recurred throughout the various exhibits of arts, crafts, cookery, and antiquing across all participating buildings: the 250th anniversary of July 4th, 1776, generally considered the date of birth of the United States of America. Granted, not all citizens observed the only semiquincetennial party our nation will ever have, particularly among a statistically significant percentage of the terminally online. No, America isn’t perfect and never will be, which is kind of the point, no matter who’s in charge. If you only love people, places, or things that are perfect, then how many absolutely perfect people, places, or things do you genuinely love? If you count more than one, you’ve gotten it wrong.

As it happens, our road trip this year began over the Independence Day weekend and showed us evidence of folks proud to celebrate offline, about which I’ll get to post about here someday when I get caught up on sharing our travelogues, Lord willing. Anne, for one, was excited to see America cross that milestone without preemption by the Second Coming, collapsing under a giant meteor, or being conquered by a conspiratorial Canada/Mexico tag-team invasion. She braked at every roadside attraction that acknowledged its happening and was overjoyed to see that same enthusiasm here at the fair.

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