Tag Archives: photos

Our Halloween Trick-or-Treating Stats 2026: We Are BACK, Boo!

October 31, 2026 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Me doing seated jazz hands at a table in front of our house with a Halloween tablecloth, three McDonald's Boo Buckets, and bags of candy.

Halloween candy handout jazz hands!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each year since 2008 I’ve kept statistics on the number of trick-or-treaters brave enough to approach our suburban Indianapolis doorstep during the Halloween celebration of neighborhood unity and no-strings-attached strangers with candy. I began tracking our numbers partly for future candy inventory purposes and partly out of curiosity, so now it’s a tradition for me. Like many bloggers I’m a stats fiend who thrives on taking head counts, even when we’re expecting discouraging results.

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Sir Patrick Stewart, 1940-2026

October 29, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A copy of "Making It So" standing atop a pile of others. Far background, student art hangs on the white wall, including a painting of an orchestra conductor evocative of Van Gogh's "Starry Night".

Flashback to Stewart’s U.S. tour for his 2023 memoir Making It So, which we’ll come back to in a minute.

Today my wife Anne and I were saddened to hear of the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at age 86 from a cosmically unfair tag team of Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. Stewart needs no introduction — he’s played spacefaring authority Jean-Luc Picard, telepathic civil rights leader Professor Charles Xavier, Captain Ahab, more than one King Richard, Ebenezer Scrooge, the same Dune warrior that Josh Brolin later played, Green Room‘s head neo-Nazi, Conspiracy Theory‘s evil CIA psychiatrist, an elderly ram in this year’s wonderful The Sheep Detectives, and even himself more than once, especially that one Family Guy episode. And those are just the roles I’ve seen and remember. Obviously I wish I could’ve added some stage work to my list, but London’s a bit too far of a drive for us.

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Our Birthday Walk Through Clifty Falls State Park

October 25, 2026 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Shirt cute lady smiles on a wood bridge in a park forest.

My lovely amazing wife, now 56 and looking half my age even though I’m younger than her.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together, often traveling beyond Indianapolis to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip -— partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never seen before. That’s every May for me and every October for her. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Last weekend it was Anne’s turn. This year she wanted to see one of Indiana’s state parks that we hadn’t previously visited…

…and the winner was Clifty Falls State Park, two hours south of Indy. It’s among Indiana’s smaller parks, but Anne rather liked the idea of viewing pretty waterfalls on her special day. Unfortunately Mother Nature denied her birthday wish, but at least we got some steps in and enjoyed some cool autumn air.

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The Heartland International Film Festival 2026 Season Finale

October 22, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Us smiling, nicely dressed and in cramped seats with an old red ceiling and dangling light above us.

Selfie time at Scottish Rite Cathedral for the opening night soiree. We tried to ignore our leg cramps.

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…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for about the six films I saw at four venues over eleven days, and two virtual screenings we’ll get to in a moment. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet! For those just joining us, those six films were as follows, ranked:

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Our Birthday Tasting Party at Madison’s Soup, Stew, Chili and Brew Festival 2026

October 14, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tiny cup of Hungarian mushroom soup.

Hungarian mushroom soup, Anne’s favorite bite of the day, from Off Broadway Taproom.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together, often traveling beyond Indianapolis to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip -— partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never seen before. That’s every May for me and every October for her. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Last weekend it was Anne’s turn. This year she wanted to see one of Indiana’s state parks that we hadn’t previously visited. In researching the area around the park that she’d chosen (which we covered in its own separate photo gallery), I learned it’s next door to the city of Madison, which — as luck purely had it — would be holding a special occasion on the very weekend we’d be observing her special occasion: their 24th annual Soup, Stew, Chili and Brew Festival. The name is self-explanatory — dozens of vendors and organizations have tents up and down the length of quaint ol’ Main Street Madison and (mostly) offer one or more of the items proclaimed in the festival name.

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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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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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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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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 2: The Year in VHS

August 23, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Simulated video rental store with shelves devoted to the 1990s Disney VHS releases in the white cases. Movie candy lines the bottom shelf.

Remember when Disney released its movies on home video in those oversized white cases that were incompatible with VHS racks?

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 once again the most interesting exhibit was hosted in the Harvest Pavilion: “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. Same as last year’s tribute to LP cover art, the curators started with a simple premise — in this case, “Remember movies on videotape? Those were awesome!” — and didn’t tailor everything to Indiana specifically, so much as it hearkened toward ye olde American entertainment monoculture. They assembled a collection of simulated video-rental store shelves, videotape boxes, movie posters, painted recreations of posters and iconic images, a few educational sections about filmmaking, and so on. Their contributors offered some offbeat choices, so it wasn’t all just Spielberg and Star Wars.

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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour, Worst to Best

August 20, 2026 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Me holding a snack shaped like a corn dog with green sauce drizzled on it. I seem unimpressed.

Ceci n’est pas une corn dog.

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.

Most years, we’re all about the food. Each time our favorite part is the “Taste of the Fair” competition, in which vendors showcase ostensibly new dishes in hopes of enticing foodies and/or impressing attendees who seek more to fair-life than eating the same tenderloin again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) The TotF lineup is announced weeks in advance so everyone can plan their meals and experiments accordingly.

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Fan Expo Chicago 2026 Photos, Part 5 of 5: Everything Else!

August 20, 2026 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Sculpture of icky monster from "The Thing" on a cart in the middle of a convention center.

Fans of John Carpenter’s The Thing were thrilled to meet its director and stars Kurt Russell and Keith David. Tribute sculpture by One Eyed Fat Man Studios.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. In 2022 they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times, and have expended tremendous efforts to maintain the previous showrunners’ geek-marketed traditions to keep luring in longtime fans and newcomers alike…

…and it all comes down to this: one last photo gallery touring what else we saw beyond the cosplay, besides the celebs, past Artists Alley, and even outside the convention center’s walls. The con was large; it contained multitudes.

One thing our weekend contained much less of than expected: severe thunderstorms. Our local feeds showed us countless photos and stories from the destructive floods that too many consecutive rainy days had brought to Indiana — surpassing all expectations, overwhelming meager precautions, overtaking numerous areas and forcing more than a few evacuations. Our hearts go out to those affected, the families who’ve lost loved ones in the resulting calamities, and the communities struggling to recover.

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Fan Expo Chicago 2026 Photos, Part 4 of 5: Comics!

August 17, 2026 By in Comics/Lit, Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
five publications and a Little Cheese sketch arranged on a table.

My comics-related haul this year.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the fifth edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. In 2022 they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times, and have expended tremendous efforts to maintain the previous showrunners’ geek-marketed traditions to keep luring in longtime fans and newcomers alike…

…and for this longtime comics collector, that means keeping an eye out for favorite creators and/or new reading material. Pictured above are the graphic novels I picked up in this year’s Artists Alley, plus a sketch of a character from my childhood. As for the creators who sold me those items…

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