Science Fair - and how it sucks any last vestiges of enthusiasm for science out of the marrow of your bones, and replaces it with tedium.

I like science, I really do. But I hate the over-legislated guts of science fair. The name itself is misleading. When you think of a fair, you think of an event consisting mainly of nauseatingly wild rides, nauseatingly unhealthy snacks, and nauseatingly grotesque teenagers, while still being fun.

All that the science fair is, and I know from experience, is a bunch of nerdy kids sitting around in suits that they don't want to be in, in front of large cardboard monoliths, which are pasted with large words that no-one cares about. Old people, also in suits that they generally don't want to be in, shuffle around, reading the words that they don't care about, putting little round stickers on the cardboard monoliths, and writing stuff on clipboards. This takes about fifteen minutes, and then the kids continue to sit there in suits for about three hours, for no apparent reason. After all this excitement, the event comes to a culmination with the awards ceremony, where old ladies from some high school read a bunch of names, and the nerdy, suited kids walk up to the stage, where old people who no-one ever sees shake their hands and hand them plaques.

It's about the same at the State Science Fair, only the kids have to sit around for seven hours for no apparent reason, instead of three, and the awards ceremony is twice as long.

But none of these is the reason that I don't like the science fair.

I don't like the science fair because it has too many rules! Here's a list of some of the things that you're not allowed to work with;

Alcohol
Animals, deceased
Animals, extraterrestrial
Animals, invertebrate
Animals, vertebrate
Animated tissue in any form
Bacteria
Bleach
Calculators
Chemicals of any kind
Electricity
Flame, Open
Fruit
Human Subjects
Letter 'Q', The
Light
Magic
Magic, black
Matter
Mathematical calculations whose variables could be construed as offensive if rearranged
Money
Occult, the
Oil
Rocks, very small
Software, analytical
Vegetables
Wikipedia

And so on. As a result, on can rarely do anything that even approaches something that someone, somewhere, would find remotely interesting. However, as I approach high-school, at the same time that the rules are becoming more restrictive, the expectation is that my projects will be less 'elementary'. So what's causing this strange clamp-down on anything fun? What is the root of the problem? Why, they're the same roots of most of the everyday problems facing citizens today; stupid people, and the American legal system.

You see, back when the constitution was written, either you were smart, and lived, or you were stupid, planted your crops in the same field you kept your cows, and died of starvation. So the founders, naturally, based the American legal system on the assumption that everyone in the country was smart enough to seperate your cows from your crops. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart and other stores came along and alowwed stupid people to prosper, they quickly grew to become a majority in the country, and have now discovered the legal system to have this wonderful feature called a lawsuit. Now, some of these stupid people, believe it or not, thought that if they got hurt, it wasn't because they were being stupid; it was because whichever company was involved with the making of the item that was related to them getting hurt was being stupid for not putting a label on every ladder that says "Do not use on trampoline!"

Now, as the American saga progressed, the stupid people had children, who, once they reached fifth grade, were forced to do science fair projects. If the kid got hurt while doing the science fair project, who could they sue? Not the companies who made the components for the science fair project; They had already wised up and put a hundred and seventy two warning stickers on everything. The stupid people decided to sue the Science Fair people. Thus, as another arm of the "Stupid people; ruining it for all of us" phenomenon, the Science fair people were forced to also include on hundred and seventy two warning labels on everything, this time in the form of fun-sucking restrictions like the ones listed above.

Isn't suing great?