MARYLAND STATE FAIR: Best of Awards - Guessers, Moo'ers and Lookers

Best Looking Vendor: Dave the Hot Tub guy

Just inside the York Road entrance to the Timonium Fairgrounds near the agricultural building, sits a man, in a portable hot tub (filled with enviably chilly water).

He is surrounded by faux grapes, peaches, assorted cheeses, wine and liqueur, tiger lilies and green leafy vines draped luxuriously over the edges of the tub.

His cabana-style fedora is tilted a la Casablanca, and as passersby cock their heads with curiosity, he tips the brim and flashes a shockingly white, toothy smile, winking one ice-blue eye.

This is "Dave the Hot Tub Guy" and he's "demonstrating" how the tub works. It's an instant party.

When told which category of "best" his photo will appear next to, Dave lets out a deep laugh and says, "anybody looks good when they're the only one with a pool on a 100 degree day."

I think he might be onto something, as I sweat all over my camera.

Best T.M.I Event: The Guessers

If you want t o know far more than you should about your fellow fair-goers, grab a frosty beverage and hang out near The Guesser, adjacent to the Milking Parlor, and conveniently, a beer truck.

It works thusly: people pay $3 and man in a bright green shirt tries to guess any number of personal statistics, such as weight, age, birth month or the state you were born in. 

The guesser is not just guessing, though, and his performance is largely that of a heckling stand up comic. 

Staring at a smiling young woman, considering her age, he remarks, "Well, I can't tell if you're late thirties, or early forties, but one thing's for sure – you've been hitting the bottle a little too hard either way!"

The crowd bursts into laughter as the woman moves to pick her prize after her license reveals the guesser to be wrong by more than 3 years.

The spectacle continues, without pause, and in the course of five minutes, the guesser has mocked and awarded prizes to nearly 10 people. He shouts peoples' names and birthdays into his microphone, along with insults to their weight, wrinkles, graying hair, scrawny arms, drinking habits and affinities for staying up to "mess around" all night instead of getting some rest. 

It's all carried out with a jovial air, but it is curious that in these days of obsession over identity theft and keeping our personal details private, within the gates of the State Fair, people line up, and pay for the chance to have private information shouted over a sound system.

Best Once-in-a-Lifetime Event: Witness a live birth at the Birthing Center

For people, the miracle of birth is not usually a spectator sport.

It's shared only with closest kin. Then glossy photos of the new addition, all squeaky clean and wrapped warmly in a fuzzy blanket, are mailed out long after the bloody part is over.

Not so for the bovine population. The whole spectacle, from pacing, gravid mother, to the calf's wobbly first step, is open for public viewing – and there's even stadium seating.

The animals are injected with a substance allowing them to go into labor during the daylight hours (it's normally a night time event). One of the farmers provides soothing, thorough, play-by-play of the action in the pen. 

At the first sign of the calf, the crowds in the bleachers become cheerleaders, shouting encouraging phrases such as, "C'mon girl!" or more uniquely, "Yay! Make another cow!"

This is real-life Discovery Channel, Animal Planet footage, just feet from your seat, only without editing out all the interesting parts. And when it's all said and done, where there was one cow, now stands two.