Posted: April 19th, 2010 - 6:47am by Doug Powell

Every time I say, I’m from Kansas, some genius makes a remark about Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz.

Wamego (Kansas), about 20 miles from Manhattan (Kansas) is more than the home of the Wizard of Oz museum (visited by a couple of my daughters, right, exactly as shown), where fights among the little people on the set of the movie are depicted in all their glory. It is also apparently home to the annual Tulip Festival, which ran this weekend.

A couple of my colleagues went tuliping on Saturday, and found the fair also included a lot of food and a petting zoo: a poorly supervised petting zoo, where little kids could walk in and swap saliva with a bunch of animals like cows, and llamas and alpacas, without supervision, and then go eat food or suck their fingers or whatever.

I’m told there were signs, there were wipes available, but is that really enough, especially given all the tragic outbreaks that have been linked to petting zoos? And the handwashing facilities were about 30 yards removed from this sign (left).