Seeking Michelangelo of the breath mint tin

If you act now, you can still enter the Marin County Fair, set for June 30-July 4. An informal count showed almost 100 areas of competition, in arts and crafts, photography, food and beverage, etc. Among the categories: Decorated Bicycle Wheels, Decorated Tin; Selfies; Healthy Message Posters, Divine Dips (eating, not dancing); Public Speaking; Loving Lasagna; and, of course, the Chicken Championship (which is not the Poultry Championship).

To illustrate the possibilities, let us consider Decorated Tin, which asks competitors to “decorate any metal container such as an Altoid tin or decorate one or more empty metal cans.” Top prize in each category is $20 for children; $25 for adults. Clearly people are into this for love of the art, not greed.

Five junior categories sort competitors into age groups. And there are seven adult categories: Tin Box, painted by an adult; Tin Box, Needlework; Tin Box, Decoupage; Tin Box, Diorama Scene, Tin Box, Mixed Media; Can(s), decorated by an adult; Tin Box or Can(s) decorated by a family. (“There are no restrictions on the materials you can use . ... Example: Make a pencil holder or candleholder from one or more cans. Be creative!”)

There’s also some good news for veteran horticultural competitors: Although most exhibits entered in previous years are forbidden, there is an exception for potted plants, which “may be entered more than one year.”

Donna Ewald Huggins, who is professionally (http://ontheroadwithdonna.com) in the car biz and personally in the havinga-good-time biz, is planning to celebrate the Summer of Love by driving up to the California Historical Society’s “On the Road to the Summer of Love” exhibition in her own art car, a Rolls Royce completely covered with 1967-centric art. Huggins layered the outside surfaces of the vehicle with applied posters and old-fashioned die cuts. She and exhibition curator Dennis McNally plan to arrive at the historical society at 10:30 a.m. Friday, May 12.

She says she got an “incredible deal” on the car. The engine was perfect, the outside, not so, making it a perfect candidate for the surface makeover. She’s planning to drive it around the Bay Area all summer.

Huggins says her design “was inspired by the musicians, the promoters (Chet Helms and Bill Graham), the photographers, the roadies and the hopefuls who converged on San Francisco to make the world a better place.”

Facial recognition and emotion-tracking software deployed by DiGiorno pizza found that when the smell of pizza permeated a room, “it coincided with the highest observable increase in joy — even greater than levels reached when the pizza was actually being eaten.”

The company is distributing this information, although it seems it would cast the taste of its product — meant to be eaten — in a less-than-glowing light. Seems it’s something like saying a shopper is more excited by the prospect of selecting and buying of shoes than he/she is wearing them.

I guess that’s exactly right.

Kimberly Chambers is one of 12 swimmers and six kayakers to cross the U.S.Mexican border at sea, from Imperial Beach to Playas de Tijuana. The swim was scheduled for Friday, May 5, Cinco de Mayo, with the cooperation of the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Coast Guard, Mexican navy and Mexican immigration authorities.

Chambers is the longdistance swimmer who, in 2015, became the first woman to swim from the Farallon Islands to San Francisco; in November 2016, she was part of a team that swam across the Dead Sea.

She emphasized in her blog that her swim was not political, but was “to cast a global spotlight on human suffering.” The Colibri Center for Human Rights, which raised money for sponsors of the swim, describes itself as “a family advocacy organization working to end migrant death and related suffering on the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Department of Understatement: According to a report from Sacramento, state auditors have determined that about 26,000 permanent parking placards give privileges to people 100 years old and more. There are 8,000 Californians who are 100 years or older. A CBS account of this cited the shrugging response of a man with a legitimate permit: “It’s pretty apparent that there is abuse going on.”

Dictating into her iPhone an email to her gardener, Marsha Cohen saw it printed out as, “... it had grown as tall as the Apple tree next to it.” So the company — apparently protecting its brand — capitalizes “apple” even when it’s a common noun. Just wait until they get to Genesis, the story of adam, eve and the Apple.

“I can’t stand her constant complaints and Eeyore-alities.” Man to man, overheard at Cole Coffee in Rockridge by Matt Regan