The annual Turkey Testicle Festival in Byron, Ill. draws all sorts of colorful characters to the heartland to gobble down gonads cooked in various styles.
Had I not visited Festivals.com, I never would have known about this event. If you've ever wanted to know if there's anyone around the world celebrating something unusual (or common), Festivals.com is one way to find out.
Originally, mind you, I had arrived at the site to search for Renaissance festivals around the country. Festivals.com contains feature articles about festivals around the country that aren't testicle-related, such as Seattle's annual Bark in the Park (on the Kids page) in Gasworks Park. The article follows the day of a cute dog named Barley as he attended the festival. In its Arts section, the site recently interviewed a touring group of urban graffiti artists known as Tats Cru. They recently showed up as exhibitors at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, one of the "top festivals in the nation" according to the site.
The site also does features that cover certain genres of festivals - in this case, the Culture page features a small collection of "busking" events around North America and in New Zealand. Buskers are better known as street performers, and can be found on Mill Avenue and in any urban area where a lot of people are likely to stroll by.
Also on the Arts page, a link is provided to a large .GIF graphic that provides instructions for how to make a banner for the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) celebration in Latin American countries. This feature is nice, even though it's a marketing venture with a company that designs CD-ROM tutorials with similar cultural craft how-tos.
The site is apparently looking to increase its marketing power with a section called Backstage @ Festivals.com. The busking feature links to interviews with two people who put on the street performer showcases within the Backstage section. The section is also designed to arrange more marketing partnerships like the Day of the Dead banner how-to.
This is an interesting way to combine good content and profit for the site's owners. Indeed, the Web is viewed as a vast money pit. The dot-com boom turned to bust when people didn't have disposable income to drop on online purchases. Online readers are perhaps one of the most - if not the most - fickle target audiences out there when it comes to business. But here, at least the theory is perfect: the site uses brick-and-mortar cultural attractions as a basis to deliver marketing messages. However, such a vague concept smells of so much spin. Only profits will show how well the plan works.
And frankly, for readers, the business side of the site is the least interesting part. The features and descriptions of the various festivals are far better. Trudging away from the Arts page, I next ventured into the Motorsports section expecting to find a bunch of garden-variety car festivals. But instead, I found stories about English lawnmower racing and low riders. I give the site a lot of props for going beyond the obvious.
Check out the Music section, though, and you'll find the standard bluegrass and jazz festivals. I only detected one Celtic festival link, and expected a little more idiosyncracy in the music festivals. You can find immensely popular folk music shows anywhere. At least the feature article on folk festivals is an interview with a folk festival organizing expert. And it makes clever use of electronic media by providing sound clips of folk music from around the world.
The Sports section contains articles about dragon boat racing, balloon racing, marathon running, Disc Dog shows and even a sheep-shearing contest in New Zealand. The Culture section - my favorite - entertains Japanese cherry blossoms and Thanksgiving traditions.
The Culture section also finally led me toward what I originally sought - information about medieval reenactment celebrations from a Renaissance Fair fanatic. The article contains photos of her, as well as a link sidebar containing information about the Arizona Renaissance Festival and others.
Navigation of the site is fairly simple, once you figure out that the tiny little links at the bottom will get you to the major sections. Look for links running down the side of each section, pointing to "top 25" festival lists by genre and specialized features. Searching for festivals is a bit frustrating, as the site says it will only show a maximum of 30 results. Therefore, I couldn't tell off-hand if the Arizona Renaissance Festival was listed and not shown, or simply not listed in the directory. It would be nice if there would be some way of navigating through more than one page of results, as well as having a way to know if the current page of results is all the results that were found.
I highly recommend going on the search page and typing random words to see if a festival exists for that topic. You can never under-estimate the power of people's need to design a festival for anything and everything. The site is just a convenient way to find a festival near you on those occasions when you need a little Turkey Testicle on a Stick.
Nicole Saidi is the Content Editor of the Web Devil. Reach her at nicole.saidi@asu.edu.
