They were selling plates of fries nearly as big as your head and tickets to a 100-foot tall rotating swing that scares the you-know-what out of some people.

Such is life during the early days of summer, when the San Diego County Fair reaches the mid-point of its annual run in Del Mar as a flashy, wacky and sometimes tacky bit of Americana.

The San Diego Union-Tribune dropped by for a taste on Saturday. Here are a few vignettes.

On the midway

“Hey diddle-diddle, throw it down the middle if you want to win a prize!,” yelled Damon Shirley, the carnival worker running Lean N’ Toss, a game in which players are rewarded if they knock down three pink cups with a single throw of a baseball.

Really, anyone can win?

“You can if you listen to what I’m saying,” said Shirley. “Lean forward as far as your arm will take you then throw the ball through the middle of the cups.”

A customer wandered up, got the same advice, then reared back and threw the ball through the top cup, leaving the others in place. Just like that, he lost a chance to get a teddy bear. Shirley didn’t shame him. But, once again, he said, “You’ve got to throw it through the middle.”

Can you make money running a game like this?

Shirley smiled and said. “Yep. I own my own house.”

Photographic memory

All cellphones take photos. And everyone owns one. So the photo booths that began appearing at county fairs in the 1930s are long gone, right?

Nope. Lauren Penley of San Diego was standing in front of a line of booths on Saturday, telling her two daughters and a friend how to use them.

“I still have the pictures we took with my friends when we were little — 30 years ago,” Penley said shortly before noon. “This is so nostalgic. The photos remind you of all of the fair’s smells, all the fun, everything.”

Other customers weren’t rushing in. But that would change, said Izek McKinney of San Diego, who was running some of the booths.

“This is something that a lot of people do at night, when they’re getting ready to leave,” McKinney said. “They want to remember the experience.”

Adrenaline rush

Peering through sunglasses, with his head titled way back, Reuben Ortega of Riverside muttered, “I ain’t doing that.”

He was staring at Defender, a very long steel structure that has seats for passengers connected to both ends. It’s attached to a stand and rotates vertically, creating a lot of centrifugal force in the process.

His 13 year-old son, Maxx, felt otherwise, smiling as he stood in line to take his seat.

“We got him an annual pass to Knott’s Berry Farm and he goes and rides these things with his buddies,” Ortega said. “I might have done that when I was younger. But not now. I’m older. I’m happy to just stand here and watch.”

Brilliant strokes 

Plein air painting, producing a finished painting outdoors, doesn’t seem like a competitive sport. But it is at the fair. On Saturday, artists pulled up in front of interesting sights and tried to replicate them as best they could.

The was not shortage of distractions.

Matthew Pinkey of San Diego sat next to a bank of Whac-A-Mole machines that produced loud, annoying tapping sounds.

Pinkey set aside his palette of rich red, green, blue, yellow and pink paints, leaned closer and said, “You know, there’s kind of a rhythm to the sound that’s not so bad.” He paused, grinned, then yelled in a booming voice, “WHAAACK-AAAH-MOLLLE!”