"You're lucky to have Bumbershoot," remarked comedian Michael Ian Black the other night. "There are a lot of music festivals, but this is an arts and music festival. You get both." He paused. "You get both." Everybody laughed. Why? That is one thing we did not learn at Bumbershoot.

We did learn that while, really, all carnivals are human-powered, some are more human-powered than others. Cyclecide's assortment of pedal-powered rides had lines all day, and if they were more human-scale than usual, their homemade style probably added a little thrill when you got whipping around on them.

There weren't many other opportunities for whipping around. We learned (again) that Bumbershoot can get crowded. We also learned that baby strollers didn't make an agreeable fit with this kind of pedestrian density. Especially those double-wide models. Holy shit did we learn not to follow them around. "There's really no place at Bumbershoot that isn't considered child-friendly is there?" asked Todd Barry during his stand-up set. "Yeah, park the baby next to the speakers, that's fine." Then he went on to make a non-child-friendly joke about masturbating with Purell.

At the Monica Drake and Wesley Stace literary reading, hosted by the lovely Brangien Davis, we learned that the author of Clown Girl has real-world clown experience. We also learned that Wesley Stace is the same person as John Wesley Harding and that he has his own ventriloquist's dummy (or "figure" if you're a Freaks & Geeks fan). It's a family heirloom.

At the Fleet Foxes show at the Sky Church we learned that they still haven't finished up with their long-promised album, that Robin Pecknold's voice sounded a little worn, and that his flustered, amiable string of non-sequitur stage banter charms the flip-flops off hordes of teenage girls (including Samantha at Metblogs who's no longer a teenager but has honorary status). We still struggle with describing their sound, but we did hear someone say: "Hippie Coldplay, that's all I heard." How wonderful, if true. Hippie Coldplay. We just want to keep repeating that like Zippy does sometimes.

At the 33-1/3 Reading & Listening Party we learned that the DJ had forgotten to include some of the songs requested on his much-remarked-upon Zune so parts were more reading than listening. We had no idea what 33-1/3 was, so we can legitimately say that we learned that the book series existed. What happens is that rock critics and others (here represented by Kate Schatz, who wrote a fictional accompaniment to PJ Harvey's Rid of Me that had us fanning ourselves, what with all the licking and tying up with ropes) get to write about their favorite album in whatever manner they choose: memoir, criticism, what-have-you. We learned that Kate's initial alternate (then disclaimed) choice for an album was Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits, and that as a child she used to make her mom put on Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose that Number," wrote a number on a slip of paper, and then pretended to lose it. EMP's Eric Weisbard's alternate was Garth Brooks. We also learned Michaelangelo Matos is from Minnesota, and has that stereotypical brusque affect you imagine rock critics have to adopt so they can make judgments about childhood heroes.