CONVENTION CRASHING: INTERNATIONAL FAIR AND EXPO

Friday, Dec. 8, 2006 | 8:04 a.m.

"You spend 30 years with your craft as a guitarist and do some big events," Jim Calhoun says, "and now all everyone wants from me is toads."

A bejeweled treble clef lapel pin catches the light as he turns to gesture at the toads, three of them, obese and green, like miniature zombie sumo wrestlers.

They are, in fact, trained toads.

Calhoun trains and exhibits toads at about 12 county fairs a year. That's why he's here at Paris Las Vegas for the 116th annual International Fair and Expo convention. He is, protestations of musicianship aside, hoping that fair directors, here to scout talent and talk shop, will hire him for his fabulous toads.

His toads race each other, compete in long jumps, do high dives, jump through fiery hoops and, in the rare feat that doesn't rely primarily on jumping, cross three-rope bridges. The toads, though, are not very active this time of year. It's winter and they'd prefer to be hibernating.

But wait trained toads? How?

Well, Calhoun allows, very few toads, such as the Woodhouse's toad, will take to training. And very few of those, maybe one in 100, he says. And toad training doesn't involve food, instead he just rewards them by leaving them alone. And you don't so much train a toad as you find out what it's willing to do repeatedly and build a trick out of that.

For instance, he says, toads aren?t particularly afraid of flames, but they hate to be picked up or encircled, a problem for his signature trick, the jump through the burning ring.

"It's real easy to get 'em to go through the fire," Calhoun says, "but to get 'em to go through the hoop bit ..."

Worse, eventually the toads despite the fact that they don't remember their training for more than a week or two will figure out that the flame burns down and will wait until it's almost gone before they jump.

"I wouldn't say they're smart, but they're smart enough."

Yeah, but not as smart as the dogs

JD Platt's dogs do not jump through fiery hoops or walk high wires. Pretty much all they do is jump around and catch Frisbees, and if they have to wear silly outfits and do it on cue, well, they're willing to put up with it.

"Let's just call her an Australian shepherd mix," Platt says.

Or, if you prefer, Superdog. She is, after all, wearing a blue shirt with a red cape. And she performs an act with Platt, a former professional snowboarder and current professional disc golfer. In the act, he too wears a Superman costume, one complete with fake muscles. He starts giving the act's warm-up patter:

"Faster than a greyhound, more powerful than a Rottweiler ..."

The dogs look up, Newberry first. Olympia, the whippet, and Holiday, the border collie, hop down from their perches. Riverhawk, the American Indian dog, wanders over to get her rump scratched.

"They're great employees," Platt says, "and you don't even have to pay 'em."

Powered by mouth

Oscar T. Robot is 16 years old, about 5 feet 6 inches tall, and weighs 260.9 pounds.

"But that's early in the morning, before I've had any oil," he says.

We're interviewing a robot. It's not exactly a professional high point, but it has to happen before Jack Prather will talk to us.

Prather is Oscar's operator. Oscar is radio-controlled and has a little microphone in his chest. Prather wears a flesh-toned earpiece, a discreet microphone and hidden controls for the robot. He begs us not to disclose more about his microphone or his remote control because he works by hiding in the crowd, listening to conversations and surprising audience members by having the robot repeat those conversations. He's quite good. It took us a couple of minutes to spot him, and we might not have been able to if the crowd had been thicker. Also, he has an uncanny way of getting his tin man to make eye contact.

But he does have to watch out for kids.

"Kids have a tendency to beat him up. They'll kick him and slap him," Prather says. "So he's built extra thick and tough."

Mostly, though, Prather stays out of trouble by keeping Oscar friendly and talkative.

"I've learned over the years that it's my mouth that makes this work."

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"You've never seen a crowd like this in front of a blacksmith shop before!"

--Sign for "The Village Blacksmith"

Brendan Buhler can be reached at 259-8817 or at buhler@lasvegassun.com.