The Great Googa Mooga Scam-A-Palooza

The First Annual Great Googa Mooga Festival was a resounding... wait for it... DISASTER!

Billing itself as an "amusement park of food and drink", the disorganized fun-kill infested a corner of Brooklyn's Prospect Park on May 19th and 20th.

Free admission if you managed to score some admission passes made available online in advance through the organizer's shitty, crashing servers. Or you could fork over $250 for a VIP pass.

Celebrity chefs came slumming, selling scaled-down samples of their food for inflated prices.

The beer and wine tents were not accepting direct cash. You had to go to a poorly-run "Googa Moola" kiosk and transfer cash to a card... but when we went on the 19th, their computers crashed and they worked out an alternate system where they gave you red raffle tickets for cash. If you had any extra tickets at the end of the day, you wouldn't be able to get a refund for your worthless tickets — and the beer and wine were selling at different prices, so I guess they were assuming you would know in advance what you were going to drink and how much it would all cost. Also, for good measure, you needed to buy a cheap $2 "Googa Mooga" branded plastic cup in order to sample the beers.

I ended up spending $36 for three beers.

Over-priced, over-crowded, long lines, completely disorganized. For music, we watched a few minutes of a Van Halen cover band. And the only celebrity "chef" I saw was Coolio, who was signing copies of his cookbook.

I didn't have very high expectations going in but the experience was far worse. The Great Googa Mooga Experiment turned out to be a massive rip-off. A warning to future generations: do not go near this spectacular clusterfuck.

EPIC FAIL.