Arguably, there is an art to making fun that’s good and cheesy – but it is low art and relatively quick and easy.

One: Start with a fairly straightforward task or product.

Two: Invent an event surrounding it, adding weird twists where possible.

Three: Promote, package and present the event to draw a crowd.

Voila! Something new emerges – action and interaction sparking interest and possible purchases.

On a small scale, an example of this technique would be garage sales. But I rarely see garages sold. Here’s why: Not enough weirdness. Weirdness is why I particularly enjoyed an event the other day. The Tillamook Cheese Factory hosted a 95th anniversary celebration.

Like a fine block of pepper jack cheese, 96 years of business is nothing at which to sneeze. Tillamook County has every right to proudly celebrate this successful cornerstone of its economy, this impressive creamery association and factory built brick by cheese brick since 1909. I’ve enjoyed touring the factory and, being a cheesy kind of guy, I gobble the products like an unstoppable and voracious mouse.

But what I really admired the other day was how the folks in Tillamook took their show on the road and created a sort of fromage fanfare. Package an event, add a crowd, and suddenly the act of tasting and buying cheese takes on a different, if not higher, significance – it becomes a big party.

I and other enthusiasts stood in long lines to taste free slivers, cubes and curds of cheddar on toothpicks. We wore paper hats. Adults and children tossed tiny toy cow beanbags toward a target, and won – you guessed it – tiny toy cow beanbags (complete with tiny T-shirts touting Tillamook).

We in the dairy droves bought ice cream cones for a penny, and donated more when learning the proceeds would benefit the Oregon Food Bank. We tried to guess the number of cheese bricks inside a vast container to win vast amounts of cheese.

The sight of a content dairy cow and her adorable, fuzzy little calf made my heart melt like a glob of cheddar on a grill. I even got my photo taken with an arm around the waving hoof of the Tillamook Cheese mascot, Tillie.

In short, I had a lot of downright cheesy fun.

Tillamook’s flight museum was not on hand the next day when I attended a different event, but some of the items there might deserve museum display.

The Red Bull Flugtag, a happening sponsored by a soft drink that originated in Vienna, was held at the Willamette River waterfront in Portland. Participating teams from across Oregon as well as Washington and California built contraptions from old bicycles, cardboard, wood and daring-do. The “athletes” dressed in ridiculous costumes, performed sketches, and “launched” their crafts from a dock 30 feet high.

Most of the crafts simply plunged to satisfying, instantaneous watery destruction.

Skateboarding champion and Nehalem resident Tom Innoue was among spectators interviewed and seen on the oddly enormous television screens lining the stands. Asked to describe the difference in danger between boarding and flugtagging, he acknowledged that “these guys hit water; we hit cement.”

Among the most popular crafts were a silver Mylar pedal plane with detaching bicycle, and taking inspiration from the 1985 film with Astoria as a backdrop, “The Goonies,” an X-wing glider complete with a cast of characters from “Star Wars,” a flying pig called Pigasus, and a flying mullet launched by a team calling itself Hair Force One.

Whether tasting cheese or seeing how far you can fly with little more than crude backyard engineering and a willingness to look silly, such events are all about celebrating innovation – or would-be innovation. And when push comes to shove, we enjoy events tinged with a salute to what makes innovation work – the strange, the novel, the weird.

This kind of partying definitely makes us happy. After all, when we are posing for photographs, to smile we are often asked to say, “cheese.”

Brad Bolchunos says he certainly does not mean to imply cheese-making or aircraft design are forms of low art – that would poke holes in his theory, like Swiss cheese. Instead, he reiterates that he is referring to the art of inventing and presenting promotional events, and even at that explanation he admits he is no wizard or whiz kid, but he may be a cheese whiz.