Pressdog.com

Pumpkin Cannons
and Bite-Sized Bloat

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 05/23/03)

It's Halloween, so naturally I'm thinking of the Aludium Q36 Pumpkin Modulator.

I first became aware of the Q36 in 1997 thanks to a Wall Street Journal (motto: We Know Far More than Any Little Punk In Iowa) article shot over to me by brand czarina and former co-worker Cassie Hagan.

The article was about a group of guys in Morton, Illinois, who confirmed that testosterone truly is the father of modern weaponry, by building an 18-ton, 100-foot-long pumpkin cannon. That bad boy used compressed air to fire 8- to 10-pound pumpkins up to 2,710 feet -- a world record in 1997.

Yeah, it gives me the shivers too.

I hit the Web recently to see if the Modulator still held the record, and apparently there have been major breakthroughs in pumpkin gun technology in the last six years.

The current World Champion pumpkin cannon is "Second Amendment Gun," a 120-foot-long gourd howitzer that shot a pumpkin 3,881 feet to become the 2002 Punkin' Chunkin' World Champion. Second Amendment Gun beat out former World Champions "Old Glory" and "Big 10 Inch" for the title. Second Amendment's posse claims to have previously shot pumpkins 4,594 feet.

Second Amendment Gun was made in 1999 at the S&G Erectors in Howell, MI, over the course of six weeks. It weighs nine tons, which is half as heavy as the old Q36. I guess there have been advances in the use of carbon fiber or something.

I can picture Second Amendment's posse hunkered down in their basements and at S&G Erectors after hours, ignoring their families and pouring thousands of dollars into something that shoots pumpkins nearly a mile.

Is this a great country or what?

I was most recently reminded that real men build pumpkin weapons during a trip to Carroll's Pumpkin Farm outside tony Grinnell, Iowa. There we saw a guy activate their wooden Mighty Pumpkin Catapult and send an orange orb in a high, majestic ark right into a farm pond.

I and many other men had to wipe manly tears and then immediately started considering how we could tweak the machine to "get a few more feet out of 'er." It's a better pastime than the alternative pre-Halloween activity in my house: slowly eating ourselves to death one freaking fun-sized piece of candy at a time.

Oh I hate the candy industry with its wee beady eyes. They sell about $2 BILLION worth of candy during Halloween, $1 billion of which is eaten in American homes during the week before Halloween. You know the Candy Lobby (my goal is to one day be so big I have a lobby named after me as in the Gun Lobby or the Sugar Lobby) knows EXACTLY how much candy is eaten at home between the time of purchase and the time of dispersal. This is probably called something like "Purchase-to-Dispersal Supply Consumption Index (PDSCI)" or something.

There surely are multi-volume, PowerPointed, branded marketing plans devoted to increasing the PDSCI year-on-year. I'm pleased to report that the Zahren family has done its part to prop up the economy by eating roughly 43 metric tons of candy during the last week. It's entirely my fault, of course, for buying our Trick-or-Treat candy six days ahead of Halloween.

I came across a sale at Target and I bought about four bags. WHAT AN IDIOT. Ideally, you should buy your trick-or-treat candy seconds before the first kid comes to the door. That way you don't have as much of a chance to swine it all down before the kids even show up.

For the record, my wife, Rhonda, opened the first bag. She broke the seal on Satan's crypt. And once the Candy Devil was loosed, what came next can only be described as "candy orgy." We both attacked like squealing, rapacious candy sows. Soon an entire bag of the candy was gone and a second one was opened.

I feared Rhonda and I would end up flat on our backs, abdomens impossibly distended, looking for all the world as if we were about to give birth to some kind of grotesque nougat creature in a scene right out of Alien: Milk Chocolate Resurrection. Even as the repulsive, candy-fed alien struggled to birth itself from our respective steaming thoracic cavities, Rhonda and I would be trying to crawl over to get the last bite-sized Twix bar.

It's not good. Not good at all. I told Rhonda if she'd just encourage me to build a pumpkin cannon, I wouldn't have to change my name to Billy Normous.* But she was lunging for a little bag of Whoppers as I talked, so I don't think she heard me.

*Shout out to Mike Meyers' Austin Powers Goldmember featuring the mega-striking Gwyneth Paltrow as my cousin, Dixie Normous.

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