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Smashing Pumpkins

always wanted to do that with frozen oranges and plastic pipes but never got round to it! Love that guys mullet!! :D
 
Bristoe has yet to fire the cannon at full power, but he estimates the range at about 5 miles.

that rates high on the Cool-O-Meter.
 
At Punkin Chunkin, smashing pumpkins is a celebration of America
By Lisa Rose, CNN
Updated 2044 GMT (0444 HKT) November 21, 2016


Story highlights
  • The pumpkin throwing competition dates back to 1986
  • Old-school catapults face off against high tech cannons
  • But a woman was critically injured after an air cannon malfunctioned
(CNN) On a blustery Sunday afternoon in a Delaware soybean field, Marc Gussen paces around the catapult he and his team have built for the sole purpose of throwing pumpkins as far as humanly possible in competition. Gussen, the captain of Team Chucky, is wearing a red hard hat, a logo shirt, cargo shorts, Crocs and a scowl.

There are concerns that strong crosswinds could cut the gourd's flight short but Team Chucky, straight outta Asbury, New Jersey, thrives on adversity. Spectators behind a fence chant the team's name as they squint through swirls of windswept dust and the glare of the midday sun.

All eyes are on the 10,000-pound catapult, an orange and black colossus named Chucky III that's modeled after the siege engines that once defended the Roman Empire.

It's Day 3 of the World Championship Punkin Chunkin 2016, a post-Halloween charity showdown featuring medieval war machines repurposed as long distance dispensers of squash. The event, which dates back to 1986, is Americana writ large, an autumn duel that celebrates ingenuity, vision, wit, monster armaments and flying foodstuff.


Continued at surprising length with pictures and videos:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/21/living/punkin-chunkin-trnd/index.html

Follow-up story on injured woman:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/27/e...kin-injured-producer-recovers-trnd/index.html

I do think there's something almost noble about the amount of time and effort ploughed into what is--bar the entertainment factor--a purely pointless activity. Conspicuous waste is part and parcel of almost every economically advanced country in history and as such things go, this strikes me as harmless; others apparently feel otherwise:

"We take a lot of heat because our cannon costs a lot of money," says American Chunker captain Brian Labrie, 43, a New Hampshire landscaper who's converted his basement into a "Pumpkin Nest." There he gives each gourd a bath and critiques them to select nine perfect specimens for the competition from a herd of hundreds.

"People will send me some email that says, 'You could feed a third-world country for what you put into that machine,'" says Labrie. "But it's like, 'Dude, that's what America's all about.'

635763520401092097-110307-PUNKINCHUNK-GE6.jpg
 
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