Sunday August 21, 2005
Reflections on the silly season
Summer is the silly season. The politicians are all on holiday, reporters don\’t know how to dig for news unless someone calls a press conference to announce it, and so we all have to fill space with information you\’d really rather not hear about.
For example, today, Saratoga Springs, NY, hosts Nathan\’s Hot Dog Eating Championship. New Jersey will hold the Tomato Festival Pizza Eating Championship. Bluff\’s Run Casino – wherever that is – will have the World Smoked Pork Eating Championship. And the Michigan State Fair will celebrate the Golden Palace Grilled Cheese Eating Contest.
If that\’s not enough, there\’s the Midway Slots World Crabcake Eating Championship.
August 21 is clearly a big day for stuffing oneself.
Over the next month or so, a collection of semi-professional high-speed junk-food binge-eaters will attempt to force incredible quantities of buffalo wings, waffles, and hamburgers down their throats. Already, this year, they\’ve competed over grilled cheese sandwiches, lobsters, bratwurst, watermelon, ribs, and pizza.
For prize money, yet. The Johnsonville Brat-Eating Championship had a first prize worth $4000. Harrah\’s Rib Eating Contest paid $2000.
For downing 100 pork buns in eight minutes, in Hong Kong earlier this week, Takeru Kobayashi took home $2,574 cash.
Spectator sport
Kobayashi is the Tiger Woods of eating contests. For the fifth year in a row, he won Nathan\’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest (held, naturally enough, at Coney Island) by cramming down 49 hot dogs in 12 minutes.
Some other contestants protested Kobayahi\’s win – they said he had thrown up during the contest. The judges ruled that Kobayashi kept his ingested hot dogs under control until seconds after the contest closed.
Bulimia has become a spectator sport.
In a country – no, a continent – where obesity is now rated a major health hazard, eating contests hardly seem like wholesome entertainment that sets a good example.
Whether it is a sport or not, it is certainly competitive. Currently, two individuals dominate: 135-pound Kobayashi and 100-pound Sonya Thomas, nicknamed “The Black Widow.”
“I\’ve always been a very competitive person,” Thomas told an interviewer. “Not just at eating, but at all sports. I just don\’t like losing.”
As the stomach turns
Thomas has set a number of world records for eating. The hardest, she suggests, was “cheesecake eating. I ate 11 pounds of cheesecake in nine minutes (and) almost had to go to the emergency room… The record I\’m most proud of is the oysters. I ate 432 of them in 10 minutes and I think I could have eaten more.”
In the Third Annual World Lobster Eating Championship a week ago at Kennebunk, Maine, Thomas set a new record – 5.1 kilograms, the equivalent of 44 lobsters, in 12 minutes.
I wonder what how a refugee in Darfur, in south western Sudan, sifting the dust for a few stray grains of rice, might react to Thomas\’s accomplishment. Or a family in Baghdad, trying to reconstruct the bombed-out ruins of what had once been their home.
Or – assuming lobsters can think – how a crustacean cowering on the bottom of a bay, watching an onrushing trawl net scooping up every living creature, might feel.
“Sixty per cent of the people out there probably think eating contests are really stupid,” said Thomas. “But eventually, I would like to be thought of as an international sports star, like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan.”
"The hot dog eating contest is not only a beautiful display of athleticism, it is a fundamental way for citizens of all nations to display patriotism," gushed Wayne Norbitz, president of Nathan\’s.
If anyone can demonstrate for me a single benefit to the human species that results from these eating contests, I will concede that they might have some value. But I can\’t think of one.
Dumb and dumber To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
There are other equally dumb things that we do.
Vandals smashed $800 worth of windows at a local soccer clubhouse. The clubhouse took four years to build, entirely by volunteers. Vandalism, said one of those volunteers, “is starting to crank up more and more down here.”
Just north of here, Kalamalka Lake has some cliffs, variously reported at 60 to 80 feet high. Every year, some people – mostly young males with a surplus of testosterone – show off by jumping or diving off them. Every year, someone gets hurt.
This year, a visitor from Texas landed among the rocks at the bottom, instead of in the water. Last year, a Kelowna resident suffered spinal injuries when he fell off the cliffs. The year before, a Vernon man jumped far enough to hit a boat. There were fatalities in 1992 and 1997.
And how about the driver towing a ski boat who pulled in for gas at a local mom-and-pop grocery store. He could have gone outside the canopy, which had clearly marked height restrictions. Instead, he took the inside lane. The ski mast knocked out a support beam and damaged two support pillars. The fire department shut the gas pumps down for the rest of the weekend.
Does heat affect our brains, perhaps?
Toronto suffered through a record-breaking heat wave. Ontario Hydro issued constant warnings about power shortages and blackouts. Staff continued to crank the office and store air-conditioning lower and lower.
Crude oil prices soared past $66 a barrel. Gasoline prices across Canada topped $1 per litre. People continued to buy two-ton gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs.
Canadian officials continue to believe that they can negotiate a settlement on softwood lumber with U.S. lumber lobby.
Will we ever learn?
If this planet survives another thousand years of human occupation, I suspect that the inhabitants of that time will look back at our generation and ask, “How could they have been so dumb?”
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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