One Sweet Weekend

Fourth of July weekend is pretty great. You get to celebrate the birth of our country, maybe take in a picnic and get a day off. A really sweet deal. The weekend is made even better by the inclusion of a massive amount of sports. Baseball is nearing mid season (My Cards have 3.5 game lead on the Cubs, take that Adam), Wimbledon hits the finals and the Tour de France kicks off. As impressive and diverting as all that is it pales in comparison to the real sporting event of this weekend: Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.

The hot dog eating contest is the best deal this weekend. Can Kobyashi pull it off yet again? He’ll be tough to beat, he once ate 50.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes…with buns. How stunning is that accomplishment? Think about it for a moment: 4.2 hot dogs per minute -OR- five pounds of meat (and meat by products) in less than a quarter hour. And I’m forgetting about the buns. Incredible.

Most of you probably don’t find competitive eating so enjoyable. Todd certainly wouldn’t (try to split a six pack with him and you’ll see some very quick drinking). I’ll admit I have an ulterior motive: I was once a competitive eater.

Interlude: I was so tempted to make this song automatically play when this page opened, so very tempted. But I didn’t. Click play now for some background music for the rest of the post.

It was seventeen or eighteen years ago, I was living in Florida at the time. Some friends and I headed up to Destin for a seafood festival they were holding to separate the tourists from a few more dollars. Being in High Schooler I was predictably broke and when lunchtime rolled around I was suffering from an extreme case of herbally induced hunger pangs. Realizing that there were no free samples (c’mon it was a seafood fest, I anticipated free samples!) I needed a plan to either get some dough or some food. That’s when I noticed the “Shrimp Eating Contest” sign. I decided to hit my pals up for the entry fee, a fee they gladly coughed up.

They eagerly coughed up the cash because everyone was under the impression that I didn’t eat, after all I was six three and weighed 155. My “friends” anticipated that I would get up in front of the throng and polish off one or two cold boiled shrimp and lose in spectacular fashion. Then, they reasoned, they could mock me in school for the forseeable future. Cause that’s what friends are for and all. Plus there was the possibility of something going seriously wrong, I was painfully shy and they might have expected some kind of breakdown on the stage.

They were sadly mistaken. I had two things going for me: I loved cold boiled shrimp AND I was under the influence of the aforementioned appetite enhancer. I’m a juicer, I admit it. I also knew that it was the best deal I would ever get on cold boiled shrimp in my life. I pretty much saw it as a gastrointestinal nirvana with onlookers. Sooner or later the contestants ended up on a stage with plates of shrimp in front of us and stacks of shrimp laden plates ready to go. There was no cocktail sauce which disappointed me, I wasn’t in it to win, I was in the thing for lunch. My motives meant I paid zero attention to my fellow competitors. My plan was just to eat until full, let the glory go to some glutton and call it “free lunch”

It was a timed deal, I think five or ten minutes. I knew I would have to eat pretty fast to get enough food to last the rest of the day so while the emcee tried to whip up interest I concentrated on my method. I figured I’d go for a two handed, two shrimp approach. I decided to grab the headless crustaceans two at a time bite and swallow. By the time my right hand had delivered it’s payload lefty would be grabbing two fresh ones. I remember wishing the emcee would stop talking so we could start eating, after all cold boiled shrimp are supposed to be served ice cold and the warm Florida sun doesn’t make for frosty shrimp. On the other hand I knew that eating contests weren’t really epicurean adventures.

The timer started and we started eating. I wasn’t trying to set a pace or anything but I was scarfing the shrimp at a nice clip. I was paying no attention to the clock or the other idiots on the stage, I was mostly eating lunch. I heard the emcee moron spouting off about the time elapsed and paid no attention. Until I heard “TWO MINUTES LEFT!” “Two minutes” thought I “I’m still starving!” I kicked it into overdrive. I was really hammering the shimp at this point. I became aware that the guy next to me had stopped eating, he just sat there staring at me. I scanned the crowd and saw my friends looking up at me with awe in their eyes. I also noted most of the other people were looking at me. I took a moment to look down the table. Mostly I saw people looking back at me. Somewhere a shrimp was trying to organize a protest against my very existance.

Still I ate. I shoveled those tasty things in. I ate like a man born to eat shrimp. The people in charge of putting a new plate in front of you were grabbing plates originally stacked for other contestants to put in front of me. I still ate. I heard the one minute call and I thought “Well that’s plenty” And it was, I was feeling rather fullish by this point but I also realized I was winning, So I redoubled my efforts. I went after the shrimp like Rush Limbaugh in an oxycontin factory. Sea mammals who live mostly on shrimp began worrying about their ecosystems.

Then it was over. The time was up and I was pretty clearly the winner. I can’t recall how many plates of shrimp I downed but I was ahead of the next guy, a burly tatooed biker by nine plates. People shook my hand, asked me how I felt etc. I felt slightly bloated but otherwise fine.

I rejoined my friends still warm from the thrill of my unintended victory. They were left slack jawed by my display. I didn’t think it was anything special.

I walked around and felt like a king, well a minor Earl at least, for half an hour until we headed to the beach. Everything seemed to be fine one moment, maybe a little indigestion, the next instant I was spewing shrimp like a busted fire hydrant. I guess I was stuffed like a sausage casing because the pressure seemed to literally blow the shimp out of me. If you’ve ever seen an impact sprinkler in action you’ve got a good idea of what I looked at. My friends had ammunition for the school week ahead and the seagulls had a meal.

All that to explain why I find competitive eating so compelling.

Onto links, cause what I do best is the old href thing. I can’t tell you how many times people e-mail me saying “dude, put the links first” eff u Todd, it’s not going to happen.

If you think you have the stuff to match my moment of lameness, I’ve got the place:
Six Pound Hamburger

A site from Tim. This really slaughtered me, cause I remember my sister’s Holly Hobby Easy Bake oven and the crap I had to eat. Let’s face it, this cooking method is a glorified prison workaround.

Hostess Snack Oven

A little political stuff:

Yep, you can click on that image and see a pretty decent documentary. Its a pretty good flick but the really interesting thing is that the highest quality is a 1.33 GB download.

cks/BL tridiot rating time: I think this is a pretty good post. Nice story, features vomiting AND music, but what I think doesn’t matter. This is an objective rating system. Let’s see what the Analytical Engine has to say: 101.2546875657% Interesting…