Baseball, anyone?

Whoever the two people are who have actually played Moldy Pumpkin Machete Baseball, would you please stand up? Was it as fun as it sounds, or more so? If I built a small air cannon and shot a pumpkin out of it at a machete I was holding, would that be as stupid as it sounds?

What else?

Oh, yeah, I feel like an asshole, but I really don't hate you. As far as I'm concerned, things don't have to be weird, or awkward, or anything else but friends.

Der uber-pumpkin

Have you ever had a pumpkin last seven months without rotting? Neither had I, until this year. Last October, we went out to the pumpkin patch to buy a pumpkin, which we intended to carve into a jack-o-lantern. What wound up happening was we set the pumpkin in the kitchen and proceeded to walk around it while we did other things.

Such was the state of things for several months, until some time after New Years we realized that that really was a pumpkin from two months ago, and it hadn't turned to mush all over the floor yet. At that point, a friendly competition began over who could guess the date of the pumpkin molding the most accurately.

Even our furthest prediction only got us into mid-March.

So we proceeded to watch the pumpkin carefully for a few weeks. Weeks turned into a month, and a month into several. Finally, between Cinco de Mayo and Memorial Day, the pumpkin (which we had now dubbed the Uber-Pumpkin--I'd like to buy an umlaut, please?) finally got a few spots of mold. The mold didn't actually compromise the structural integrity of our friendly neighborhood uberpumpkin until Memorial Day weekend, at which point we declared an end to the experiment and proceeded to remove the toxic gourd from our back patio (we had decided to put it out there) in "the best way possible." You know what I'm getting at. Moldy Pumpkin Machete Baseball.*

Originally invented by Wes Sturr of Eastern Wyoming, the game consits of taking turns lobbing the moldy pumpkin (usually a jack-o-lantern in November, but this was a special case) at one another, and swinging at it baseball-style with a machete. Once the peices are too small to hit anymore, or all the parties are too grossed out to continue, the game is over. Whoever got the last hit wins.

We don't keep machetes around (shame on us), so we just ground a coarse edge onto a peice of steel flatstock. Ta-da!

With der uber-pumpkin eliminated, life could continue.

*I honestly thought I'd never get to use that tag again, but I actaully did.

Moldy Pumpkin Machete Baseball

Some of you may be wondering I have found myself short one machete, one moldy pumpkin, and one person who will throw a moldy pumpkin at someone holding a machete. However, here's how it goes.

I learned this from a Government and Politics professor who grew up in Wyoming. This is both entertainment and a way to cut up and compost the moldy jack-o-lanterns one always has after Halloween.

When he was little, sometime in early November, Mr. Sturr would take my professor and his brothers (aged between 7 and 12) out to the back alley to dispose of the year's old jack-o-lanterns. The boys would take turns holding the machete and chopping at the pumpkin as Mr. Sturr threw it at them. Whoever cut their pumpkin up small enough in the least throws (while staying the cleanest) would win.

It sounds incredibly fun, and is a brilliantly elegant way to take the normally unpleasant task of jack-o-lantern disposal and incorporate a game aspect. Professor Sturr now has his wife throw the lack-o-lanterns at him every November, and uses his father's machete to continue the tradition. Redneck ingenuity and dedication, right here, people.