The Electron Pencil

The already very funny Billy Bullion nailed it with this one:

Hillary got it terribly wrong. There are SOOOOOO many more deplorables.

More than can fit in this basket.

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A Deadly Game

So a guy died the other day while participating in a taco-eating contest at the minor league ballpark in Fresno, California. The guy, 41 y.o. Dana Hutchings, keeled over while scarfing down scads of the Mexican delicacies. Acc’d’g to Fresno TV station KOAA, “It was not immediately known how many tacos the man had eaten or whether he had won the contest.”

I like that little nugget tacked on to the end of the quote. Did the reporter ask if the dude had won? And what would have prompted the reporter to wonder if he had or hadn’t. Would winning have made his tragic death ever so slightly more, y’know, worth it?

Wait a minute — tragic death? That’s my word, and I’m sorry I wrote it. People dying in an airplane crash or a hurricane, mall shoppers getting mowed down by a terrorist, a sixteen-year-old violin virtuoso being sidelined by Multiple Sclerosis, all these are tragic happenstances.

A knucklehead gorging himself on junk-y food in a competition with other knuckleheads? A middle-aged cetriolo ( * see note at bottom of post), likely with a thick layer of fat surrounding his heart as a precursor to the inevitable atrial fibrillation? Stuffing food in your mouth for fun? Nuh-uh, babies. That’s no tragedy. That’s stupidity.

Dig this bit from the Fresno Bee:

(Fresno) Grizzlies fan Matthew Boylan, who attended Tuesday night’s game with his wife and four children…, said he quickly noticed Hutchings because “he was eating so fast compared to the other two (contestants.”

“It was like he’d never eaten before, “Boylan added. He was just shoving the tacos down his mouth without chewing.”

About seven minutes into the contest, Hutchings collapsed and hit his face on a table as he went down to the ground, Boylan said. The eating contest immediately ended, though there was no stoppage to the actual baseball game.

Phew. Thank goodness the baseball game wasn’t delayed or cancelled! I mean, it’s just one guy’s life, after all.

Which brings us to the villains of this macabre tale. The Fresno Grizzlies staged the taco eating contest as a teaser to the coming weekend’s Taco Truck Throwdown, a big bash featuring 30 local taco trucks as well as entertainment by the likes of Goodie Mob with CeeLo Green, Too Short and A.B. Quintanilla, and the Kumbia KIngs. The Throwdown, which was to include the World Taco Eating Championhsip, the Saturday main event, was sanctioned by an organization called Major League Eating, whose raison d’être, apparently, is putting on these food orgies.

Is it so hard to attract fans to minor league baseball games that the two aforementioned outfits have to schedule gluttony extravaganzas? If so, why not just put on something like Meth Fest? You know, see who can ingest the most crystalline powder before passing out. Hell, you can even have categories like Smoking, Snorting and Shooting. It’d be a sure-fire success as I’m certain meth freaks from hundreds of miles around’ll converge on the ballpark for their blasts of free junk.

And the winner is….

And you know what? It’s not likely that anyone’ll die, seeing as how meth addiction is a slow suicide.

Oh sure, call me crazy. But what do you call people who put on these eating contests?

[ * I love this word, cetriolo. It’s Italian for cucumber and is used by immigrants and their progeny to mean…, well, a knucklehead. In the Sicilian dialect, it’s pronounced CHEH-drool. That means it’s unintelligible to the rest of Italians. If you come from a largely Sicilian neighborhood, as mine on the northwest side of Chi. was, you come to understand that at least one of every three or four males is a cetriolo…, oops, sorry. I meant CHEH-drool.]

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