Monday, September 10, 2007

in the most sincere pumpkin patch

Fair season is underway. There was a story on "Live at Five" today about a guy bringing his giant pumpkin to the Tennessee State Fair in Nashville. Coincidentally, I caught part of a show on PBS about giant pumpkins today. The show was called "Lords of the Gourd: The Pursuit of Excellence." It was amazing to see a group of people so deeply involved in a world I had never thought about except maybe for the year that I saw some giant pumpkins on display at Disneyland around Halloween. The growers deeply mourned when one of their prizes pumpkins "went down," sometimes due to mice or woodchucks. The pumpkins that survived were cut from the vine and brought to the Cooperstown PumpkinFest.

Kevin & Bean and Ralph were similarly fascinated by a world they previously knew nothing about when they interviewed the makers of a new documentary called "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters." I heard the interview on their August 17th podcast. I don't know if the movie about the world's greatest Donkey Kong players will make it to a local theater. If not, I'll keep an eye out for it on DVD or HBO or IFC, etc. The KROQ crew compared this true life documentary to the great mockumentaries by Christopher Guest, like "Best in Show." The same can be said for the giant pumpkin show.

To bring it back around to state fairs, I recently saw a news story about the World's Largest Self-Propelled Whole Hog Rotisserie at the Alaska State Fair. Mmm... BBQ...

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2 Comments:

Anonymous j said...

Don't forget the time the Kevin and bean show Launched extra large pumpkins from a catapult one year. I wasn't present, but I have seen the tape. It was pretty neat stuff.

9/11/2007  
Blogger Frank Murphy said...

I was present and should have remembered! It was in the parking lot before an Oingo Boingo Halloween concert in Irvine. They put a metal folding chair at what we thought was a safe distance away. K&B told Lightning to sit in the chair. He wisely started running as the huge pumpkin flew toward him. It hit the chair, bending it into permanent disrepair.

One of the smartest things we did was to videotape it ourselves and hand deliver the tapes to all the TV stations that night. Several used the footage for their Halloween kicker stories.

9/11/2007  

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