Thursday, January 26, 2006

High Stakes Gambling with Vegetables


My friend Waddy Thompson is a master underground technologist. He's good with machine tools and good with a welder, plus he knows a thing or two about machine design as well. I met Waddy at the World Championship Punkin Chunk a few years ago when he brought "the Spooky Bazooky", a human powered air gun that could launch a 10 pound pumpkin about a half mile.

Waddy lives down in South Florida so his knowledge of how to make fruit fly comes naturally. See, they've got a lot of watermelons down there. So many, that they are used in ways we northerners never consider.

Waddy sent me this sequence of pictures that shows how people down there gamble with vegetables. Here's how this works:

Somebody brings a bunch of cheap china dinner plates to a field. Everybody who wants to gamble, pays 10 bucks for a plate and writes their name on it with indelible marker.

After all the plates are purchased, everyone marches out into the field and places their plate in a place they consider "lucky." (top photo) Then, all retreat back to a safe distance.

An airplane appears overhead (middle photo) and a water melon is dropped over the side. And then another melon. And another. An so on. The fruit barrage continues until a melon smashes into someone's china plate and breaks it (bottom photo.) Winner! The plate owner collects all the money in the pot.

Kind of like Battleship and Bingo, but kinda not. Anyway, Ka-boom, splat.

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