Pumpkin Launch

This is sort of baseball-related: I went to Goodwin Field on Saturday to watch the baseball scrimmage. I expected the usual couple dozen cars in the parking lot, but it was jammed like a Super Regional finals. As I started up the hill, I heard all kinds of excitement going on at Titan Stadium.

It was the Pumpkin Launch competition - this ought to be fun. They had the entrants lined up around midfield, most of them wooden catapults, with competition for pumpkin launching distance and accuracy. The targets were within 50 yards of the launching points.

But all eyes were riveted on "Pumpkin Lobber," a rocket launcher capable of propelling pumpkins and medicine balls alike great distances with enough force to go through a scoreboard 120 yards away, high upon a hill. (I was a Chemical Engineering student during medieval times, so I understand how experiments can go badly awry - but this was seemingly foreseeable.)

The Pumpkin Lobber was shut down after it went Herman Munster on the stadium scoreboard. The crowd (I've seen estimates of 3,000 - it was at least that many) shouted in unison: "Lobber!!!! Lobber!!! Lobber!!!" It wasn't funny --- but it was really funny.

I didn't get a close-up look, but the damage looked really minimal - just some displaced sheet metal. In hindsight, it is very fortunate the scoreboard was struck, because cars and pedestrians could just as easily have taken the brunt of the hit - which could have been lethal.