Sing for your supper - er - survival

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space aliens, first contact, singing, competitions

Well, after a few serious books in a row, I was ready for some mindless escapism. Boy, did I find that! Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente is about the silliest bit of SF I've come across, yet based on an idea worth thinking about.

Scenario: When the aliens arrive, they arrive to everyone at once. By some kind of projection, a bizarre-looking alien being visits every single human on Earth, wherever they happen to be at the time, and converses with everyone individually (only much later in the book is there just a hint about translation technology). After various amounts of time for the human involved to get over the shock, the discussion gets serious (as serious as anything gets in this book): One human person or group is to be entered into a Galactic singing contest, to determine if humans are sentient. It turns out that "sentience" is not so self-evident as we'd like to think.

According to the Esca, the species chosen to "recruit" a human singing group, all entrants in the song festival are ranked, including any newcomers (in this case, humans). If a newcomer winds up ranked dead last, the species is indeed "Dead Last": the entire species is to be exterminated and the planetary biosphere will be given another few million years to evolve a new, purportedly sentient, species. Rinse, Dry, Repeat as necessary. The Esca were the most recent species to "enter" the contest, and are quite proud that they came in Eighth, rather than something like Seventy-Fourth, or whatever Dead Last would be. The proven sentient beings of the Galaxy have decided that the extinction of an occasional species is the price to be paid for the peace-promoting songfest. It succeeded "Galactic War X", after all.

To give you an idea of the hyper-enthusiasm of language Ms Valente, here is the description of the leading member of the Absolute Zeroes, the group that is taken a few thousand light-years to the competition venue, a certain Mr. Decibel Jones (né Danesh Jalo):

…a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambiguous glamrock messiah…

The prose reminds me of teachers of the art of composition, who advised us, "Use more adjectives!" This book is about 2/3 adjectives, frequently in sentences that run 100-200 words. Sentences full of immense enthusiasm. Also full of neologisms. Amazingly, newly coined words seem to fit into the text around them and practically define themselves. Other than the occasional jarring bit of potty-mouth, prose like that just washes over me like perfumed olive oil.

The concept is actually based on a real bit of history, though "last place" in a certain global competition does not result in anyone's being exterminated.

I don't know if I could call this escapism at its best, but it is certainly escapism of a most compelling sort.

To pick this fruit, you need a forklift

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, fruits, competitions

Here's a pumpkin that'll make 100 pies – it weighs 100 pounds (45 kg). OK, once you remove ten pounds of seeds and fiber it'll make 90 pies.

How do you grow a big pumpkin? This isn't really that big. The pale color indicates it is a very young Giant Pumpkin (not the Great Pumpkin, Linus...just a giant one). And you have to start with the right genetics.

Seeds from Dill's Atlantic Giant variety are a good place to start. In a backyard garden, the plant will be cramped for space, but should have no trouble producing a 300 pound (136 kg) fruit.

Give your vine more space, say 800-1000 square feet (75-95 sq m), and spend a bit on fungicides and pesticides, and the same seed can produce a 650-pounder (295 kg) like this one.

The man has his arms around it so he can "thump" it to see how solid it is. Pumpkins are around half air when ripe, and some are airier than others. That makes it hard to tell the weight from the size.

This image and the prior one were cropped to conceal the identity of the two men posing with their pumpkins.

If you want to approach, or surpass a half-ton (1,000 lbs or 454 kg), you need better genetics than stock Atlantic Giant seeds provide. Get involved with the people who communicate via bigpumpkins.com and sooner or later you'll be able to buy or beg seeds from a pumpkin that weighed as much as a VW bug. These obsessive Growers do their own cross-breeding of the biggest of the biggest Atlantic Giant stock, and keep meticulous records. Certain seeds go for $400 and up at auction...that's each!

In Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever, Susan Warren reports on the lives and hard times of a few dozen men, women, and couples who grow pumpkins you could get inside of. Ms Warren got to know these growers of the earth's largest fruit, and followed a bunch of them around for the 2006 growing and contest season.

She was fortunate to witness the weigh-in of several of the largest pumpkins of 2006, including Ron Wallace's 1,502 pound (681 kg) monster, the first pumpkin to officially surpass 1,500 lbs. That record was made at the Frerich Farm weigh-in near Warren, Rhode Island. The Rhode Island club, the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers, hosted the event; they've become a force to reckon with in recent years among gourd growers.

Ron and his father Dick have been growing these giants for more than a decade now. Prior to 2006 they'd had more bad luck than good, but it seems everyone else had the bad luck that year, while they turned in three of the four largest pumpkins ever grown, at different weigh-ins.

Pumpkins over a half ton are notorious for "weighing light". There is a recognized method for measuring across the top of a pumpkin in three directions so as to calculate its weight. The "tape weight" is only a rough measure, however, and there seems to be a much greater margin of error for the largest fruits.

I've used that word three times now...pumpkins are fruits, even though we don't typically think of them so. They aren't apples, after all. But "vegetable" is formally confined in meaning to the stems, roots and leaves of a plant, while the seed-bearing organ is a fruit. Squash, including pumpkins, are fruits.

Well, records are made to be broken. Ron Wallace's good friend Joe Jutras boosted the record another 187 pounds in 2007 to set a new record of 1,689 lbs (766 kg). Behind Joe's pumpkin you can see several others that weighed less, but some came rather close. "1500" seems to be the new standard, and everyone is now thinking of trying for a full ton.

So how do you get a one-ton fruit to the weigh-in? An engine hoist is too small; you need a heavy tractor with a crane attachment to get it into a large pickup truck...put a pallet into the truck bed first. At the weigh-in, it is going to be picked out with a forklift, and set onto the scale by forklift.

2006 was a tough year for the Southern New England club. Tons of early rain, too hot, too wet, too dry, or just too everything, and still the pumpkins grew. By contest season, late September and early October, however, many growers had lost all their fruit to various rots, parasites, and other hazards faced by their fragile giants. Yet it was still a year for several folks to bring personal-record fruit to be weighed.

As I read, I wondered at Ms Warren's good fortune. But I soon realized, she took care to gather material from three major pumpkin-growing regions: New England, Ohio Valley, and coastal Oregon. The record fruit of the year, and perhaps a record pumpkin, was sure to come from one of those areas. If you collect enough stories, you have the pieces you need to tailor a narrative to follow the fellow who finally wins.

Gorging for fun and profit

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, competitions, eating, gurgitators

In my college years, I got the nickname "Monumental Mouth" because of a scheduling problem that made it quite hard for me to eat more than once daily. I would eat dinner at my dorm, then run to another dorm and eat another dinner with friends. On occasion, when cooking for myself (which consisted of warming an unopened can in a saucepan on the stove), I would shovel in a 3 pound can of spaghetti. My friends thought that a lot.

I'm glad I never tried a contest. It never entered my mind. By the time I first heard of eating contests, the winners were eating upwards of ten pounds of "food" in ten or twelve minutes. More recently, a few really big eaters are approaching twenty pounds. Yow!

Jason Fagone, a journalist working freelance out of Philadelphia, was sent to cover an eating contest, sort of as a rest stop between more "serious" stories. He got to know a few eaters, and became fascinated (today he'd say, "morbidly..."). His book Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream chronicles a year he spent following the eating circuit, getting to know many major players, both eaters an promoters.

What can be told about a tiny Japanese guy who eats, bun and all, fifty hot dogs in twelve minutes? A tinier Korean-American woman who eats (not bones and all!) 160-plus hot wings in that same time period? Or a score of folks weighing up to 400 pounds that try their best to outeat one another, and especially these two Asians?

Author Fagone tells us as much as he can. Some folks, like Coondog O'Karma, "el Wingador", or Crawfish Nick, self-promote. A few, like "Eater X" Janus, are more retiring and serious. The most mysterious, both self-promoting and self-hiding, is Takeru Kobayashi, the Japanese marvel (eventually, Fagone learns that "Koby" trains with much larger masses of food than he expects to consume in a contest. None of the other eaters comes close).

Big-time competitive eating didn't start that long ago. There have been informal speed-eating contests for a very long time; one fellow claims two guys in a prehistoric cave had to try to out-consume each other as a survival tactic. You never know when the next mastodon will come along... But mass-marketed and -promoted competitive eating began in the US in the early 20th Century, or perhaps more in the middle...the early part of the backstory depends on the memory of just a couple of notoriously unreliable gents, the Shea brothers.

George Shea promotes IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating), which he and his brother created just over ten years ago. Many contests run under their aegis, including the biggest, the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, which is now covered by ESPN.

So is eating a sport? There is certainly money in it, now. The author is ambiguous. He seems to be bemused by the idea at first, then lean in favor, and finally lean away, or conclude it doesn't matter.

Late in the book I noticed certain palindromic structures: "Comedy equals tragedy plus time, and maybe tragedy equals comedy plus time" [p 240], or "Eating seemed like a highly entertaining but empty vice, its very emptiness made terrifying by its intensity, and its intensity made terrifying by its emptiness" [p 243]. Whenever I've seen such before, their vacant profundity indicates the writer is running out of ideas.

In the end, perhaps more than many endeavors, competitive eating exists for itself. It doesn'nt need to have meaning. People strive for recognition, and this is one way some folks achieve it. For them, I am glad; for the destruction it can cause to their health, I am not so glad, but I understand. For eaters, eating big is worth it.