"giant" news and stories

Most years, my parents grow pumpkins in their vegetable garden. One year a pumpkin got lost behind some particularly large leaves and was left to grow for an extra month after its brethren had been removed from the vine. By the time we discovered it, it was huge (and starting to shuffle its way off this mortal coil).

It seems that our pumpkin was nothing in comparison to the pumpkin that took the honors today at the Half-Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival Weigh-off. Clocking in at 1,524 pounds, that pumpkin was grow by Thad Starr from Pleasant Hill, OR. For bringing the largest pumpkin to the festival, Staff gets a prize of $6 a pound for his gigantic gourd. That comes out to a not-so-shabby $9,144.

The five largest pumpkins will be on display at the festival through the weekend.

Via Philly.com

Apparently, Viacom International Inc., which owns MTV and produces the TV show Pimp My Ride, owns a trademark that covers the use of not only the phrase "pimp my ride" but of "pimp my." As such, they requested that the fantastic snack site formerly known as Pimp My Snack change its name. Without admitting any liability or other intentional wrongdoing, the snack-pimping gang changed the name so that their pimping could continue unimpeded. They can now be found at Pimp That Snack.

If you haven't seen the site before, they take normal snacks and reproduce them in huge (and delicious) proportions. We mentioned them back at Easter, but here are a few looks at what they've been up to recently. Be warned that you may have a strong desire to pimp snacks after hanging around the site:

 

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One of the pastry classes at the Oregon Coast Culinary Institute took on a big task this year. They learned how to recreate preservative-laden childhood favorites without using the preservatives or the machines that are typically used to engineer candies like gummy worms, Zingers and lollipops. And then they made them giant.

At their final exhibition, there were cupcakes and candies that would have fit in perfectly at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Perhaps the most impressive was the creation made by Brandon Finley: a giant tootsie pop. Pictured here, the lollipop weighed more than 40 pounds and used a 24-inch french rolling pin as a "stick." The chocolate tootsie center weighed about 15 pounds alone. Finley said that he had planned to make the confection larger, but the school actually ran out of sugar after the other students finished their projects and Finley used more that 25 pounds of it in his.

I wonder how many licks it took to get to the center of that pop.

[Image The Worldlink]

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Yesterday, students at York, Pennsylvania's Locust Grove Elementary School doused their principal with hamburger toppings in an act of charity. A local supermarket chain offered to double the amount of money they normally donate to local schools whose principals did something "original and entertaining," according to the York Daily Record. Locust Grove principal Robert W. Shick (above) was one of five administrators chosen from hundreds of entrants. Shick sat on a hamburger bun as students covered him with all sorts of fixins, including lettuce, relish, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise (shiver). "It felt very good between my toes," Shick told the YDR.

[Photo: AP/York Dispatch, Bill Kalina]