Competitive Eating & Winter Games

News Item: Molly Schuyler, a competitive eater, recently won a contest by consuming 501 chicken wings in thirty minutes. Wow! That would be almost seventeen wings per minute, or three and a half seconds for each wing. That must have been a lovely sight, to see this woman shoving wing after wing into her mouth for half an hour. I wonder if she was growling or simply sighing with pleasure. Only in America. In places with extreme poverty, children starving to death, I wonder how many wings per day would sustain each child’s life. Five? Six? If as few as five, then Molly’s thirty minute total would save a hundred children from starvation for a day. Or keep one child alive for a hundred days. And what does a competitive eater do at the end of a contest? I’m pretty sure it would involve a finger in the throat to disgorge the wings, hotdogs, pies, burritos, steak, or whatever. Only in America. I then found on the internet that she had also taken up the Big Texan Steak Ranch challenge and had eaten three 72-ounce steaks in twenty minutes. Wow! And I thought that even one Big Texan steak meal would be impossible to consume in their time limit of an hour (the meal includes a shrimp cocktail, a baked potato, salad, and a buttered roll). Molly could probably go through everything in the kitchen in an hour, even the pots and pans. Wow! You go, girl! Only in America. Also on the net I found that there's an organization called MLE (yupp, that's Major League Eating and yupp, those are cannolis you see in the picture above) that oversees eating contests and set the rules for such competition. I also found that there are world records for consuming any kind of food you can think of (amount and time involved). Also, that nearly every nation has its own contests. So, America isn't alone in its gluttony.

          Winter Olympics: In a dictionary, you might find a photo of the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony right next to the word “spectacular.” It was a hitchless spectacle. I’ve watched every opening ceremony of every summer and winter games for the last sixty years and this one was by far and away the best. I hope the entire games can live up to the opening.

          Countdown Mode: Every day I feel a little less alive, a little more fatigued. The increments of these changes is tiny but relentless. Therefore, I’m going to describe briefly how each day is a movement down or up (it all depends on which direction death will take me). I know that sounds super self-indulgent, too much like an examination of my navel, as though anyone cares what my navel looks like. So, whatever readers I still have, please feel free to skip all paragraphs in future blogs marked as “Countdown.”