A grower and a shower.

"So wait, it just sits there?"

-some jerk (me)

Look, I don't want to rain on anyone's, uh, gourd festival and I get that I'm just being a huge jerk here, but I mean, the pumpkin does most of the work, right? I'm referring, of course, to yesterday's Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-off in Half Moon Bay, California, which is only an hour away for me and I can't believe no one told me about it. Anyway, according to this NPR article, the winner was Travis Gienger, horticulture teacher from Anoka Minnesota and, you know, congratulations. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving, uh, person who's pumpkin grew to be a remarkable size. 

Skills like owning at pumpkin
patch and...uh, patience?

I'm the worst, I know. There probably is some kind of skill involved in growing unusually large pumpkins, even if that skill absolutely eludes people like me who see articles generously described as news online and then writes sarcastic blog posts about them. But still, I have questions. For one, what would motivate someone to grow and then haul a twenty-five hundred pound pumpkin more than two thousand miles to Half Moon Bay. A trip of around thirty hours. Huh? Ok, fine, it's obviously the glory.

Tens of pumpkin weigh off
enthusiasts apparently think it is.

But it kind of seems like you'd have to know how much it weighed to begin with, right? Like before you load it onto the flatbed or whatever, you'd want to know how much it weighed, so can't they just, you know, tell the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-off committee or whatever regulatory body governs pumpkin-related world records? It just seems like it'd save on gas, you know? And if cheating is a concern, it kind of seems like it'd be easier just to fly a judge out to Anoka to confirm the results right? I guess it's less fun that way. Wait, is it fun?

And yes, it's come to this. After twelve years of this blog, I'm down to ragging on pumpkin contests, but I mean, I'm not wrong, am I? Sure, Travis Grienger planted and watered it or whatever, but otherwise the pumpkin did the growing. It just seems like gambling or the stock market. Sure, people who do it have to have some knowhow but at some point it's down to dumb luck. But then, this is Grienger's second win, so what do I know?

What? I just don't think using money to make other money is an achievement.
More like a serious flaw in out civilization's economic system.