I grew up on the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas, less than five miles away from the Big Texan. If you’ve ever been on I-40 anywhere along it’s nation-wide stretch, you’ve probably seen a billboard touting their “FREE” 72 ounce steak. Yes, it’s for real. Yes, I’ve seen it. Yes, it’s free… IF you can eat it, a baked potato, a salad, a shrimp cocktail, and a dinner roll (about 4500 calories total) in under 60 minutes without a bathroom break (or even standing up to “pack it down”). If you don’t make it, you pay about $80.

Generally speaking, Big Texan is a tourist trap. The kind of place you should visit once, just to say you’ve been there, but the locals just kind of chuckle about. The food is good, but expensive. The atmosphere is comically cliché. And the seat-cushion sized steak is only attempted by “fariners.” (You know, ignorant yankees and such.).

So imagine my surprise when I saw the Big Texan on Good Morning America this morning! (Quintessential ignorant yankees!) One such “fariner” made a visit to Amarillo this weekend and records were broken, nay, shattered.

A 125 pound Nebraska woman, competitive eater Molly Schuyler, cut the previous record in HALF finishing the massive meal in under five minutes! UNDER FIVE MINUTES!! And, as if that wasn’t nauseating enough, she ordered a SECOND MEAL which she finished in under ten minutes. Oh… Em… Gee.

Let that sink in for just a minute. a 125 pound woman ate nine pounds of meat (and another few pounds of sides) in 15 minutes. Nine… Pounds…

As they say in my home town, “That thar’s gonna be a three flusher!”

(Read the full story.)

A symptom of my blog neglect is the large collection of news links stacked on my desktop. Rather than try and write a post for each one, I’m just going to have to do a link dump. So, hold on to your bloomers. Here we go!

Dirty space news: Mysterious explosion on Uranus!! (Clicky clicky.)

Siberians share DNA with Neanderthals… OR maybe Neanderthal were actually humans… Duh. Read Genesis! (Clicky clicky.)

Insult to injury: Netflix customers (former and current) cut deep into earnings. Stock collapses. (Clicky clicky.)

Shamed ultra Liberal (and likely criminal) “community organization” ACORN is the driving force behind the “Occupy” movement. (Clicky clicky.)

After exposure, ACORN scrambles (but fails) to cover up “Occupy” involvement. (Clicky clicky.)

Hilarious: Mass of McDonald’s job applications dumped on “Occupy” protesters. (Clicky clicky.)

The parasites have parasites: Lice outbreak at Occupy Portland. (Clicky clicky.)

Walmart for rats: “Occupy” encampments are breeding grounds for dangerous disease including drug-resistant TB and truth-resistant socialism. (Clicky clicky and clicky clicky.)

Obama’s agriculture dept introduced Christmas Tree Tax to promote Christmas trees. Seriously?! (Clicky clicky.)

U.S. military kicked out of Iraq likely because Obama admin completely ignored the Iraqi gov’t for nearly a year! Turns out the “silent treatment” is not good foreign policy! (Clicky clicky.)

And now for something completely different. Everyone sing along!

Anything goes in. Anything goes out!
Fish, bananas, old pajamas,
Mutton! Beef! and Trout!

…

Sorry. I’ve been working pretty hard lately. Maybe a bit too hard. I shall endeavor to improve.

…

SPAM!

In the spirit of Jedi Squirrels, Army Squirrel, and Sith Squirrel, I give you… Faith Healer Chipmunk!

Thanks to DangerDave for posting his pic on facebook for me to steal!

Okay, I need a sanity check here. First, watch this YouTube clip of a Heinz commercial currently running in the UK.

Do you get it? Mayo with a New York deli flavor. Mom is making the sandwiches with New York deli flavor, so Mom “appears” as a rough, tough, stereotypical New York butcher. Get it? Ha haaa… Clever-ish. And the kiss at the end comes off as slightly comical, with some shock value.

Enter my friends at the American Family Association. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I respect what those guys do. I appreciate the work. I need someone else to keep an eye on things that I don’t have time or opportunity to watch. Without the AFA, I would not have known about Ford pumping money into “gay pride” parades and running explicit ads in “gay” magazines because, well, I don’t go to those parades nor do I read those magazines. I don’t have eyes or ears in the advertising market to let me know when someone’s putting money toward that kind of thing.

But there are times, when the folks at the AFA really puzzle me. Did anyone watch that commercial and jump to the conclusion that Heinz was promoting gay marriage? I could be wrong, but I don’t think gay marriage is even a hot button issue in Britain. It’s not legal and I haven’t heard anything about a push to legalize it.

You can read the AFA’s alert here.

Is it just me or is the AFA way off the mark on this one? I mean, seriously. Who looks at that and thinks, “Oh, that big, burly butcher with the New York accent must be the homosexual lover of that wimpy little Brit. And look! They have kids!” I can just imagine what that big, burly butcher would say if you told him that, but I can’t print it here because my blog is rated PG.

It’s that time of year, boys and girls, when we gather around the charcoal pit, turn on the flood lights, flush two extra times, and leave our SUVs idling in the driveway. Yes, June 12th is Carbon Belch Day!

In response to the idiocy of the “carbon footprint” nazis, we, the intelligent few who recognize a poorly conceived conspiracy theory when we see it, are celebrating today by producing as much “climate changing” carbon dioxide as we can in a single day.

Read all about it at the official Carbon Belch Day website. You can even calculate your own personal belch. (Tammy and I combined will belch approximately 145 pounds of carbon today.)

And in honor of this great celebration, last night Katie helped me make a Carbon Belch Day video. Thanks, Katie!

And please don’t think that Carbon Belch Day in any way besmirches my parents’ wedding anniversary, which is also June 12th. Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad!

Just for grins, here’s a couple of pics I scraped of the inkernets.

The secret’s out! Your iPhone is really running XP!

And here’s a sneak peak at Mac’s new Sudanese version of the iPod due out next Spring.

New York City now has a training academy for Jedi’s. No, seriously. (Pause it and let the video load before you watch it. It’s kind of slow.)

I love the quote near the end of the video. I love even more that it comes from a girl! A girl who is actually, somewhat attractive. It’s the geekness trifecta: Extreme geekness, estrogen, AND tolerable appearance. That just never happens.

It’s not about nerds trying to best each other. It’s about nerds trying to better each other and make their lives better through the dorkiness that makes them great.

(Title translation for folks who don’t deal with teenagers: “Oh my gosh! That’s so not fair!”)

You may have heard the sad sad tale of Windy Hager. (It’s “Windy” with an “i”. In this, I feel her pain.) Windy is 16 years old (Almost an adult!) and for months, her parents had been total jerks when it came to her boyfriend, Brenton. They tried everything to keep the two apart. When Windy and finally had enough, she pulled the teen angst trump card and informed her parents that she “hated” them. It was at this that her parents, Dennis and Betty Hager, finally relented. They would let Windy and her boyfriend do whatever they wanted to do.

So far, this is just like several million other cases in which parents wimped out to the detriment of their own kids. But in this case it’s much much worse. You see, in this case, the boyfriend is Brenton Wuchae, Windy’s 40-year-old track coach and the parental relent involved signing consent forms for their under aged daughter to marry the old perv.

Like I said you may have heard this story because it was all over the news a month or so ago. What you may not have heard is this follow up story. When Windy moved out, she left behind some things. One can imagine that she’d be in a hurry to get out before her parents came to their senses.

She recently took her parents to court to try and get her stuff out of her old room. I am totally not making this up: a mounted fish, a sculpture, a PlayStation game system, and a Beanie Babies collection valued at $300. Now how could anyone doubt the maturity level of a girl who sues her parents for custody of her beanie babies? (And believes that such a collection has any monetary value whatsoever.)

The judge promptly threw out the case because a parent of a minor legally owns all the possessions of their children, especially when they paid for them in the first place. Like I said, “TSNF!” Windy has the right to appeal the case, but it’s unlikely that screaming and throwing things will go very far with the appellate court. And everyone knows that judges couldn’t care less if you hate them.

When we were on our mission trip, a very inebriated gentleman approached some of our kids near the Alamo. Before they had a chance to ask him if he knew Jesus as his personal savior, he introduced himself as Jesus. The Lord and Savior then asked them if they had any weed they’d be willing to part with.

In the news, a man went for a walk in his birthday suit (That means nekkid for your yankees.) around the county court house in Palestine, Texas. (Palestine! Coincidence? I think not.) When police confronted him, he said it was okay because he’s friends with Jesus. Oh! I see. Carry on then.

(As an aside, the journalist gets extra points for this line, “[The police officer] said he had never been exposed to such an incident.” Ahaa! Exposed. Ba-dump tshh!)

And in a story we’ve all heard a million times, some nut jobs in Connecticut claim that Jesus’ image has “miraculously” appeared in the wood grain pattern of their kitchen cabinet. (Insert your own shellac fumes joke here.)

So, what I want to know is this: In countries with different religious backgrounds, does this still happen? Do drunk Indians (towel, not feather) claim to be Shiva before they ask you for some vegetarian doobage? Do Middle Eastern Muslims ever “see” Mohammad’s face in their falafels? Would a French Atheist ever walk around naked and then claim to be friends with no one? Well, I guess that last one is pretty probable, but you get my point.

Is the link between insanity and Jesus a purely American invention?