Taylor Made Festival, Al Queda, &c.

When I was 12 years old, my family moved to Taylor, AL. Every summer Taylor hosted the Taylor Made Festival. Activities included a Softball Tournament, vendors peddling their various wares, and (my favorite) the Washer Chunking Tournament. For those of you unfamiliar, Washer Chunking is a lot like throwing horseshoes except the horseshoe is replaced with a 2 inch washer, and you try to throw it into a small hole instead of at a stake.



Here is a visual aide:

This particular shot not only cost me a match, but made me question my fathers' skills as a craftsmen. If he hadn't gone cheap on the glue...

Back to my story. As a child, my best friend Stevie and I watched every match of the tournament, as we were unable to participate do to age. The same team, Tom and Henry, won the thing almost every year.

Steve and I have spent the last 20 years training to become Taylor's greatest washer throwers, which probably puts us amongst the best in the world. In a best of three situation, I doubt there are very many teams that can compete with us.

Just as our skills were beginning to peak, and we were prepared to challenge Tom and Henry for the title, The Town of Taylor elected Joel Napier as mayor. Joel is one of my least favorite people (due in large part to a nasty soccer incident in 1994). Elections have consequences and Joel's mismanagement of our town resulted in the Festival not being held for the past few years and thus Stevie and I have been denied our chance at glory.

As an aside, it brought great joy to my soul when I read this article last year: link

Joel apparently thought he was the mayor of a town in South Carolina, because he was arrested for "sexing up" a fat chick in the Waffle House parking lot. I have a policy of not rejoicing in the misfortune of my enemies, but in this case I made an exception because my hatred is so deep and I thought Joel would resign and the Washer Tournament would be restored. Unfortunately, Joel didn't have enough pride or dignity to resign, so the town's hardships continue.

Amazingly, Stevie called me a few weeks ago and said that the Town of Taylor was planning to once again hold the Taylor Made Festival over the July 4th weekend and was I ready to take down the Washer Chunking Title? While skeptical that they could actually pull it off, I began training late at night in my garage.

Just as I completed knocking all the rust off my game, I found out they were having the festival, but weren't having the Washer Tournament. I can only assume that the word "chunk" reminds Joel of Waffle House hash browns, and he killed the Tournament for another year.

So I'm headed to white water raft in North Carolina.

In other news, today we got a great report regarding the Global War on Terror. It seems that Al Queda has been rendered so impotent that they've had to discontinue their efforts to kill us and are now going to attack us with an English language magazine. Here is the front cover of the 1st issue:

Someone should inform them that we American's have already built up a pretty strong tolerance to bad journalism.

From the article linked above: "The U.S. is quite worried about Al Qaeda's new publishing ambitions."

Quite worried? Really? More like terrified! We Americans haven't been exposed to anything this dangerous since "Air America" filed for bankruptcy.

I am interested in the article "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom". I've begun the process of making many bombs in my mom's kitchen. Typically I deploy them in her bathroom a few hours after eating.

(Sorry about that last paragraph. I know it was childish. However, my Aunt Amy reads this blog to my grandmother. I'll spend the better part of this weekend laughing hysterically, envisioning how that scene unfolds. BTW, Amy turned 43 this week.)