Why compost your old pumpkins when you can launch them?
That’s the theme to this weekend’s 24th annual World Champion Punkin Chunkin Festival, where over 75,000 people will gather in rural southern Delaware to witness a variety of pumpkin-launching devices — from catapults, trebuchets, centrifugal machines, to pneumatic cannons — try to set world records.
If watching flying gourds isn’t your thing, Frank Shade, the Chunk’s director of promotions, assures that it offers “something to do for everybody.” But even he’s aware that a festival revolving around standing in a cornfield, clutching a beer, while pumpkins fly overhead isn’t for everyone. “Ninety-five percent of our visitors are hooked for life. But the other 5 percent are like, get me out of here.”
