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Potato Guns Threaten
Life and Limb -- And They're Really Cool
By Dave Barry
Copied from Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph
Sunday, September 11, 1994
(NOTE FROM THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT: The
activities described in this column are dangerous and stupid and possibly
illegal and should be performed only by trained humor professionals who are good
at sneaking around. This newspaper assumes no responsibility or liability for
any injuries, deaths, maimings, cripplings, eyes getting poked out, pregnancies,
fires, riots, ointments or suppositories that may or may not occur as a result
of some moron attempting any of these activities or any other actions,
forfeitures, debentures, indemnifications, and such other big scary legal words
as we may or may not think up at some future point in time. Thank you.)
For more than a year now, alert
readers have been sending me alarming newspaper articles about the "potato
gun," a bazooka-sized device that can shoot a potato several hundred yards
at speeds up to 1,000 feet per second. To give you an idea how fast that is, an
ordinary potato, on its own, will rarely travel more than four feet per day,
even during the height of mating season.
Potato guns -- which have already been banned
in some municipalities -- can be easily made from plastic pipe available in any
plumbing supply store; the explosive force comes from ordinary hair spray, which
is ignited by an electrical spark. Needless to say I will not provide any
specific details concerning how to construct these devices, because a great many
young people read this column, and they already know how to construct these
devices.
Anyway, I recently got a fax from an individual
whom I will identify here only as "Buzz Fleischman, 810 Pinecrest Drive,
Miami Springs, Fla. 33166, telephone (305) 885-4817." Buzz, who makes his
living performing humor at corporate meetings and other functions, and who by
the way currently has some openings on his calendar, informed me that he had
constructed a potato gun, and was willing to demonstrate it for the purpose of
helping me, as a responsible adult, better understand just how alarming this
menace is.
We decided to fire the potato gun from the roof
of my place of employment, The Miami Herald (motto: "We Are Still Keeping
An Eye On Gary Hart"). Let me stress that The Miami Herald is a responsible
institution that does NOT ordinarily allow people to shoot potatoes from its
premises. We were able to do it only because we met the very strict requirement
of not asking for permission. It was a Covert Operation, during which we
addressed each other by code names except when we forgot. (For ease of
memorization, we both used the code name "Eagle One.")
Once we got up on the Herald roof, we decided
to fire the potato gun toward Biscayne Bay. Our other option was to fire it
toward the city of Miami, which would have been a serious mistake because
hundreds of local residents would undoubtedly have fired back (and not with
potatoes, either).
To load the gun, Buzz stuffed a potato into the
barrel and shoved it down with a pole, then sprayed some Aqua Net Super Hold
hair spray into the detonation chamber. He then aimed the gun at the bay and
pressed the ignition device, and FWOOOM, the potato came blasting out of the gun
and went way way WAAAAY out over the water and landed approximately in Portugal.
As responsible adults, Buzz an I were very
alarmed by this demonstration. We shot off a bunch more potatoes to see if we
would continue to be alarmed, and we were. We also got excellent results with an
onion.
But as any reputable scientist will tell you,
the "acid test" of the alarmingness of this type of device is what
happens when you shoot a Barbie doll out of it. We used the "Gymnast
Barbie" model, which comes with a little gold medal. First we loaded a
potato into the gun, then we put Gymnast Barbie into the end of the barrel, with
just her head and hairstyle sticking out. Then we pointed the potato gun
straight up and FWOOOM up went Barbie, high in the sky, smiling perkily, waving
her arms and legs gymnastically around inside a cloud of potato atoms before
finally landing in a really unladylike pose.
Needless to say these results were extremely
alarming. Because if the potato gun can be used to shoot Barbie dolls, then it
is only a matter of time before some fiendish criminal mind thinks of using one
to shoot a Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tart. So we tried that, too. It was pretty
dis appointing. The gun made a noise like "phoo" and spat Pop-Tart
fragments a short, nonalarming distance.
Nevertheless as concerned adults we all need to
become wrought up about this menace. People should form organizations and write
angry letters. Congress should hold hearings. The Clinton administration should
announce a definite policy and then change it. Maybe the Warren Commission
should get back together. Also the Defense Department should probably go on Red
Alert, because any day now Portugal is going to start shooting back.
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