It all started on my brother’s 40th birthday. Somehow, I thought it would be fun to launch him out of a cannon for his birthday. Well, he didn’t want to be launched and I found out you can’t just rent that sort of cannon. In my search, though, I came up with Spudzooka.net.

A spudzooka is a cannon that shoots potatoes and other tuberous vegetables. It became immediately clear that shooting an effigy of my brother out of a cannon would be much more practical, so I downloaded the instructions and built the cannon.

It worked great! My sister-in-law Mok carved the effigy and we shot it into a tree, totally mashing the potato into oblivion. We spent the better part of the afternoon trying our skill on various targets and really had fun. Even Mary enjoyed the silliness of it.

Of course, there is an international community surrounding potato cannons. These people go completely mad building some of these things. I have not crossed that line, but have contributed an engineering improvement to the public realm. Look for “Peter S.” on this link, and you will find my handiwork. Hopefully, this tweak will add to the enjoyment of other amateur spud launchers.

We donated an afternoon of spudzooking to St. Dominic School’s Silent auction. So a couple of weeks ago we co-hosted an afternoon of blasting away with a dozen or so eager participants. Kids and adults laughed and had a good time launching spuds and parachutes. I’ll post some photos of that, too, if I can remember where I saved them!