Chucking Pumpkins

4 comments

I heard rumours a few days ago of some trebuchet action out in Whitby, Ontario, where they're sending pumpkins airborne for a good cause. Earlier today we had the chance to get out there and experience the action for ourselves.

For five bucks (which goes to the Cancer Society) the guys at Boychyn Farms will sell you a pumpkin and launch it almost a hundred meters to its doom. You even get to decorate your pumpkin beforehand. News articles about the trebuchet claim that it was planned at 45 feet tall but I reckoned it at closer to thirty. Though it's quite a bit smaller, it's still an impressive piece of medieval siege machinery. Check out some video footage (1.8MB MOV File) of the toss! Anyhow, it's good fun and well worth the road trip out to Whitby.

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Lori -

Ohhhh I'm soooo jealous! I would love to launch a pumpkin! Parisiens are just not into these things. Grr.

here is punkin chunkin -

http://www.punkinchunkin.com

real deal hickadge

Daniel Burka -

Wow, some of those videos of Pumpkin Chunkin are incredible. Kind of makes the trebuchet I saw look a little wimpy. Some of the better ones on that site:
<ol>
<li>Mista Ballista: a huge crossbow.</li>
<li>Hypertension: a powerful trebuchet.</li>
<li>Air Cannon Free Fire: a bunch of air cannons firing at once (hard to see the pumpkins)</li>
<li>Bad to the Bone II: I don't even know what to call this thing, but it's incredible.</li>
<li>Pumpkin Hammer: a huuge trebuchet.</li>
</ol>

Laura -

I'm supposed to build a Catapult for my physics class, got in cool plans that could get me going?

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Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm one of the founders of Milk Inc.. For several years I was the creative director at Digg and previous to Milk, I was the director of design at Tiny Speck. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

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