I’ll be perfectly honest with you, sometimes I sit down to write my Freely Speaking article and nothing, and I mean nothing, happens. My mind goes blank and my fingers sit helplessly poised over the keyboard of my computer waiting for it to slip into gear.
It happened with this issue, my brain, for want of a better word, wandered aimlessly through dark void passages (professionals refer to it as writer’s block) searching for a glimmer of hope. And then yesterday evening, well away from the office, I read an article in the newspaper that got my fingers dancing across the keys this morning.
Modern man (and here I use the generic term for a human being characterized by erect bipedal posture, a highly developed brain and powers of articulate speech) through time has searched perfection in all segments of life. So much so that we now take for granted such wonders as electricity, air travel and the computer. For better or worse we have also created nuclear energy, ‘planes that travel faster than sound and we have even put a man or two on the moon and landed a motorized vehicle on Mars.
Of course, to this list we must add our own extraordinary domain, horology. For centuries man has sought to create machines, both large and small, whereby we can see at a glance the time and watchmakers around the world have progressed to the point where we now have timepieces that are worn on the wrist that not only offer the time of the day or night, but also show the day of the week, the date, the year and moon phases, not to mention such complications as chronographs, tourbillons, time zones and minute repeaters. Millions of millions of any currency you care to name have been spent to achieve this and we happily salute those geniuses involved in the quest for miniaturized mechanical precision.
But what do we do with these wonderfully intricate timepieces? Some genuine watch lovers actually wear them, others store them away in a bank’s safe for fear of having them stolen, even more leave them untouched in their packaging to sell at a profit in the not too distant future. In America, however, they use them to illustrate how far Homo sapiens has progressed in 5,000 years of existence by timing the speed that so called civilized men and women consume food. No, that’s far too elegant a phrase, make that stuff fodder down their throats, it’s more appropriate.
Apparently, every year there is a hot dog eating contest in New York’s Coney Island. This year’s winner, a young lady called Sonya Thomas, managed 37 hot dogs in 12 minutes, thus beating the previous women’s world record of 32 of these epicurean delights. Ranked Number 1 competitive eater in the USA, Miss Thomas is the holder of 26 current world records. Here is a list of some of them – to be read slowly to avoid mental diarrhoea:

 56 hamburgers in 8 minutes;

 65 hard-boiled eggs in 6 minutes and 40 seconds;

 a 9 pound cheeseburger (1 kilo = 2.2 pounds) in 27 minutes;

 11 pounds of cheesecake in 9 minutes;

 5.75 pounds of deep fried asparagus spears in 10 minutes;

 80 chicken nuggets in 5 minutes;

 167 BBQ chicken wings in 32 minutes;

 40 crab cakes in 12 minutes;

 44 lobsters from the shell (5.2 kilos of meat) in 12 minutes and last, but far from least, the one that ignores any pearls of wisdom … 46 dozen oysters (that’s 552 oysters) in 10 minutes! (Note the absence of seconds in these feats, due probably to fast-food juices squelching into the watches.)
Nicknamed The Black Widow on the competitive eating circuit, Sonya Thomas says, “Like the female Black Widow spider, it is my desire to eliminate the males. In competitive eating I want to eat more or faster than my male counterparts.” And one of those male counterparts is the Japanese eating sensation and the world’s Number 1 competitive eater, Takeru Kobayashi. Beyond that, The Black Widow wants to open her own restaurant – which will be, naturally, a fast-food emporium.
So for all you Breguets, Audemars, Jaegers and Journes wishing to expand in the American market, resistance to moisture and dust is no longer a benchmark for watches, they now need to be tomato ketchup and mustard proof, and impervious to acid attack from Coca Cola, an essential ingredient in the digestive process of competitive eating.
So, eat drink and be merry … although 552 oysters and 11 pounds of cheesecake might just be pushing it a bit!


Source: February - March 2006 Issue