White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Oh, My Gourd! Pumpkins Are on the Loose

October 21, 2016 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Giant pumpkins are a clear and present danger, and we are not being told about it. Linus of the comic strip Peanuts no longer gives us the heads-up.

Consider in 1900, the largest pumpkin on record weighed in at a modest 400 pounds. Two men could lift it. That was the typical weight of obese pumpkins until 1980, the year after the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, when they started getting bigger, a trend that continues. Suspicious, eh?

Monster pumpkins this year are coming in at more than 2,000 pounds, with the American champion weighing a scale-busting 2,261.5 pounds. It was grown in Rhode Island.

But maybe there are bigger pumpkins lurking in the Amazon. The Swiss claim a bigger pumpkin, but they would, wouldn’t they?

In the world of Cucurbita maxima (Latin for big pumpkin), these monsters are fit for a pie for the Kardashian family. Have you noticed the Kardashians only seem to do three things: take selfies, conduct social media fights and eat? Just watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”: They are always eating. The family’s many crises are dealt with food. Did Kim go to Maxim’s when her jewels were stolen in Paris?

Actually, pumpkins are good-eating. Always sprinkle cinnamon on pumpkin. Cinnamon is to pumpkins what drawn butter is to lobster: It just belongs.

When I was a boy, I ate a lot of pumpkin and it was either mashed up with or without sugar. My brother and I liked the sugared version, while my father preferred his simply boiled.

But that was before people started growing pumpkins as big as elephants. What is the purpose of a 2,000-pound pumpkin? Do you need a chainsaw to cut it up? Who needs to cook with a vegetable that was brought in on a truck, held down by chains? Even the best-equipped kitchens do not have forklifts.

Worse, there is the way pumpkins are taking over our politics.

The first politician to show their influence was John Boehner, the former speaker of the House, whose face kept turning pumpkin-orange before our startled gaze.

Now comes Donald Trump, clearly a man who has had sinister dealings with pumpkins: His orange hair is the giveaway. What do the pumpkins want? Can Trump deliver or will Hillary Clinton get the Pumpkin Party endorsement? Some of her pantsuits are already Hubbard squash-colored.

Halloween and Thanksgiving are when the pumpkins come to haunt us. Forget the witches, it is the gourds muscling in on our innocent festivals.

Yet all year in domestic gardens, U.S. Department of Agriculture research centers and in secret pumpkin patches, pumpkins are sucking up nutrients to grow bigger and bigger. Soon they will rival the Trump Tower and the Grand Coulee Dam.

What do they want? Why are they courting our celebrities, our politicians and corrupting our children? Oh, my gourd!

Be afraid, the pumpkins are on the loose for the next month.

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: halloween, satire, trump

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
The Folly of Biden on the Picket Line

The Folly of Biden on the Picket Line

Llewellyn King

The United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Chrysler — no matter the merits of the workers’ yearnings, shouldn’t have happened. Once it got going, it shouldn’t have lasted. The White House should have spoken. Already, there is damage. Ford has “paused” plans to build […]

The Cheapening of the Impeachment Process

The Cheapening of the Impeachment Process

Llewellyn King

Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman, argued during the celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, that impeachment was essentially a political process, not a judicial one. Quite so. The political dimension of impeachment is again on display in Washington, where the Republicans, driven by a faction of the party, are moving toward impeaching […]

Men I Knew Who Knew Oppenheimer

Men I Knew Who Knew Oppenheimer

Llewellyn King

I have been to the movies. I haven’t done that since before the COVID shutdown. I went to see two huge movies that have each grossed $1 billion, and I enjoyed them enormously. They are, of course, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” I went to see “Barbie” because I thought I should know what people were discussing. […]

Joe Biden, the Man Who Won’t Call It a Day

Joe Biden, the Man Who Won’t Call It a Day

Llewellyn King

Is Joe Biden hiding in plain sight? Is his most extensive public effort these days fending off signs of age, hiding his infirmities, and clinging to the hope that he can still win in the election just over a year from now? Sotto voce, the savants of the Democratic Party worry and complain in private […]

Copyright © 2023 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in