M&D spoiler: Cheese Rolling

Fri May 30 12:10:21 CDT 1997

*******M&D SPOILER AHEAD

INJURED IN CHEESE ROLLING CONTEST

 This happens almost every year and is each time duly reported by the
American press. Some years ago, Miami (Florida) Herald columnist Dave Barry
made it the topic of his column.
+ I stumbled upon that while writing about Hawthorne's The Maypole of
Merrymount and doing a little side research into pagan rites still
surviving in Old Merry England.
+ One can read both the AP report and the column
on the Web + at Karl Hagen Geppert's joke site
http://blackadder.eng.monash.edu.au/~pat/mail/snippets/0013.html

19 Injured In Cheese Rolling (fwd)

Karl Hagen Geppert (K.Geppert at cit.gu.edu.au)
Tue, 30 May 1995 13:38:50 +1000 (EST)

Some of you may remember Dave Barry's column about cheese rolling
that I posted some time ago (included below for those with write
through cache memories :) ). Here is some documentary proof that
he wasn't making it all up.

> CHELTENHAM, England (AP) -- If you think hang-gliding, sky-diving
>and big-game hunting are dangerous sports, apparently you've never
>heard of cheese-rolling.
> In the annual cheese-rolling contest here on Monday, 18 of the
>approximately 20 contestants were injured -- four of them seriously
>enough to be sent to the hospital.
> And it can be a tough sport even on those seeking vicarious
>thrills. One spectator who tried to get a better view fell down and
>hit her head.
> The annual competition, in which contenders vie for a giant
>round cheese by rolling smaller versions down Cooper's Hill, left
>four contestants with broken arms and legs and 14 other were
>treated on the spot for sprains.
> Among those who ended the day unscathed was Darren Yates, 15,
>who won the big cheese.
> Cheese rolling on Cooper's Hill hill is thought to date back to
>pre-Roman times when it was a fertility rite heralding the return
>of spring.
___________________

(((((((((((((((((
Dave Barry Column
)))))))))))))))))

Oh God! Now there's a frog-flavoured pretzel.

What's wrong with this contry, aside from "light" beer is that Americans
do
not know anything about foreign affairs.
Your average American can't even answer basic questions abnout
geography,
such as:
1:In which direction does the Nile River flow?
2:What can the letters in "Great Britain" be rearranged to spell?
(Answers: 1 - Downhill; 2 - "Big Titan Rear")
Tragically, we Americans are too busy sitting around watching worthless
juvenile mind-rotting comedies to learn about foreign affairs. This is bad,
because what happens abroad can greatly affect our lives.
For example, if tensions were to mount again in the Middle East, fighting
could break out, and it could escalate to, God forbid, nuclear war, and this
would probably affect our TV reception.
This is why today I'm going to present a Foreign News Update, starting
with
an important story from the September 2, 1993 Times of India, sent in by
alert
reader Tapash Chakraborty.
This article, which I am not making up, states: "Villagers of Khajuria in
Ganjam district worshipped a frog on Monday to please the rain god Indra,
as
the dry spell continued to delay cultivation."
The article further states that "a big live frog tied with a bamboo stick
was carried by villagers who roamed in and around the village chanting
couplets
in honour of the wife of Lord Indra".
The article does not give the exact wording of the couplets. Probably they
went something like:
We need rain; your wife is great
Here's a frog, let's cultivate.
The article also doesn't state whether this effort resulted in rain, but I'm
sure it did. If you're a rain god, and you have people waving a frog around
and chanting about your wife, you're definitely going to dump something on
them.
But whether or not it worked, the point is that the villagers of Khajuria
DID
something about their problem. They did not just sit back and wait for "the
other guy" to worship the frog.
We need more of that kind of gumption in this country.
Take the economy. People have been whining about the economy for years,
but
nobody does anything about it. I'm not saying we could get the economy
going
again by worshipping a frog. Please do not take me for a total idiot.
We have a huge, complex economy, and we'd need a much larger amphibian,
such
as a manatee, or, if he is available, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Speaking of frogs, many alert readers sent in an Associated Press report
concerning and incident in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is not
technicallyy
a foreign country, but you'll want to know about this incident anyway,
because
it involves a woman who opened a bag of pretzels and pulles out a pretzel
with
a 2.5 cm frog baked into it.
The AP sent out a photograph showing the actual pretzel, and sure enough
there's a frog sort of welded on to it, looking crouched and ready to hop
away, except of course that frogs become very poor hoppers when
subjected to
the pretzel-baking process, as has been verieied in countless laboratory
experiments.

My first thought, when I saw this article, was that maybe the frog had been
put there on purpose.
We live in an era of increasingly complex snack-food variations, such as
Jalapeno Cheddar 'n' Onion Crackers ("Now With Avocado!").
It's entirely possible that marketing experts at the pretzel company were
simply enhancing their product line ("Now With Frogs!"). But apparently
that
was not the case with these pretzels, so the woman took them back to the
store,
which gave her a handsomely baked prince.
No, seriously, the store gave her a refund, so all{s well, that ends well.
Bi]ut that does not mean we should relax, not with these alarming
cheese-related developments that are taking place in England.

I refer to a May 26, 1993, UPI report, sent in by alert reader Clyde E.
Morgan, which begins "Fourteen people were injured taking part in the
annual
****Double Gloucester cheese-rolling race****".
I am still not making this up. The article states that this race takes
place every year, and it involved "rolling large round slabs of cheese down
a
hill", with individual cheeses "reaching speeds of up to 50 km/h". Last
year,
27 people were injured.
The question is: What if this kind of semideadly activity catches on in
this country? I, personally, am not worried, because I live in South Florida,
which is extrememly flat; plus, even if you could get a large cheese rolling
down here, passing armed motorists would blow it to smithereens.
But what if people start rolling cheeses in, say, Colorado? What if you get
one of those big babies hurtling down a Rocky mountain, straight toward -
to
pick a worse-case scenario - a John Denver concert?
...friends around the campfire,
And everybody's hiiiEEEE (SPLAT!)
Is that the kind of nation you want your children to grow up in? Me too.

Dave Barry is a columnist for the Miami (Florida) Herald.

_________

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1996 Cotswold Events

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This list last updated 24th. February 1996

CHEESE ROLLING 1997

5th. May
              Cheese Rolling, Parish Church, Randwick, Gloucestershire.
              01453766782

27th. May
              Cheese Rolling, Cooper's Hill, A46, near Brockworth. Starts 6 p.m