Punkin Chunkin!

It's that time of year again! Time for eating pumpkin pie for breakfast, like our friend Andrea, or watching a series of monster-sized balloons float across Manhattan's Upper West Side. For some it might mean laughing as Bill Murray is perpetually relegated to the kids' table, or getting a great deal on some Firestone wine (ok, that might be a new one). Whatever your family customs may be, there's just no time like the holidays for observing traditions that might seem a bit crazy, if your family hadn't been doing them every year since you can remember. Sometimes, these funny little annual quirks tend to snowball, gradually becoming more overblown each year until, next thing you know, a pumpkin is being hurled farther than any pumpkin ever dreamed of being hurled. Which is exactly what goes down every year at the annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin. Having grown from a few burly men trying to out-anvil-toss each other back in 1986 to $50,000 air cannons capable of chunkin a punkin just shy of the much coveted mile mark. It's a glorious celebration of the backyard engineer, where victory requires everything from growing special aerodynamic pumpkins, to calculating the perfect pumpkin's mass, to mastering the complex mechanics of an air cannon or the physics of a trebuchet. Though this decade's final chunk went off earlier this month, the Science Channel will be airing a two-part Punkin Chunkin special on Thanksgiving day, hosted by Whose Line is it Anyways' Brad Sherwood. It all starts with The Road to Punkin Chunkin, a cross-country journey in which we meet some of the characters behind the contraptions, and see their works in progress. It'll then head straight away into full, pumpkin-splattered coverage of event itself. It looks like this could be the beginning of a brand new Thanksgiving tradition!