Guests
by Jason Fagone, July 28, 2006 12:10 PM
So I'd like to end my blogging week by pointing to the first magazine story that really stuck with me, changed the way I thought about writing, blew my mind and all that (again, hat tip to Brian Doyle, who my wife and I just realized is the same Brian Doyle who wrote this piece we love about the heart of the hummingbird, Joyas Volardores). The story was published in Wired magazine. I'll get to the exact story in a second, after I explain why my mind, at the time I read it, was so ready to be blown by this story. I was sort of a nerd in high school. I mean, I ran a BBS. ("Bulletin Board System," for those of you pureblooded Internet children.) That's nerdy. I lived in the suburbs of southeast Pennsylvania and had a suburban PA kid's access to cool new Silicon Valley tech gizmos. I didn't know Lillian Ross from Hugo Boss. What I read for pleasure was MacUser, Newsweek, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Wired. Michael Wolff says that great magazines are aspirational; they create a world you want to be a part of but can never really be a part of. That was Wired for me. I wanted to be shiny and connected. I even loved the way the magazines looked and felt. Each Wired had a striped spine, alternating two slick saturated colors like a long thin chessboard, so if you stacked the magazines from floor to ceiling you got this very cool neon confetti effect. So there I was, age 17, BBS proprietor, reporter at the school paper, Wired fan, paging through Wired 3.06 until I got to a story called The Curse of Xanadu by Gary Wolf. And stopped. Wired billed the story as "amazing," "epic," "a saga." Magazines say these things all the time, but "The Curse of Xanadu" actually is epic and amazing. On the face of it, Wolf's story is about a failed piece of software and its troubled-genius designer, Ted Nelson. Nelson's software, which he dreamed up in 1964, was called Project Xanadu. It was a hypertext system, like the World Wide Web, except more sophisticated and more ambitious. The idea of Xanadu was to organize every document in the world. Wolf writes that one person involved with the project "marveled at the programmers' apparent belief that they could create 'in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years.'" According to Wolf, Xanadu's principals "began to believe they were helping human life evolve into an entirely new form." Okay. We know what happens to utopians with such beliefs, especially if the leader of said utopians suffers from ADD, becomes briefly suicidal when the project gets delayed, and gives his team members cute names like "System Anarchist" and "Hacker" and "Accelerator" and "Hidden Variable" and "Speaker-to-Bankers." What's so cool about Wolf's story, which is as deeply reported and sharply written as anything in the New Yorker/Esquire canon, is that Wolf gets the culture and empathizes with the talent and ambition behind Xanadu ? at one point he suggests that Ted Nelson's digital-culture encyclopedia "Computer Lib" was a forerunner to Wired itself, the text that created the "popular audience for news about the digital revolution" that Wired would later exploit ? but he's also unsparing on Xanadu's folly, which Wolf suggests is not so unlike other forms of human folly. For one thing, the coders, an insular group, are betrayed by their own involuted vocabularies, their "constant stream of fresh jargon; the system was filled not just with berts and ernies, but also with 'flocks,' 'shepherds,' 'abrahams,' 'dybbuks,' and 'crums.'" Wolf points out that at every stage of Xanadu's failure, the coders always asked for six more months to pull it together. Just give us six more months: the cry of the righteously deluded. At one point, some coders working on Xanadu at a software company got so fed up that they literally "pull[ed] the plug," hauling their computers out of the office. Wolf writes, "Xanadu was like a defeated rebel whose corpse is destroyed in secret so as not to become a shrine." And the end of the story. Holy god. I won't spoil it, but it contains these lines: Gregory answered the door when I knocked. His dirty blue pants were unbuttoned and he was barefoot. A long-sleeve pinkish T-shirt dropped over his rounded midsection but stopped before it reached his pants.
This may not be the saddest thing you've ever read ? but still, pretty damn sad, yeah? When I finished the story, I felt lightheaded. I hadn't realized that nonfiction could be this powerful. I think it was after that, post-Wolf, when I started reading more nonfiction, and started thinking that writing magazine articles would be a fun way to make a living. Okay Powell's fans. Thanks again for reading along this week. I really enjoyed
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Guests
by Jason Fagone, July 27, 2006 2:33 PM
1. New York, NY. Valhalla. Not only the headquarters of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (Chelsea) and the site of the eating world's most prestigious contest (Fourth of July hot dogs on Coney Island), but also the Big Man's home turf. You've got civil servants Eric "Badlands" Booker and "Hungry" Charles Hardy, day-trader Tim "Eater X" Janus, plus past Nathan's champs and borough guys like the hirsute Jay Green, Ed Krachie of Maspeth, Frank "Large" Dellarosa of Queens. ("Large." The best eating nickname ever.) Extending New York out to Long Island pulls in Don "Moses" Lerman, Arnie "Chowhound" Chapman, and Ed "Cookie" Jarvis. 2. Tokyo, Japan. Nobuyuki "The Giant" Shirota lives here. Conventional wisdom has it that six-time hot dog champion Takeru Kobayashi is the world's greatest eater, but Kobayashi has been beaten by Shirota three times in major televised Japanese contests. ("Food Battle Club," the show was called. Picture "Iron Chef" except with eating instead of cooking.) I met Shirota in early 2005. I could not stop looking at him. Looking at him was like looking at one of those optical illusions of people standing in specially constructed rooms designed to screw with your sense of scale. I mean, look at this picture. His head. The picture really doesn't do it justice. Shirota can fit an entire onigiri (rice ball) into his mouth, and an entire normal-sized coffee mug, and can fit any lollipop vertically between his lips. 3. Philadelphia, Pa., host of the Wing Bowl chicken-wing contest/knucklehead freakout. Do a flickr search and you'll see. Fun fact about Wing Bowl: it's a guilty pleasure of some pretty heavy politicos. This guy gets tickets every year. This guy was snuck in via a back door so as not to attract attention. This guy loved it so much he volunteered to present a miniature Liberty Bell statuette to the winner. 4. Las Vegas, NV. Thanks to its buffets, a growth medium for pro eaters, a vast arid Petri dish. Home of the "First Couple" of competitive eating (Rich and Carlene LeFevre) and site of horrendous televised fiascoes such as the Alka-Seltzer U.S. Open of Competitive Eating" (2005, ESPN, not renewed for 2006 due to Alka-Seltzer's corporate parent's apparent embarrassment and fear of a consumer backlash) and the tackier but far more entertaining "Battle of the Buffets" (2003, The Travel Channel). 5. Chattanooga, Tenn. The pro-eating circuit's most lucrative event, the Krystal Square-Off, holds its finals here. A Krystal burger is a square burger about the size of a White Castle slider. Locals call them "gutbombers" or "gutblasters." (It's a love/hate kind of thing: people know, on a rational level, that the burgers are vile, but Krystal is pervasive, a component of the local identity, and a lot of people seem to have had their sense memories hijacked at some key vulnerable point in childhood, so there's a lot of nostalgia about these gutbombers.) Tennessee is also noteworthy because it can claim Al Gore Jr., who wrote a newspaper story about a Whopper-eating contest at a Tennessee Burger King back when Gore was a cub reporter at the Tennessean. He subsequently moved on to more boring issues, such as saving the planet. 6. Cleveland, Ohio. In recent years, Fox 8's slapsticky and beloved program The Big Chuck and 'Lil John Show ? a forerunner of which was hosted by Ghoulardi, aka Ernie Anderson, who is the father of filmmaker P.T. Anderson ? has revived its long-dormant "Pizza Fight" segment. Locals tune in on Saturday nights to watch 'Lil John Rinaldi, a midget, introduce the champion, David "Coondog" O'Karma. Coondog then eats a 9-inch pizza in 25 seconds. 7. Morioka, Japan. Home of the original WONKOSOBA restaurant and the famous soba-noodle game. David "Coondog" O'Karma and I made a pilgrimage here on our trip to Japan. Our waitress seated us. We had called ahead and told them we wanted to play the soba-noodle game, and they were ready. The waitress disappeared and came back with a helper who carried a tall stack of trays. On the trays were neat rows of lacquer bowls, each bowl holding a 20-gram fillip of soba. The waitress gave each of us a personal bowl and a set of chopsticks. She lifted two bowls from a tray and told us to tell her when we were ready. We looked at each other, grinned, and said go. Okay. The waitress poured the two bowls of soba into our personal bowls. Ganbarre, I believe she said. Have courage. We dipped in with our chopsticks and slurped the soba. As soon as we finished, she poured more soba into our bowls. The gap between shots of soba was like 2 seconds for me, half that for Dave. I started giggling but then I sobered up and the three of us fell into a groove. Dave told me later how much he liked the sounds of the clicking lacquer bowls, an industrious sound, quite pretty. Ganbarre, ganbarre! Final tally was Dave 180-something, me 107 or 109. I will have to check the exact number on the little wooden plaque that the WONKOSOBA people were nice enough to give me and that's now hanging in my kitchen. (I'm at the beach today.) Top soba-noode-game players score in the 400- to 500-bowl range. Hot dog champion Takeru Kobayashi once ate 387 bowls in 12 minutes, more than 20 pounds of food. 8. New Orleans, La., long the capital of laid-back civic indulgence. Consecrated, in 2005, by Sonya Thomas's 46-dozen-oyster performance at the ACME Oyster House championship. 9. Martin County, N.C., because its residents elected a Moon Pie-eating champion named C. Mort Hurst as their chairman of the board of
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Guests
by Jason Fagone, July 26, 2006 4:00 PM
Yesterday I learned a few things about wedding rings and a few other things about the hazards of having a wedding at a state park. I also learned, from my mother-in-law, Lynn, that I say the f-word too much. So I'm going to watch that now. All in all, though, a good day. We checked out the park and met with the caterers. Our caterers are great people. The park looks green and smells nice. I am excited. I think you can tell from the prior graf ? which starts with pessimism and shades into optimism ? that pessimism is my default. Writing a praise-heavy post like yesterday's was difficult for me, because normally I'm just as likely to go 50/50 on the praising/hating (okay, who am I kidding, let's say 35/65 on the praising/hating ratio), and to go to 100/0 takes discipline and will. Here is a terrifying thought. Every word I commit to the web here is telling you what kind of person I am. "Character permeates writing," says Ben Yagoda in his book, The Sound on the Page. "Style is the man himself." Yagoda illustrates his point in what's got to be my favorite part of the book. He compares two letters written by prisoners: one from the wrongly-executed anarchist Nicola Sacco, whose native language was Italian, and one from murderer/crank Ira Einhorn. Here is Sacco's letter, as quoted by Yagoda: Every night when the light goes out I take a long walk and really I do not known how long I walk, because the most of the time I forget myself to go to sleep, and so I continue to walk and I count, one two three four step and turn backward and continue to count, one two three four and so on. But between all this time my mind it is always so full of ideas that one goes and one comes, and the idea of my youth of day I find one of my mostly beautiful remembrance. While I am thinking and walking, frequently I stop to my window sill and through these sad bars and look at the nature into crepuscular of night, and the stars in the beauti blue sky. So last night the stars they was moor bright and the sky it was moor blue that I did have had seen; while I was looking it appear in my mind the idea to think of something of my youth of day and write the idea and send into letter to my good friend Mrs. Jack in first thing in morning. So here where I am right with you, and always I will try to be, yes, because I am study to understand your beautiful language and I know I will love it. And I will hope that one day I could surprise the feel of my gratitude towards all this fierce legion of friends and comrades. It's impossible to read this letter without being moved or at least feeling a sense of communion with Sacco, who must have been a very decent human being indeed. Einhorn's letter evokes the opposite emotion. (I won't quote it. Buy Yagoda's book, it's excellent.) The way Yagoda puts it is that Sacco has "nobility of soul" and Einhorn "is devoid of it." If you're an egomaniac or a jerk, you'll be an egomaniac or a jerk in print. Not to get too sentimental, but I think Yagoda is right, that the process of finding a writerly voice is to some extent a process of finding yourself. When I started working on my book, I had no idea what I sounded like. I didn't think I had any identifiable voice. I knew what I sounded like at 5,000 words but not at 70,000, or 100,000, or whatever. And what I sounded like at 5,000 words was often pretty variable ? swung by editors, maybe, or by the subject matter, or swung by my own determination to write the kind of holy-shit pieces my editors were always photocopying and handing around to the staff: GQ, Esquire and New Yorker stories by Tom Junod, Susan Orlean, Elizabeth Gilbert, etc. Those clips were inspiring: the best work by the best magazine writers working today. They were also troubling because they reinforced the arbitrariness of all writing. Junod and Orlean don't have their desks in the same universe. Same with the nonfiction I read on my own. I really liked Tom Wolfe and I really liked all the New Yorker people Tom Wolfe hated. I liked Hunter Thompson's letters and Joan Didion's essays, David Samuels's stories for Harpers, Gary Wolf's stories for Wired. I had trouble finding a common thread. Even if I was going to start by biting somebody's style, like painters used to do back in the days of workshops and apprenticeships, well ? which writer? Which style? I had to figure this out on the fly. The last day or two I've been looking back through some of my book's early drafts, most of which are too embarrassing to post, but I think I can walk through a few passages here that suggest how I settled on the voice and tone of Horsemen, a hybrid of deadpan observation and earnest keening. I'll start with a passage I wrote and revised a few times. It's basically polished but I cut it because it didn't quite work. So think of this as a DVD extra. By way of setup: the guy I'm talking about here was in jail for armed robbery. While in jail he competed in a few informal eating contests in the prison's "day room." I'll call him Jimmy. (Not his real name.) ...the most interesting thing about Jimmy, to me, is his short but intense eating career as a guest of the state of Maryland. His most epic victory came at the hands of his "cell buddy," a guy named Big Pete. This is impressive, because, according to Jimmy, Big Pete is "an outlaw biker guy" who "killed a couple people" and then embarked on "this big prison scam" to bilk folks on the outside: a man of no small appetites, anyway. The authorities "weren't really thrilled with Big Pete," says Jimmy, "but the truth of the matter is, he's a nice guy." Big Pete, Jimmy adds, was "a frickin' idiot," in the tone of voice a big brother might use when giving his little brother a noogie.... In a basin, the inmates mixed a batch of "hookup," a prison delicacy combining Oodles of Noodles with the tuna and whatever else they'd cadged from the commissary ? pickles, spare packs of mustard, chopped-up pepperoni, Slim Jims, whatever. They spread the hookup onto Saltines and gave each contestant a stack. This was the first round.... The next stage was hard-boiled eggs, with the shells. Jimmy ate six; Big Pete ate six. No one else could match them. All other contestants dropped out. Two unpeeled oranges were procured; Jimmy and Big Pete ate one each, peel and all. Somebody poured out a pack of cigarettes. Jimmy ate ten cigarettes. Big Pete ate ten cigarettes. "We were just kind of showing off about who could eat the more grosser stuff, realistically," says Jimmy. Next were paper towels; neither man flinched. Finally, candles. They ate candles. Big Pete couldn't handle them, but Jimmy could. "It's really not competitive eating," Jimmy says. "It's really more like attempted suicide." Jimmy won nine packs of cigarettes. Okay. The person who wrote the first part of this passage is a snide jackass. I hate all those quotes in the first graf. They're the print equivalent of air quotes. They're not just annnoying, they're a stand-in for real understanding. The passage improves as it goes along, but not enough to make the cut for the book. Here's a passage that did make the cut: Dave O'Karma is a painting contractor. He paints houses in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where he lives with his second wife, Lisa, and his stepdaughter, Juanita. Dave stands tall but not straight, a slouching six-two with a paint-ladder tan and nicely toned biceps and unfortunate brown hair. The hair is shaved to the skin except for a stripe down the middle. The edge definition of the stripe varies
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Guests
by Jason Fagone, July 25, 2006 10:43 AM
Light posting day, Powell's fans. My wife (I have taken to calling her that even though we won't be technically married for two weeks) is taking us to get wedding rings. I'm told that if we don't order them, like, today, we will not have rings at the wedding. And that would not be good. So there are no gurgitation facts or theories to follow, just random praise of people and things I'm not necessarily qualified to talk about. But many of you probably are. So let's discuss, yes? Jane Kramer. Kramer's book Lone Patriot, which is about a right-wing militia in the American northwest, begins with the following sentence: "The enemy took John Pitner by subterfuge and surprise, on a hot midsummer Saturday when no one could really have been expected to stand and fight, and the result was that John lost his liberty before he had a chance to save America." I don't have a discussion question here. I was just thinking about this sentence the other day and wanted to share it, share my awe of it. It's so self-sufficient, info-dense and voice-y, you know? Slice it from the page, paste it on a fresh blank sheet with fat margins and you've got the nonfiction equivalent of those one-sentence Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis short stories. Screenwriter weblogs. Specifically, Kung Fu Monkey and I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing. Here is a post authored by K. F. Monkey's John Rogers, a man perhaps best known for having scripted a version of the Catwoman movie but who's clearly some kind of a storytelling savant, Catwoman notwithstanding. Ignoring the political content of Rogers' post ? which I don't think is too controversial anyway, unless you believe Alan Dershowitz can do no wrong ? I just gotta admire the technical virtuosity here. The pacing. The way Rogers kicks the chair legs out from under his increasingly stubby sentences as he gets to the punchline. See also this genius post by War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman. David Cross, prophet. David Cross is a popular alternative stand-up comic who recorded a double CD called "Shut Up You Fucking Baby" back in 2002. Driving around the country to eating contests, I listened to this CD probably fifty times. It helps to have a voice there in the car with you sometimes, and this is a double so it doesn't conk out for hours. What I want to say is that the political material here holds up remarkably well, four years later, same as the Bush material in Shrub by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. All of these folks saw what was coming down the pike and they said so, piercingly, when it mattered. Other things I've been enjoying lately: Roy Kesey's lush, lovely novella Nothing in the World, which I need to read again and think about some more. Marilynne Johnson's The Dead Beat, for its energy. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, for the reasons everyone says. George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, because it's frickin' Orwell. The Jon Krakauer interview in "The New New Journalists." "Jon" by George Saunders, which blew my mind (as per Brian Doyle) when it was originally published and is now blowing my mind anew: a sort of holy document to me and maybe to you too. I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell ? I haven't read it yet but my wife says it's funny. Ned Vizzini and Ned Vizzini's myspace page, for reminding me how much I loved Gary Paulsen's book Hatchet when I was a kid. My friend Daryl Lang's story on the biggest camera ever built. Jenny 8. Lee's story on Flushing, Queens. This thing. This other thing. The work of singer-songwriter John Vanderslice, who should be given a palace somewhere or a bigass farm on many acres in the midwest, tax-free, or maybe a line-item in the federal budget to buy amps and mixers and anything else he needs, because the louder this guy's voice, the better, seeing as he's not just a great musician but apparently (if his website's any guide) a model human being all around: open to experience, attuned to wonder. Okay. Thanks, all, for your attention. I'll revisit the world of gurgitation in tomorrow's post. ?Jason
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Guests
by Jason Fagone, July 24, 2006 1:00 PM
Recently I spent a year traveling around the country to watch large men and skinny women gorge on food, in public, for cash prizes. My book about this experience was released in April. When I tell people about the book, they tend to ask the same couple of questions. How does that 100-pound woman eat all that food? (Really, 46 dozen oysters in 10 minutes?) Does she throw up afterward? Also, why did you write this book? (Really, competitive eaters?) Questions one and two are easy enough. One, the skinny eaters train by stretching their stomachs with large volumes of water and food; two, the eaters do get rid of their calories in this and other ways, including the proper digestive channels. Question three is a little tougher to answer. A few weeks ago, Powells.com blogger Chris Ballard mentioned that he once wrote a magazine piece about competitive eating without ever thinking "there might be a book in there amid all that stomach acid." I do remember reading Chris's story when it was first printed, back when I knew nothing about high-level gurgitation. I liked the story. It was quite good. But I don't think I came away wanting to read much more about the topic ? certainly not 300 pages, which is what I ended up writing. So why the change of heart? Why did I decide that pro eaters were worth writing about, aside from the fact that if you're a journalist with some ambition and some bills to pay, most anything a major publishing company will pay you to write is worth writing about? More broadly, how do you know when you've hit on a good idea? I got lucky. I met a vivid guy with a story to tell. He did a lot of the work for me. By the time I met him, he'd been telling his story to everybody, but I think I was the first person to show up with a tape recorder. The guy was Bill Simmons, also known as "El Wingador" here in Philadelphia. At the time I met Wingador, in the summer of 2004, he was the four-time champion of a yearly chicken-wing-eating contest called Wing Bowl that draws 20,000 spectators to Philly's Wachovia Center, which is the same place the 76ers play. I had called him one day after reading a few short newspaper clips about him. He invited me to his house. I visited the next day. The guy was huge, 320 easy, a bit of a mullet, built like a linebacker. Wingador took me into his kitchen and didn't stop talking for two hours. He showed me the contents of his fridge. He gave me a taste of the sauce he bottled and sold to local grocery stores, "El Wingador's Sauce." He talked about his appreciation for chicken in all its forms. The love of his life, he said, was his two daughters ? "that, and chicken." He wasn't joking. He said, "Chicken is my lobster of the land." It sounded like lobster ulla lan', a Steinbeckian folk saying for a man who was essentially a Philadelphia folk hero, a man who could get free drinks at any celebrity bartending event from Roxborough to South Philly and yet a man who had been driving a truck for a living since he was 23. "I screwed up," he'd tell me later. "My life." I learned that Wingador could have been a ballplayer ? major-league baseball teams scouted him when he was a teen ? but instead he was a pro eater with acid-reflux issues who had lost his most recent Wing Bowl, Wing Bowl No. 12, to the famous 100-pound woman, Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas. Bill had grudges. Bill had regrets. Bill had a branded specialty sauce. He was a great character. That was enough to get me digging into pro eating websites and thinking about the topic's hooks into larger themes that might make a book kind of interesting. There was a mythic component: America, Land of Plenty. There was a news component: the obesity epidemic. There were food icons to play around with ? the American hot dog, the American chicken wing ? and people with silly names like David "Coondog" O'Karma to poke fun at. I also felt, in a way that was hard to articulate back then, that a book about pro eaters could speak (indirectly) to the ugliness of the 2004 presidential election and the Iraq War, and this sense that America was becoming too stupid to live: creating nothing, selling everything, flooded with trash culture, dangerous to itself and the rest of the planet. Now my opportunism kicked in. I'd never written a book before. I was curious if I could do it. One year, 100,000 coherent words. Boy is Mary Roach right when she points out the blue-sky terror/blessing of writing your first book. "Book editors don't give you this pamphlet 'So You're Writing a Book,'" Roach says. No they do not. They assume that since you knew enough to pitch the book, you know enough to write it. Of course this isn't true. So you've got to fake fake fake fake until you figure out what you're doing. Early on, I sent a lot of sheepish emails to writer friends along the lines of "Are footnotes lame?" and "How long is a chapter?" and "Should I ever use the word 'fuck' outside of a quote?" I think what got me past this self-doubt, besides the encouragement of a very patient literary agent (Larry Weissman), was another kind of opportunism that was a little more familiar to me: the excitement of finding uncharted narrative territory. The feeling is a greedy one, kidlike and giddy. You've been unexpectedly left alone with some big sugary thing that's now yours for the taking. (The kids in Jurassic Park just prior to the Raptor attack, loading up on cake and jello.) Because pro eating was so disreputable and overblown, no one, Chris Ballard excepted, had written about it seriously. Eating was something you'd see on late-night TV or read about in the "News of the Weird." So I had it to myself. (Almost. Another writer was working on an eating book concurrent with mine, but we only crossed paths a few times.) Fresh tracks. That was exciting, and rewarding. Pro eating was a crapulent spectacle, sure, but the rim of the spectacle was unexpectedly vibrant because the eaters had built a community there. The community was worth writing about even if the spectacle was exactly as dumb as it looked. The community generated conflicts, sacred controversies, moments of joy and mercy. I thought it would be good to honor that ? not the spectacle itself but the life that had sprung up around it. And I figured that even if I fell short of that goal, at least my book would contain some entertaining facts, such as the best way to eat a lot of hot dogs and buns really fast. Here is the proper method. Eat a hot dog, then a bun, then a hot dog, then a bun ? and so on, and so on, until time's up. Dog, bun, dog, bun. This is as close as you get to a natural law in the world of gurgitation. The method can't be improved upon, as one of my book's protagonists, Tim "Eater X" Janus, discovered, back in 2004, at no small personal
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