Damn!

So I watched the rerun of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, and Kobayashi was actually almost beaten! It was insane. Some like 22 year old from Ohio or some shit, who didn't even have an eating contest nickname (a la Tekura "Tsunami" Kobayashi or Ed "Cookie" Jarvis) got signed up for an eating contest by his brother as a joke, and he did really well and was like hey... He ate 50 hot dogs in the qualifying round, which is crazy, because Kobayashi's record was 53 and a half, and no one else has ever come CLOSE to touching that. Apparently no human has ever beaten him in an eating contest--his only recorded loss was to a Kodiak bear, and I think we all know that in most man-bear match ups, the man is not going to come out on top. Anyway, the guy, Joey Chestnut, was actually ahead by a full two hot dogs for a while around the middle of the contest, and he finished with 52! only one and a half away from the record set by a superhuman eating machine! Kobayashi just broke his own record by eating 54, but still. It's amazing that it was so close. I think the record before was something like 27, and thats about how many everyone else ate. Watching the contest made me feel so sick though, since they all were stuffing hot dogs into their mouth while looking unquestionably like they wanted to send them all back up. And I was like, man, I'm not going to want a hot dog for a while. But, of course, tonight my stepdad was like, well there's not really any food, I'm gonna grill some hot dogs. Oh well.