Survival Research "Pitching Machine" Show
Friday, June 8

Misha heard about a Survival Research Labs show in San Francisco: a "pitching machine" would fire 6' lengths of 2x4's into a 10-foot high Toys R Us giraffe at 200 mph, two per second.

Reid Fleming and I met at Misha's house in Alameda and we drove across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco with Reid at the wheel. Reid used his Global Positioning System device to drive right to the site of the show, an auto dismantling place (read: junkyard). It was $7 to get in.

We got there around 915pm and the ten-foot Toys R Us giraffe was in place and lit up and the 2x4-throwing-machine was sitting there in readiness with a barricade of junk computers ringing it and a pallet of 2x4s.

We climbed onto a mountain of old tires to get a better view. I estimated the total attendance at 500.

Some of Reid and Misha's friends were there, including Mark. A couple of bands were playing.

I told stories about previous SRL shows to the group of us on the tires--not personal attendance stories, just from reading and from attending a lecture Mark Pauline gave at UCSB ten years ago. I mentioned how things never change--100 years ago, a guy sent flyers all over the West advertising a train collision he arranged in Kansas on the Fourth of July. Tens of thousands of people attended and he set two steam locomotives going full speed at each other and they crashed. Hundreds of spectators were injured and three or four were killed by flying debris.

That didn't happen last night, however. The SRL guys fired up the machine, which was powered by a car engine, and the two car wheels spun mightily, and six or a dozen 2x4s were fed into t he machine and were spit out at high speed in several test runs. Some of the 2x4s had fireworks installed in the trailing end and it was pretty spectacular, but they were just test shots not aimed at the giraffe. Then the guys splashed gasoline all over the giraffe, and the engine fired up and started revving at high speed--

And the cops crashed in and shut everything down. Sigh.

Reid and Misha and I went back to Mark's house and dropped off a bunch of computers--Mark had a party going on and invited us to stay, but we didn't. Deth Vegetable was there from the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Reid and Misha and I then went on a Larry, Moe and Curly ride attempting to find a restaurant after midnight. We went back to Alameda and the restaurant Misha was thinking of was closed, and Reid thought of a restaurant in Emeryville, but then he took a wrong turn and suddenly we were on the Bay Bridge again and had no recourse except to pay the toll again and go back to San Francisco.

We ended up at Mel's Diner on Van Ness. I got home around 3am.