Clarence Birdseye Day

Last weekend I was in Gloucester, Massachusetts to celebrate Clarence Birdseye Day.

Clarence invented the frozen food process, a method of converted sugar cane waste into paper, and a sweet harpoon gun. Gloucester owes him because frozen seafood is the only thing keeping Gloucester going, aside from rampant sailor alcoholism.

Clarence was truly a renaissance man, being not just an inventor, an author, a naturalist, and an entrepreneur, but also a hillbilly chef.

From a USA Today article:
'Birdseye could make a mean soup of mice, chipmunks and gophers... He once told an interviewer: 'I'll tell you another thing — the front half of a skunk is excellent.''

Way to go, great grandfather.

(bed.)

Unfortunately, there's no documentation of Clarence going insane and inventing crazy shit. For example, he made a pretty sweet harpoon gun that shot harpoons using kinetic energy generated from a large rubber band and a crank mechanism.

Now imagine he snaps and turns the gun into something that shoots, say, frozen gerbils. Because he was so brilliant, there would be at least a week or two where people take him seriously and think "oh man, frozen gerbils. I've always had trouble moving all my frozen gerbils over long distances before they melted, but now that genius invented a frozen gerbil gun."

Then after Clarence is committed, that person would look at his large cache of frozen gerbil guns and think "Ah, fuck."

Unfortunately for comedy, Clarence Birdseye died of a mostly unhilarious heart attack. Damn.