A bad idea to RELISH!

You know every time I want to write about my worst invention idea ever, I get distracted by some random ‘gun and target’ story. Or if that is not boring enough, I will start typing away again and I’ll wander off recalling some fast food antic. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just COMBINE both a food story and a gun n’ target experience into one convenient blog post?

Ok, well there is no mystery how this failed invention floundered as I happened to be hungry so I pulled into some burger joint with my wife and kid. We had just come from the house where we were shooting a BB rifle into (of all benign things on the planet to use as a target) an old pumpkin. Now I don’t know if you have ever spent any quality time with old pumpkins, but as prom dates go, they are not much to look at. Pumpkins after gutting, tend to quickly lose their shiny and regal orange skin as it turns a tad gray, saggy and sad.

Regardless, the pumpkin was still a seemingly good target to shoot at because it was soft so no ricochet issues, and it was big enough that even if I aimed poorly, I still usually could hit a basketball-sized target. The problem of course was that after hitting our formerly orange friend, our shots left a very unsatisfying tiny bb-sized hole in the pumpkin’s epidermis. In fact to distinguish any new shots from old shots, we would have to circle the hole in the putrid pumpkin with a Sharpie marker. We needed something better.

So fast forward BACK to the fast-food place. Well you know all of those keen little catsup and mayo packets food places put out instead of bottles – what if we found a way to use THOSE as targets? Just think of the fun kids would have if you shot a target in the head and it ‘bled out’ white mayo for brain matter. Or you hit the target in the heart, and the catsup packet explodes replicating a quadruple bypass gone wild? I even figured that the green relish packs could be used on ‘Martian’ targets and kids would not get enough of shooting BB’s into an alien life form and watching him bleed ‘ Green’!

You might be amused that I actually SPENT ENERGY and TIME looking for plausible ways to make this work. The inherent problem is that catsup packets are not pressurized so they ALSO are not very satisfying to shoot with a BB. Unless you have some way to motivate the goo outside of the packet, even if you punch a hole in it, all it will do is slowly (if at all) ooze a bit at the breach site.

So I set up targets with packets tightly squeezed behind them in hopes that they might ‘spill their guts’ if I shot them. No Luck! I tried springs, rubber bands, clips – you name it. I think this target holy grail might still be possible if I set- up some kind of switch and solenoid to punch the back of the packet when hit by a BB? But I always worry about ricochets when metal parts are involved, not to mention the time and expense. This was supposed to be a fun little throw away idea not a ‘Be or all Be’ (BB) life goal. Turns out those irritating little packets are just as worthless giving up their contents as gun targets as they are on hamburgers. Makes me want to shoot them all the more, especially those green Martian blood packets – now that is an experience I would indeed RELISH!