By Alexei C. Summers (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: November 9, 2011
UFV hosted its sixth annual Pumpkin Chuck on November 1 – an event that provided ample opportunities for Smashing Pumpkins puns. Students from all over the school congregated outside U-house at the Abbotsford Campus to take out some of their adolescent rage by destroying leftover pumpkins from Halloween with a vast assortment of spades, baseball bats, frying pans, and croquet mallets. It was a pumpkin massacre, a battlefield of pumpkins, with orange guts and seeds strewn across the small lawn outside of U-house. All pumpkins in sight quickly became decimated piles of orange squash in the crisp fall midday sun, all to the tune of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” issuing forth from the stereo system.
“The horror. The horror.”
Participation was quite good, and even faculty such as associate vice president of research and graduate studies Yvon Dandurand took part in the festivities, sending one particular pumpkin into the great big pumpkin patch in the sky with some fatal blows delivered by a razor-sharp spade. The grand spectacle of the day occurred when a student from the UFV Chemistry Department, garbed in a colourful labcoat, showed up to make a smoke bomb using chemicals.
The event was organized by Student Life Programmer Martin Kelly. “I’m the one cleaning it up, with the help of Ryan Petersen, volunteer extraordinaire,” Kelly said. “Everything gets composted.”
The pumpkins never saw it coming.
