What Do You Give A Guy For His 50th Birthday?

I just turned 50 this weekend (insert codger joke here). So, Unknown Wife and I got a sitter and went out to eat some sushi and see The Dark Knight.

But after church today, we stopped by a Learning Express (basically a place with educational toys). Right there on the shelves was a Water Balloon slingshot (in case you're wondering, here's a link to a similar model). When we got home, I got my neighbor who lives three doors down to help me out and started launching balloons down the street and over the trees. We soon had the Unknown Daughter and the neighbor's three sons try to catch water balloons we launched from about 60-80 yards away.

Back in college we used to make a similar contraption called a "Funnellator" by attaching surgical rubber tubing to a funnel. We used it to launch water balloons (and other, far more disgusting things) almost 200 yards with our deluxe model. It surprising how many other contemporaries had similar experiences. In fact, a member of the advisory board for our student-managed investment fund once told me (after a few beers) that he's used a Funnellator to launch a sheep's brain (yes, you heard me right, a sheep's brain - he was a Biology major before he switched to Finance) almost 150 yards to land in at the front-door of one of the sororities' houses.

My neighbor and I are thinking about modifications to the store-bought model to see if we can bring it up to code. After all, you never know when the development down the street might try to attack us. We might bring the engineering professor down the street into the loop to see if we can make something more automated.

Preparedness is all.