It's late October and it's time to get ready for the culmination of the most American of American sports. No, not baseball -- anvil shooting. The rules: Your anvil must be at least 100 lbs., and you can't use more than 2 pounds of gunpowder. That's right. It's all about violently launching anvils. All you need is a fuse, some gunpowder, an anvil, and total disregard for your own safety.
The founder of the World Anvil Shooting Society, Gene Mulloy, claims the practice goes back to the Civil War, when Union troops thought it would be fun to blow up all the blacksmith equipment.
There's even a video where you can see a live anvil launch by anvil-launching pro Gay Wilkerson, who firmly believes that shooting anvils is like "launching pianos or Cadillacs or anything else that wasn't meant to fly." (There's a valuable lesson here: If you name your kid Gay he will grow up to be big and strong and shoot hardware into the sky.)
