Bertoletti takes the ice cream crown

Patrick Bertoletti is the new ice cream eating champion after winning the GoldenPalace.net World Ice Cream Eating Contest in New York. The win marks the third of the year for Bertoletti, who also took home the gold in a key lime pie contest and a corned beef match.

Bertoletti downed 1.75 gallons of vanilla ice cream from the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory to set a new world record. The official results and summary are posted here, but Crazy Legs took second with 1.5 gallons and Eater X third with 1.25 gallons. To put 1.75 gallons in perspective, that's the equivalent of 14 pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

In the post event story, IFOCE President Richard Shea had this to say: "Ice cream is clearly one of the most difficult disciplines on the circuit because of the 'Brain Freeze' factor. However, most of these eaters are immune to the cold."

Immune to the cold, Rich? By now I'm used to Shea's tendency to stretch the truth and embellish here and there (after all, it is competitive eating), but now he's just making things up -- and maybe insulting our intelligence just a little bit. I guess you can blame my impatience for bullshit in the media on my job as a public relations strategist. (I know, I know, some of you are saying that more qualifies me to be a bullshitter.) Not coincidentally, Richard Shea himself was a PR man before devoting himself full time to the IFOCE.