MASTER DISASTER VENDING MACHINE CHALLENGE

Beau was in NYC for a marketing conference and he met a guy who was somehow connected with a group called LVHRD. LVHRD is an pseudo-acronym for "Live Hard" and is a 400-plus member group of artsy New York hipsters who get together now and then and do weird stuff and generally hang out do whatever it is hipsters do. (An article about how cool and hipsterish LVHRD is can be found here.)

Anyhow, their next gathering, on March 20, is some sort of competitive eating event they call the "Master Disaster Vending Machine Challenge." Apparently the event has gained an underground following. At least enough for them to charge $22 for tickets ($11 for LVHRD memers). By the way, props should be given to Liz. She suggested I do something like this a few months ago when I was considering my next personal eating challenge.

According to the LVHRD site, the vending machine challenge goes like this: "Each team must rise to the following task: to consume the entire contents (minus packaging) of a standard vending machine (28-32 varieties of food, 2 items each). Upon the referee's signal the competitors will be given a stockpile of dollar bills and change, and begin feeding currency into their machines while carefully selecting their eating approach. The first team to successfully eat the entire contents of the vending machine will be declared the winner."

Last year's contest featured two one-on-one faceoffs, including a throwdown between a team from advertising agency J. Walter Thompson against a team from the New York City Ballet. (The ad geeks won - full results here.) This year's contest pits two teams of three members each against each other. So far, the teams are the staff from The Onion and a group from MoMA. No word on who they'll be competing against.

The LVHRD site also says the contest is sanctioned by the Global League of Competitive Consumers. The GLOCC is all about competitive eating and even have a page on their website (which hasn't been updated since the LAST vending challenge in October 2005) on which their members express their love of competitive eating through haiku (that's for you, Steakbellie). By the way, how awesome is the GLOCC logo? At least the man-eating-the-Earth part. I'll bet it was created by one of those artsy hipsters.