A party to celebrate the release of “Eat This Book” by Ryan Nerz will be held on May 3 from 7pm-9pm at the Delancey Rooftop (168 Delancey Street) in the Lower East Side New York City. Admission is free and cupcakes will be served.

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The Orthodox Apprentice blog reports that one of the teams will organize a blooming onion eating contest in the May 8 episode of “The Apprentice”

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Liz has posted Claudine Ko’s article about her participation in the Krystal Square Off finals and Sonya Thomas at http://www.urbanhonking.com/digest/archives/2006/04/sonya_thomas_in.html A photo album of the pictures in the article is also available.

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Liz (without Krista who is currently in China) will cover Saturday’s crabcake contest in Baltimore for Urban Honking’s Digest. Liz also has a photo gallery of Ryan Nerz’s reading at Barnes & Noble.

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(Thanks Loren “Bubba” Yarbrough & Tube Sock Destroyer) The May issue of Jane Magazine (page 140) has an article (not available online) about Sonya Thomas which also includes an account of reporter Claudine Ko’s training for and participation in the Krystal Square Off finals (via a sponsor’s exemption). The article has a picture of “Sister X” wearing her brother’s trademark makeup.

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The Opie & Anthony (& Pat Philbin) radio show will be simulcast on free radio in seven (mainly northeastern) markets from 6am to 9am eastern starting Wednesday, April 26, replacing David Lee Roth’s talk show. The duo will air two uncensored hours solely on the XM satellite network from 9 to 11.

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A video clip of “The Gal” can be seen at http://www.ntv.co.jp/news/asx_dai2/060418037_300k.asx as part of a segment in which three females attempt eating challenges. “The Gal” appears at the two and a half minute mark and eats 8 pounds of noodles with chopsticks in 15 minutes. The other challenges are fried rice and shisk-kebabs.

In other Gal news, she did a hamburger eating contest at a slot machine hall and ate 5 Mack hamburgers (short for McDonald’s ?) in a minute, showing speed eating ability for the first time. There was a separate contest for men in which Nobuyuki Shirota (translated as white rice field) won by eating 10 hamburgers in 3 minutes.

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The Daily Show website has an online video of Ryan Nerz’s appearance Tuesday at http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=61778

Ryan Nerz has made available his chapter about Beautiful Brian and the 2004 Ohio watermelon contest that his editor excised from the final manuscript at http://eatthisbook.com/?page_id=38 If you are considering purchasing “Eat This Book,” that chapter provides a good sample of the style and content of the whole book.

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Megamunch has a transcript of Ryan Nerz’s appearance on the Daily Show on Tuesday.

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The episode (“Stranger Searching”) of the Japanese cartoon Samurai Champloo featuring an eating contest is available online at the Cartoon Network’s adult swim website. The contest is won by a European, so it is like the inverse of Kobayashi at Coney Island. The announcer of the contest employs Shea-style rhetoric. The episode is only available this week, so view it soon if you have any desire to see it.

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The video game version (for the PS2 only) of the anime cartoon Samurai Champloo has a mini-game in which the character Fuu competes in a snow cone eating contest (screen capture). This is the first instance of an eating contest in a store-bought video game that I am aware of.

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Ryan Nerz’s appearance received good reviews on this forum thread about the Daily Show.

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Salon has an interview with Ryan Nerz. (You have to watch a commercial to read the whole article)

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(From The Tube Sock Destroyer) The current edition of Entertainment Weekly has mini-book reviews of the two competitive eating books which award a grade of B+ to “Eat This Book” and A- to “Horsemen of the Esophagus.”

There is a new book out called “Insatiable” which might be why the title of Jason Fagone’s book was changed.

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“Eat This Book” author and IFOCE MC Ryan Nerz will appear on the Daily Show on Comedy Central at 11 pm eastern tonight. If you miss the episode, it will be replayed at 1 am, 10 am, 2 pm, and 8 pm tomorrow (all times eastern)

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The Philadelphia Daily News has a short article about “Horsemen of the Esophagus” author Jason Fagone.

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This translated blog entry says that the “Gluttonous Queen” contest broadcast on TV Tokyo April 2 received good television ratings. Hopefully this will result in more eating contests broadcast on Japanese television, including contests in which Americans compete.

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Ryan Nerz’s hometown paper, The (Columbus, IN) Republic, has an interview with the author of “Eat This Book.”

There is also a podcast of Nerz’s appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio (The Nerz segment starts at 40:00). Nerz mentions that Tim Janus has left his Wall Street job (perhaps to pursue whaling full time?)

The party for “Eat This Book” will apparently be on May 3.

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Pat Bertoletti has emailed me that Tuesday’s Teachers episode on NBC had a Teacher’s Olympics, in which one of the events was a hot dog contest won by a slender Asian-American woman. “According to Jim” and “Gray’s Anatomy” are other shows in which a Sonya Thomas based character has appeared in an episode.

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People who are waiting for a fictional competitive eating movie to be completed do not need to wait for “The El Wingador Story” to be finished. The Gloucester Daily Times reports that a short film based on the Salem Witch Trials, “Gluttonous G. Goforth”, in which the defendant is a female competitive eater was produced in under 48 hours.

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(From beautifulbrian.com) Ryan Nerz has set up a web site promoting his recently released book at eatthisbook.com The website has a gallery, a calendar of Nerz’s appearances, an interview with the grilled cheese sandwich slandered by Tim “Eater X” Janus and a blog where you can expound on your hypotheses about the entities producing this website. The release party for “Eat This Book” will be on April 20 at a currently undetermined time and place.

According to his calendar, Nerz will appear on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central on April 18 at 11 pm eastern.

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Atlantic Magazine has an excerpt of “Horsemen of the Esophagus” by Jason Fagone in its May issue about the goldenpalace grilled cheese contest from early 2005 in Venice Beach. Only the first two paragraphs can be viewed online by non-subscribers.

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Today is the official release date of “Eat This Book” by Ryan Nerz, and Liz has already read it and posted a review.

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Aside from last fall’s “gluttonous monarch” contest, the only other events that “The Gal” has participated in documented on the internet is a series of television appearances from from February and March. Each Wednesday afternoon Nippon TV broadcasted an eating challenge from a different restaurant in which “The Gal” usually competed against Nobuyuki “The Giant” Shirota. Shirota won all of these contests except one, where “The Gal” outate him by 182 items to 173. “The Gal” was generally close in the challenges she lost. If “The Gal” can match the 80%-105% of Shirota’s amounts she obtained in the challenges in Nathan’s, she should be able to eat 30-40 hot dogs (Shirota ate 38 hot dogs in 2004)

The Gal’s TV challenges

Feb 1 13 ft. 11 lb. sushi roll: Shirota 42:50, The Gal 52:45
Feb 8 Yamada 13 bowls, The Gal 12 bowls in 30 minutes- ties Shirota’s previous record
Feb 15 Yamada 190 sushi pieces, The Gal 183 pieces in 30 minutes, both break Shirota’s previous record of 176
Feb 22 The Gal 182 items, Shirota 173 items – items look like hot dog buns but are not disclosed
Mar 1 Shirota 330 strawberries, The Gal 283 strawberries in 30 minutes
Mar 22 Shirota 13 beef bowls, The Gal 11 beef bowls in 30 minutes

(Google translates Shirota as white rice field)

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I have been able to track down information about the Japanese television series about female competitive eaters I wrote about earlier this week. The show, Oogui 2006, is broadcast on TV Tokyo and the second episode will be televised Sunday night. (The program debuted on Tuesday.) The program’s home page is http://www.tv-tokyo.co.jp/oogui2006/ (Google translation) If Japanese competitive eating can command 2 hours of broadcast television in prime time Sunday night, it cannot be doing that badly.

In the contest, seven competitors are chosen from two qualifiers and then a series of contests are held which eliminate the last place finisher until only the champion remains. A similar event open to both genders was held last fall. Three qualifiers in the women’s contest also qualified for the open contest: Miyuki Iwata, Tomoko Mikaye, and Natsuko “The Gal” Sone. I am assuming that no slots in the open contest were reserved for women. Those three are the favorites for the women’s contest. Iwata is generally considered the top Japanese female competitive eater after Takako Akasaka (she lost the 2005 Tokyo Nathan’s qualifier by just one hot dog), but “The Gal” has more “upside” because she is only 19 while Iwata is 32. (I hope to write individual posts about the above three competitors later this week.)

Japanese Blog entries about the contest can be found at: Everyday of the R sea bass gluttony (Google translation) and Much & Fast (Google translation)

Click below for screen captures from the contest and additional information

Read the rest of this entry »

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