In this month's Car & Driver is a article about car tossing. It seems
there are a couple of "excentric" chaps back in the UK who have built
a catapult type device to hurl large objects "for the fun of it". Car
& Driver went over to see it, bought a 75 Mini and had it hurled.
BTW, for those of you who watch Northern Exposure and recall the
catapult and the piano episode a month or so back, it appears that
these "chaps" built the catapult for the Northern Exposure episode.
It's not a catapult, it's a trebuchet, and it's not a Mini, it's a Hillman:
_A Scud It's Not, But the Trebuchet Hurls a Mean Piano_
Giant Medieval War Machine Is Wowing British Farmers And Scaring the
Sheep
By Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
ACTON ROUND, England--With surprising grace, the grand piano sails
through the sky a hundred feet above a pasture here, finally returning
to earth in a fortissimo explosion of wood chunks, ivory keys and
piano wire.
Nor is the piano the strangest thing to startle the grazing sheep
this Sunday morning. A few minutes later, a car soars by - a 1975
blue two-door Hillman, to be exact - following the same flight path
and meeting the same loud fate. Pigs fly here, too. In recent
months, many dead 500-pound sows (two of them wearing parachutes) have
passed overhead, as has the occasional dead horse.
[There's a lot more, but in deference to bandwidth I'll restrict
myself to this much. If you want the rest, write back.--sf]
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