But how will I get the veggie burger to burn? Napalm?

Here you go with an old column, relatively unedited....

“Hey John, have you ever built a trebuchet?”
A large medieval siege catapult? Sign me up!
Nate was an Army ROTC cadet at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time. I’d been disqualified from the program due to poor eyesight but still hung around, helped out and did fun Army stuff: ride a Blackhawk helicopter, rappel from the UNC belltower… and talk about large wooden weapons with Nate.
I’d come over to Nate and Josh’s room to hang out. Nate, something of a military historian, has since been commissioned as an infantry officer and graduated from Ranger school. Hooaah!
Josh, also a cadet then, has been promoted to 1st Lieutenant and is the senior platoon leader in his Stryker light armored vehicle company in Iraq. Take care, guys.
Anyway, trebuchets didn’t seem all that far out of my woodsy area of experience. In scouts we called lashing pieces of wood together to make things “pioneering”, and I was pretty good at it. We even had a camporee organized around catapults, I recall.
A while later I was mulling over the idea with some other buddies. We reached a consensus that there was never a bad time for building siege engines. But what to fling? Large rocks and diseased corpses didn’t really catch our fancy.
But cows?
Nah. It may have been clever in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail but now it had grown passé. As they said on Northern Exposure, the cow has already been flung.
Then someone proposed a compromise (and smaller) livestock.
A chicken.
I think it was Ryan who suggested the chicken ought to be on fire.
By now you probably have some ideas of the eclectic group of folks I call friends. And you’re probably right. It can it make for some interesting parties.
So now I’ve got to build a trebuchet for to fling a flaming chicken. This produces some problems. I’m a quasi-vegetarian (I’m German-American. Sometimes bratwurst just can’t be avoided). Even assuming the chicken is already dead, maybe even frozen and packaged in plastic wrap, I’m not sure how I feel about wasting it.
But how will I get the veggie burger to burn? Napalm? I think Ryan had suggested some variety of shaving lotion. Canola oil should work. That’s what I use for candles. I should probably do this near or in water.
And making the weapon itself won’t be easy. I should probably think small – at least start off conservatively with a household-sized siege engine.
I hear there’s one in Texas that can fling a Buick a quarter-mile. I guess everything’s bigger in Texas.
So where am I on this idea so far? Standing in a shallow body of water flinging a burning Boca burger with a fair-to-middling-sized medieval siege weapon?
I’ll keep you posted.