Stars of the Internet: BigMastadon

In the distant past of 2008, a creature crawled up from the eldritch muck of the American South bearing more horror than a thousand unfunny cthulu references. In a mere four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the individual known to the Web as BigMastadon introduced himself and then unleashed his fury on forty Totino's brand Pizza Rolls.

Let's pause right here to consider the Pizza Roll as something that actually exists in this world and not in the fevered imagination of an unusually lucid stoner. The item is essentially the top portion of a slice of pizza scraped off of the crust, loaded into an injector and spewed forth into a shell of greased, flash-fried flour. The scraped toppings don't even come from a halfway-decent slice of pizza. More like those horrible squares of bargain-bin pizza they used to serve in elementary schools in the early 90's.

Now, eating just one Pizza Roll can be passed off as an indulgent hors-d'oeuvre. Eating a second or even a third is excusable if you happen to be a teenage boy. That's the scale we're using here. BigMastadon is, even at the kindest application of the metric, just shy of fourteen teenage boys' worth of recklessness and bad decision making.

The first thing you should notice about BigMastadon, aside from the fact that his girth barely fits in frame and that he angles the camera upward to make himself look like some sort of hambeast Godzilla, is that making a youtube video is enough exertion to audibly increase his rate of breathing. When he actually gets into the eating portion of the video, the intensity of his pleasure is palpable. This isn't just some guy who is bravely taking on a bet or wasting his time and health on the Internet because he can. No, BigMastadon is eating forty Pizza Rolls in under three minutes because he wants to.

Around the 30-second mark I started to have my doubts. Not even six rolls in and he seems to be slowing down. Then I came to realize that he's not losing his rhythm, he's formulating a strategy on the fly. With Pizza Roll in hand, BigMastadon chews the mass forming in his mouth just enough to make room for the next addition, popping the roll into his unstoppable maw at the split second when a proper pocket of air forms between gobs of fried saucecheese.

By about one minute in, BigMastadon changes his tactic. He eats three or four Pizza Rolls at a time, then rapidly replaces them. Notice the revved-up full-body nod he does at 1:14, indicating the success of this new method. At 1:24 he lets out a labored sigh. Don't worry, he's not slowing down. That was just the sound of his last fragment of dignity expiring.

At 2:42 a keen viewer should be able to pinpoint the moment when Bigmastadon enters a sort of trance-like state. His eyes skew to the corner of the screen and they take on a telltale glaze. The Dragonforce music plugged into his ears reaches its wailing climax and our hero informs us that he's only got five Pizza Rolls left. He even teases us with the last one, making as if to drop it in defeat, but then it just goes the way of the 39 others before it. To put an extra level of unimaginable ugliness into this video, BigMastadon rewards himself with what looks like a Smirnoff Ice.

The truly disappointing thing about the Pizza Roll Challenge is that BigMastadon invites us viewers to give him other eating quests, but no one has taken him up on this so far. Maybe it's out of some misplaced sense of humanity, but I assure you denizens of the Internet, this young man has no health or soul worth saving.

Amount of Time Likely to be Wasted: The video isn't even five minutes long. You'll probably watch it at least three times, four if you write a weekly column on horrible stuff from the Internet.

Likelihood to Result in Arrest in Real Life: Maybe. I'm fairly certain that BigMastadon is over the age of 18, so child abuse is off the table. I don't know what the suicide laws are in his state, so he might want to read up on that before he gets committed.

MCDR: Eat a salad and go for a jog. I think watching this video on its own can raise a viewer's cholesterol.

Internet Depth by Preposition: Of. BigMastadon has achieved that rare distinction of being someone whose fame is inherently Internet-y. This display would never grace TV in its raw form, only a toned-down, edited version. The Internet is the only place where we can see things like this and the only place where people who want to do things like this even exist.