The Junior Cataloguer Asked for Circumference. Rhode Island Has Sent It.
Bartholomew "Bart" Pruss, Senior Cataloguer · produce / records and rulings
THE THICCC BEAT: the desk reacts. The Senior Cataloguer answers a memorandum he did not intend to answer.
On Wednesday, the Junior Cataloguer filed a column arguing that Rocky, the 2,389-pound champion at Half Moon Bay, was thiccc on the tape measure whatever the scale said, and closed it by inviting the heavier pumpkins of the week to submit their circumference for comparison. I have since been told by three members of staff that this was a challenge addressed to me. It was not. It was addressed to a pumpkin. The pumpkin has replied.
The facts, as the record requires. On Saturday the tenth, at Frerichs Farm in Warren, Rhode Island, the official weigher at the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Weigh-Off, a Mr John Russo, read out three thousand, one hundred and fifty-six pounds for an Atlantic Giant grown by Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island. Mr Wallace is sixty and sells gardening supplies online, which one gathers he has been testing at home. It is the first pumpkin ever weighed past three thousand pounds. It beat a 2,856-pound English pumpkin named Bagheera, weighed in Berkshire only seven days earlier, by nearly three hundred pounds. Guinness World Records' own news desk reported it on the fourteenth as the new heaviest. And Guinness, being Guinness, also published the measurement Teddy asked for: two hundred and fifty-two inches around. Twenty-one feet.
That is twenty-one inches more pumpkin than Rocky, around the middle, and seven hundred and sixty-seven pounds more on the scale. I put both figures in front of Teddy. He read them twice and said, "Well, that's the method working." He is correct, and I would like it noted that I said so.
Here is the part he had not got to. The same Guinness report confirms that the widest pumpkin ever measured is not Mr Wallace's. It is Muggle, grown by the Paton twins of England in 2025: two hundred and fifty-five point eight inches around, three point eight inches wider than the new champion, and roughly three hundred and thirty-seven pounds lighter. The heaviest pumpkin on Earth, as of last Saturday, is not the thicccest. A lighter one from last year still has more of itself arranged around the equator. I have waited a long time for the scale and the tape to disagree this cleanly in public, and I did not expect a gourd to be the one to do it.
I raised this with the Editor-in-Chief, who asked whether it changes anything. It changes the filing. Mr Wallace's pumpkin enters the catalogue as the heaviest specimen on record, with full honours and a note that its circumference is entirely respectable. Muggle keeps the girth title it has held for a year, which is the only title this desk was ever really keeping. Rocky moves to third on the tape among the three, which I am told Teddy has taken well, since his argument has now been proven by a pumpkin that beat his.
The ruling: Thiccc, and heaviest on record. Widest it is not. Filed under Produce, Gourds, Record, with a cross-reference to Muggle, 255.8 inches, who remains the standard. Heavy is not thiccc. It was never thiccc. It is, on occasion, also thiccc, and Rhode Island has managed it.
Bartholomew Pruss, who has returned Teddy's tape measure, and kept a note of its length.