The Deadspin Idiots Eat The Horrifying Things Your Grandpas Did

Here at Gizmodo Media Group, we have a functional and powerful union, one that protects us from, say, reading scripts that look like hostage statements or really doing anything debasing and against our will. So while our participation in the video at the top of this post wasn’t exactly involuntary, we did not expect to be in a shot-for-shot remake of the Tyrone Biggums Fear Factor sketch either.

Previous installments in the Deadspin Idiots taste testing series included chain pizzas and milks. This was far more extreme: the grandpa diet. As our colleague Drew Magary reported, grandfathers’ twentieth-century eating habits were bizarre. Our menu was entirely inspired by items that readers submitted to Drew. Everything we ate was reportedly eaten by grandpas first, except for the blood sausage, which was a substitute for the fried blood nuggets, and made me throw up for some reason. The menu:

A thick pat of butter with brown sugar on it

Eating an onion like an apple

A shot of brandy that came out of a Robitussin bottle

Shooting fish oil

Cold blood sausage

Packing a lip of chewing tobacco while also having horseradish in your mouth

Another shot of Robo-brandy

Nobody “won” this exactly, but Nick Martin, Jon Eiseman, and I all threw up to some extent, while Barry Petchesky didn’t, and also packed his lip for the longest. As soft blog boys, we could all barely handle the chewing tobacco, and found the brandy most tolerable. Opinions were mixed on the other items; the viscosity of the fish oil has haunted me for days.

Barry’s dominant performance here—on his birthday—comes as no surprise after the twin revelations earlier this year that he washes his face with dish soap and sleeps on a bed with no sheet.