A pumpkin by any description — that description being five pounds or 1,502 pounds — is still a pumpkin, right?

I guess that depends on perspective. If your 6-year-old can easily carry the orange gourd from the car to the front stoop, then it is a pumpkin made to have a jack o’lantern extracted from it.

If you have to call in the industrial hauler to get it out of the field — or just lean against it like it’s the carcass of Hogzilla II on display — it ain’t no ordinary pumpkin. (Note: Hogzilla II, allegedly shot by an 11-year-old boy near Anniston, Ala., was no ordinary pig. It supposedly weighed 1,051 pounds. Think about it. The fake largest pig of all time barely topped a grand in weight. The 2006 record-breaking pumpkin weighed better than a grand-and-a-half. That record was broken in 2007. We’ll come back to that.)

There is an annual contest to find the heaviest pumpkin of all time. There’s been a run on record breakers in recent years. I couldn’t help but give the pumpkins names — Mark Maguire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds — because I was reminded of the run on home-run record smashing seasons in Major League Baseball.

Here’s a quick rundown to let you know how upwardly mobile the weight of the competition has become. In 1904, William Warnock of Goderich, Ontario, Canada, recorded the first pumpkin to weigh more than 400 pounds at 403. His record wasn’t broken for 72 years. Then along came a man named Bob, Ford that is, and he recorded a 451 pound semi-ovoid and the, uh, arms race was on.

It was a trickle at first. Bob Dill — no pickle jokes, please, only pumpkin references — introduced the world to Dill’s Atlantic Giant variety and it was like unleashing the ugly progeny of the Manhattan Project unto the world.

Dill recorded a 459-pound gourd in 1980. One year later, the Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada, resident shattered his own record with a 493.5-pound pumpkin.

Dill’s seed type has become the standard in competitive pumpkin growing. (We have competitions for everything these days. It certainly reminds me of the Vince Lombardi line: “If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?” In this case; then why do they record weight?)

Every two or three years thereafter, someone grew a heavier pumpkin. Dill’s ’81 record was broken in 1984 by Norm Gallagher, who grew a 612-pound monster.

By 1994, the record weight was 990 pounds. In 1996, Paula Zehr set a new record with a pumpkin that weighed 1,061 pounds. The record was broken in 1998. That record was shattered in 1999 and each following year a new record was posted. Ron Wallace recorded his 1,502-pound orange gourd in 2006. His record was broken by fellow Rhode Islander Joe Jutras in 2007 by 187 pounds. Yes, Mr. Jutras grew a 1,689-pound pumpkin. That’s insane.

All this information comes from an e-mailed press release — we get the darndest “news” items — in preparation for the 2008 competition. It’s fall and someone will certainly show up somewhere soon with a record-breaking pumpkin. If it happens, it will be 10 consecutive years the world’s heaviest pumpkin has been registered. I wonder if there will ever be a 1 ton pumpkin. It certainly seems possible. What do they feed these things and are they edible?

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From the political front comes this story:

Democrats watching the presidential campaign may find it hard to swallow a glass of the syrah Palin.

The organic red wine, pronounced “pay-LEEN sih-rah,” comes from a small winery in northern Chile.