Come spring, my local park always has two ice cream vans within 100m of each other, and I’ve often thought it’s an episode of Midsomer Murders waiting to happen¹. In my head there are fierce rivalries in all sorts of professions, but I’d never thought of this²:

A documentary now in limited release, “Twisted: A Balloonamentary” examines the world of professional balloon twisters, who make everything from life-size racing cars to their own wedding dresses. It also exposes the rift — who knew? — between the “gospel twisters,” who use their craft as a way to teach Bible lessons, and the “adult” twisters, who use balloons for more prurient entertainment.

That’s hideous. I for one never, ever want to see a professional twister using balloons to teach gospel lessons. Whereas, a prurient show - bring it on. Sure, it’d be easy for it to be tawdry and obvious, but in the right hands I can see that being funny as hell.

The wedding dress can be seen here. My wedding plans so far:

1. compulsory capes + hats

and that’s as far as I’ve got, but I’m going to go ahead and pencil in that dress. I mean, that’s some non-stop innuendo right there.

It’s just occurred to me that balloons are the perfect vehicle for preaching the doctrine of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! I’ve found a niche, people!

1. I think something stole their thunder, actually - New Tricks? [↩]
2. warning: there was a big Battlestar Galactica banner at the top of the page when I visited. I activated Spoiler Defence Mode and killed all power to the building, but beware [↩]