A Pig Roasting Box for the Dummy Chef (2-by-4 Week 5)

Commercial caja china

Ever wanted to roast a whole pig? Well, apparently enough people asked about this one that eHow's title crew scraped it up – twice, once under "pig roasting box" and once under "caja china." Contributor Fred Decker, who published (by our unofficial count) about eleven thousand cooking posts for eHow.com, grabbed "How to Build a Pig Roasting Box" and went whole hog. Fred's problem? a content editor got hold of this post (now seen at the niche site Leaf.tv)...

We won't argue with any of Decker's myriad cooking posts. We will, however, strenuously object to his plans for what he calls "essentially a very large Dutch oven," which he suggests that his readers make out of plywood. Yeah, plywood; though he doesn't say anything about thickness and says absolutely nothing about avoiding exterior plywood that''s impregnated with arsenic.

Those deficiencies, however, are not what caught our team's eyes in the search for DotD candidates. No, the giveaway line was this:

"Screw on lengths of 2-foot by 4-foot or 4-foot by 4-foot lumber for legs, as appropriate. If your box will have wheels, make the rear legs half as long and drill a hole in them for an axle. Fit the axle with surplus bicycle tires, and screw on two lengths of 2-foot by 4-foot lumber as handles." Sorry, Fred, but that's pure-D stupid -- for at least two reasons. Let's assume those front legs are 3 feet long, which would make each one 2 feet by 4 feet by 3 feet -- a total of 48 cubic feet of wood, which at 41 pounds per cubic foot would weigh about a ton. Not gonna work, Fred... second, those "surplus bicycle tires" wouldn't be much use without wheels...

Decker's kitchen expertise notwithstanding, he knows jack about plywood: no one familiar with the stuff would tell readers to

"Construct the outer box, using three pieces of plywood measuring 4 feet long and 2 feet wide... Screw the box together with long wood screws..."

...mostly because plywood doesn't hold screws. Apparently cooks don't know that.

Most of the remainder of Fred's post makes a sort of sense, although instructing his readers to hire someone to fabricate a metal box to fit in the plywood seems rather... unhelpful. The reason he's here, however (besides his obvious unfamiliarity with plywood) is Decker's failure to proofread the final post and fix the "2-foot by 4-foot or 4-foot by 4-foot lumber" nonsense. He didn't and that's why he's our Dumbass of the Day, 2-by-4 style.

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