Hey there! As per usual, we’re having an awards ceremony/party this coming weekend. Won’t you join us?

Thx,
Mgmt.

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and
The Information Superhighway Cordially Invite You To…

COTTON CANDY CANNON: THE WEAPON OF THE FUTURE

An Awards Ceremony & Party
September 17th, 2009, 7:00 PM – 12:00 AM

For all you completionists, the details are cross-posted on Facebook & Upcoming.

Betahouse, 13 Magazine Street, Cambridge MA
*Please note: we’re switching the event location this month.*

Price =  free. You can expect beverages, food, ideas, cool people, & a big ceremonial check.

This month, we are extremely proud to award our October Awesome Fellowship to Josh Gordonson, whose plan is to construct a handheld cotton candy cannon that can “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes.” Need we say more? Read more about the proposal here.

Come celebrate with us, meet the fellow and our micro-trustees. We’ll be talking about and hear what we’re scheming for the future, and answer your questions about how you can apply for the next round of Awesome grants coming out in October. To submit to be the Awesome Fellow for October, please drop us a line by the 10/15/09.

A venerable institution founded in June 2009, The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences gives monthly $1,000 fellowships to projects that advance the interest of Awesomeness in our universe. There are no requirements for applying, no definite criteria, and no limitations beyond the necessity for being awesome. The winners receive the money in cash, check, or gold doubloons.

This mean-looking badboy is the brainchild of Josh Gordonson, close to a decade in the making. It is, indeed, the first working prototype of a rugged cannon that deploys an entirely new kind of ammunition. One that is likely to change the face of battlefields and fairgrounds forever.

Specifically, it shoots cotton candy.

This is huge, people. Absolutely huge.

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is proud to announce today that Josh is the winner of this month’s Fellowship. Specifically, we’re funding the production of a handheld blaster that will be able to, quote, “coat a rotating human in a cotton candy cocoon in one-three minutes” (that’s verbatim, from the grant) and will feature “Three buttons [that] will dispense food coloring into the sugar just before it’s extruded. Color mixing should be possible, giving the artist machine-gunner a full palate of tooth-decaying paint.”

And best of all, the plans will be made available, online, at Instructables. We’re also planning a public debut of this project, once it’s all ready to start shooting.

SET PHASERS TO AWESOME!

We’ll have more details about the awards ceremony, coming up ASAP. Stay tuned, kids.

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More about Josh (from the man himself):

Josh Gordonson is a homegrown maker from the suburbs of New York.  As a child, his parental units introduced him to the world of DIY by raising him directly above a subterranean PHS (personal hacker space) and growing the highly inquisitive mammal (HIM) on an incredibly widespread informational growth medium. Once of age, Josh pursued his interests in making things via the shop below him, with the help of his equally interested cousin Ari and motivation from nearly all of those that surrounded him. Josh has since interned at Instructables and has been deeply immersed in the incredible DIY community.  He’s the first to document a functional high-output homemade cotton candy machine on the internet, a goal sevenish years in the making, and is now pursuing… well… bigger things.  Nowadays Josh spends his hours learning the inner secrets of analogue electronics at the Massachvsetts Institivte of Technology, but still scrounges for time to make everything he dreams up in his sleep.