Aragorn: What!
Gimli: I cannot jump the distance. You'll have to toss me.
[beat]
Gimli: Don't tell the elf!
Short shrift
September 23, 2003 - 12:45PM
A New Zealander who stands just 1.37 metres tall and lets people hurl him along a slippery slide as bar entertainment has defended himself against charges the act is demeaning to little people.
"I love putting smiles on people's faces, making people happy," Andrew Roigard, who calls himself the leprechaun of the Mount Mellick bar at Mount Maunganui, a North Island port and coastal resort, told the Bay of Plenty Times.
Roigard dons boxer shorts and a crash helmet and covers himself in vegetable oil as bar patrons hurl him head first and full length along a six-metre long polythene sheet, vying to land his navel inside a red square at the end.
The bar advertises the event as "leprechaun curling" after the Irish winter sport of curling, in which large flat stones are thrown across an ice-covered lake towards a mark.
Roigard, who was born with achondroplasia, or short-limbed dwarfism, told the paper he loved every minute of the action and saw himself as an entertainer.
Roigard responded to criticism by telling the newspaper: "Everybody who knows me knows I'm happy about it. It was my idea."
