With his exams over and most of his classmates gone home for the summer, Jim Harrison has few distractions as he tries to finish out his final task this month.
He's been chowing down on hot dogs every day since April 1, in an effort to eat 450 in a single month. That leaves him until midnight tonight to reach his goal.
If successful, the 22-year-old McMaster University student will win a $1,500 bet with his friend and roommate Colin Moffatt.
"I have 29 more to go," Harrison told CTV.ca by telephone from Hamilton the night before the looming deadline, when he had already eaten 19 hot dogs in a single day.
"I'm still pretty confident."
But things are getting tougher.
Moffatt has started offering him cash incentives to miss his target.
If Harrison fails to eat the necessary number of hot dogs, he is obliged to pay Moffatt $1,000.
On a recent trip to Boston Pizza, Moffatt offered Harrison $50 to eat a pizza, to get him off his pace of 18 Schneiders Red Hots each day.
He also offered $500 if Harrison skipped eating any hot dogs on Wednesday, which would have left him with 48 to eat in the final two days of the bet.
But Harrison says he hasn't fallen for any of Moffatt's tricks.
"He's trying to sort of sabotage me any way that he could."
With the bet nearly over and done, Harrison has gained some limited notoriety -- he's been on TV, mentioned in a local newspaper and has been invited to talk on a poker-related radio show next week.
Aside from the external publicity, the bet has been duly chronicled on a web cam, so that any non-believers can be satisfied that Harrison has eaten as many hot dogs as he says.
Because it turns out that there are other people who have placed their own wagers on the so-called "hot dog prop bet" and Harrison feels he owes it to them to be transparent.
"That's half the reason I eat the hot dogs online," he said, noting that if it was only a bet involving his friend, he wouldn't have gone to such trouble.
While he isn't getting any money from the side-bets, Harrison does get some love from his fellow gamblers on an Internet forum where they are cheering him on.
But he realizes that his audience is split between those who bet against him and those who think he's going to succeed.
"Half of them probably have money on it," he said.
A man who knows his odds, Harrison expects to finish up his 450th hot dog between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Friday.
