One of the questions I asked in my 2nd post to this thread was about the practice {tradition?} of throwing pies.

I suppose most of the pies that are thrown are custard pies, but maybe other types of pies are used too.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia page which provides information about how that practice started and how it is evolving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieing

Here's an excerpt from that entry:

"Pieing is the act of throwing a pie at someone. Originally a staple of slapstick comedy, pieing has also come to be used for political purposes, in which throwing a pie at an authority figure, politician, or celebrity is a means of protesting against the target's political beliefs, or against a perceived flaw — arrogance, hubris — in the target's character. (A variation of pieing, when the target is hit with a cake instead of a pie, is called "caking".)

The political act of pieing has its origins in the "pie in the face" gag from slapstick comedy (first popularized by movie director Mack Sennett around the year 1914 in his Keystone Cops silent movies). Throwing pies as a comedy staple came into its own in the Laurel & Hardy classic short film, "Battle of the Century" (1927)[1] which, according to legend, required four thousand pies. Pie-throwing became a convention of early slapstick movies made by the Three Stooges,[2][3] and others. Other comedians and cartoon characters famous for pieing are Bugs Bunny, Charlie Chaplin, Monty Python, and Soupy Sales.

The probable originator of pieing as a political act was Aron Kay [4], a Yippie, who pied singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1977 (audio footage of the incident is included in the Chumbawamba song Just Desserts, a homage to the concept of pieing).[4] Kay subsequently pied, among many others, William F. Buckley, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, William Shatner, and Andy Warhol. Kay retired in 1992 after pieing right-wing activist Randall Terry. His exploits live on though. He appears in cartoon form in a 2003 animated music video, "Death penalty for pot" by Benedict Arnold and The Traitors, where he and Dana Beal pie George W. Bush and former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (at 2 minutes and 33 seconds into the video).[5]...


-snip-

One political blog that I read "DailyKos" uses the term "pie fights" as a referemt for discussions that are highly contentious. I'm not sure whether that term is widely used on other blogs.