Happiness is walking through a department store and uncovering a skull-shaped "Bleeding Brains" candle...
Unhappiness is getting home, taking it out of the bag, and seeing a zombie version of said "Bleeding Brains" candle on the back of the box, which is approximately seven trillion times cooler than some everyday skull.
Happiest Possible Level of Happiness is finding out that you bought the zombie version and just didn't know it.
Can't wait to light him up. Even unused, it's one of the prettiest items gracing our living room. But, when lit, he's supposed to dribble out tons of bloody wax from his mouth, ears and eye sockets. I'd start the process now, but it seems like something I should hold off on until company comes over.
While I'm oh so happy to have lucked into my bleeding demon candle, I don't mean to infer that skulls are bad news. In fact, today's Countdown entry takes a look at one very nice skull, who talks and has blinking red eyes. Meet Talking Boris, a skull head who will say anything you tell it to say, even if it's some obscenity-laced tirade about gasoline prices.
Posted by Matt on 09/19/2007. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
I’m loving the Halloween Jukebox Matt. Of all the outstanding songs, and the memories each are associated with, the highlight so far has been Dokken’s Dream Warriors. I owned Dokken’s “Back for the Attack” album (on cassette!) when I was a kid, maybe ten years old?
Ah, the memories that song brings back. I was thankfully “that kid” on the block that was able to get his hands on R-rated movies and show them to his underage friends. One of those films was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Hence my love for that album and that song. Among classics like Predator, Aliens, Commando, Gremlins, The Goonies, The Terminator, Conan The Barbarian, Lethal Weapon, Star Wars, and other movies that I could tape off of HBO during their “free preview weekends”, or convince my movie-loving Dad to rent. Horror films held a special place in our hearts.
After all, these were the sick, depraved movies that my friends and I darn well knew that we had no right to view. As kids we felt like we were practically breaking the law when we watched R-rated flicks that featured stabbings, shootings, cyborg-on-human violence, chest-burstings, pipe-impalements, eyeball-gougings, limbs being severed, comet dust-guided big rigs running amok at truck stops, suicidal hero cops who weren’t faking it for their psych. pension, scary toy clowns hiding under beds, leather-clad bikers in a post-apocalyptic world searching for juice, high schoolers fighting off Russkies, Richard Dawson telling the hero he’d only be back in a “re-run”, Cody telling the knife-wielding punk to ‘try it again’, hearing the song Mr. Sandman after Laurie survived… again, wondered “what’s wrong with her eyes!” when we watched ED for the first time, saw Wolfman get kicked in the nards, learned that it was DEFINITELY wrong to feed them after midnight, were afraid at just how little gas was left in the chopper after Peter and Fran took off, and we found more than just a little in common with the character of Brad in Critters.
I’ll admit it. In 1987-88 I was the “president” of a small group of friends, a club if you will, that loved all of this stuff. Dokken’s Dream Warriors was sort of our theme song, if you could call it that. We didn’t really hold official meetings. We mostly just blew things up with fireworks, read Fangoria on the bus going to school, drew ghastly pictures and wrote short stories that would now get any kid expelled from school, and committed, in the post-Columbine world we live in. It was a simpler time I suppose. Instead of being afraid of what I wrote my teachers would smile at me, put on a brave face, and tell me that this might be a bit too violent for school, could I please re-write it without all the blood and guts. Again, the memories… sing tear sliding down the right cheek.
Thanks to this site I know I’m not the only kid who, by late September, was drawing up diagrams of how I could decorate my yard/porch during Halloween in order to freak out the highest number of kids.
Don’t even get me started on how cool Chainsaw and Dave were in Summer School.