Happy Halloween, you creatures! Though some may cry foul over Halloween falling on a Wednesday this year, at least it helps make the impenetrable hump of the workweek a little more palatable. Even people who don't give a shit about Halloween know enough to only work at half-speed today, and that in of itself is enough for me to toss aside all previous misgivings and shout, "I LURV HALLO."
Of course I watched It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown last night. It's just incredible to think that I've been watching that special for 25 Halloweens straight, give or take. I don't know when I started the tradition, and I'm sure I've missed a year here and there, but it's just so odd to realize that I watched that very same cartoon, probably at the same exact time of year on the same exact channel, decades ago.
When you've seen anything that many times, it's tough to avoid being on autopilot. When I view this special (and others in a similar vain), it's kind of like being at church: You know you're supposed to be paying attention and soaking it all in, but truth be told, your shoelaces suddenly became extremely interesting.
Throughout most of the special, I had a cat in my lap. We have five cats, and through some Halloween-inspired horrible luck of the draw, I got…"Kitten." Kitten's proper name is "Saturn," but we never call her that, because a generic, ironically nice-sounding moniker seemed to be a more natural fit the cat from hell. Don't get me wrong — I'd fight off a Doberman if it picked on Kitten, but she is definitely the meanest cat in the history of cats.
You know how some animals have "hot spots?" Parts of their body that may result in offbeat vicious behavior when touched? Well, every part of Kitten's body is a hot spot. Since she's the smallest of our cats and kind of cute in her own little ugly way, Kitten is the first feline visitors want to approach when they're in our apartment for the first time. They never believe us when we tell them that this is a grave, grave mistake. This is a cat capable of simultaneously striking with her teeth and all four claws in less than a second, a talent that she truly enjoys showing off. Everyone loves scratching a cat right above their tail, but if you do this to Kitten, five parts of you will bleed.
And yet, she manages these rare bouts of total and complete affection, always at the oddest times — like, for example, when I'm trying to take pictures of Charlie Brown television specials. Digging into my soft pink flesh with her hard eggshell claws, I could only hope that she'd grow bored quickly. It's one thing to touch Kitten's hot spots when she's just roaming around, but if you bug her when she's trying to be cute, the pain you'll face is positively legendary. I'm not sure if any of this has anything to do with Halloween, but it's helped make this appear to be fairly large for a blog post. Thanks, evil Kitten!
They stretched the Charlie Brown stuff into a hourlong broadcast by showing You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown right after the pumpkin show. I guess we have to accept this as part of the tradition, as they've been doing it for a few years now. It feels wrong to get up or change the channel when Charlie Freakin' Brown is on prime time network television, but man, that special sucks. I used the time to peruse the new and gigantic Toys 'R' Us catalog, which had just enough errant snowflake graphics to remind me of happy Christmas decorations and log fires and all of that other junk that will help take the sting out of a Halloween season that just never seemed to pork my soul like a pro this year.
You guys are great. You let me off the hook for this year's Halloween Countdown, and I appreciate that. You probably read plenty of websites, and…how can I put this? I'm sure you can tell when the people running them are "gunning for class president," so to speak. Clearly, I'm not. There's a freedom in that for me, to be honest. It's about trading some bravado and momentum to just do what I want to do, when I want to do it. I do feel bad about broken promises, but I won't make a habit out of it. This site's Christmas season will rock, and if it doesn't, I will personally stage an event where every reader is invited to bring along a bag of rocks and stone me to death.
Haven't seen a single trick-or-treater today. I guess nobody wants tiny Twix bars or Jolly Rancher lollipops shaped like Dracula. More for me. It's really calm out, and kind of chilly, and kind of darker than it should be at this hour. Pretty perfect, and I've got just enough gusto to drink something Halloweeny and watch something Halloweeny and be happy with that.
Yeah, I've become my worst nightmare: Someone who wants to start celebrating one holiday before the first one finishes. What can I say? Halloween and I had a rocky relationship this year. I'm mad at it and it's mad at me. I think we just expected too much from each other. It expected me to write tributes to it forty-five times in two months, because that's what I've always done. I expected it to make the mundane okay and the horrible palatable, because that's what it's always done. It's cool, though. Everyone missteps, and after all, Halloween and I have a whole year to make amends.
But Halloween is tomorrow, and I fully expect those of you who live life in a less self-damning way to make the most of it. Only comes once a year. Even with all my blahness, I've already got the spooky-patterned Ziploc bags out, and I'm stuffing each with 6-7 pieces of candy to guarantee myself the neighborhood's gold medal for best treat-giver.
As an adult, I've always put a lot of emphasis on giving out good tricks and treats. I got plenty of stinkers throughout childhood, and I know how kids can concoct a lot of venom and hatred for the families that give them shitty candy. The last thing I ever want to see is some six-year-old making pissy faces under his Hogwarts hat when I'm giving him a freebie. I'd only ever volunteer at a soup kitchen if everyone who entered had to sign an "I will smile at my soup pouring guy" contract first.
One of the ladies who lived on my old block once gave my friends and I a penny each, and I still feel bad about our collective reaction to this. You'd think that kids could just collect their losses and move on to the next house, but it doesn't work like that. When you're a kid, your heart is on your sleeve. When we got those pennies, the only reactions we could muster fell under the umbrellas of sarcasm and outright rudeness, and though I'm sure we didn't care much at the time, I can firmly recall that look of shame and unease on the poor penny-giving lady's face…and it's just not something I ever want to go through. So, Snickers and Twix and witch-themed rubber fingers puppets for all!
I was going to write more, but Charlie Brown is on tonight. I think I'll post after that. Meantime, comment on what your plans are, if any, for the big day. Just because I'm a misfit doesn't mean I can't live vicariously through your joys.
Was away for work most of the weekend, followed by a quick stop at a friend's house in Pennsylvania. It was pretty close to Amish country, and Amish country doubles as the antique shop center of the universe. There were gigantic, warehouse-sized antique shops all over the place, and I'm fortunate that I only had time to visit one of 'em. They're full of cool stuff, but ridiculously expensive. In the one store I went in, I recognized tons of crap from my time spent as a full-time eBay seller, on sale for 10, 20 or 30 times their actual "worth."
This particular store's idea of what served as an "antique" was fairly vague. I saw a few Star Wars toys from the late '90s on sale for up to a hundred bucks, among many other items that are just as easily and much more cheaply found at any random dude's garage sale.
In fact, the best stuff wasn't even in the place, but rather at the few tables placed outside. That's where I found the choice item hiding somewhere in the photo above. Look close. It's Freddy!
This thing is soooo bad. I'm assuming they were riffing on A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3, as the goof title is Gum In The Hair On Elm's Treat 33. I don't know if it's possible to come up with a play-on-words more convoluted than that, but I guess, if you're going to be awful, you may as well be the most awful. This isn't a licensed Freddy product, but rather a novelty item from "Zeebs" that skirts copyright jussst enough to get away with it.
From the package: "Eddie Chewger finally bites off more than he can chew!" Notably, the back of the package calls him "Eddy Chewger." Then, just to make things even more confusing, the box contains a plastic videocassette-shaped box filled with videocassette-shaped gum! Is that a double-negative? And what does it have to do with Freddy Krueger?
It's amazing that they went through so much trouble to make such a senseless product, but I think I like it. The crude image of Freddy (or Eddie, or Eddy) on the front of the box looks like it'd be a great 30×30" velvet painting.
It's always good to keep an open mind, especially when you're about to drink beer mixed with Clamato.
New Cheladas from Anheuser-Busch dare even the most filthy whitebread Americans to embrace their inner Latin soul. Mixing either Budweiser or Bud Light beer with Clamato, it's twenty-four fluid ounces of liquid heck.
Finding its origins in the elsewhere-popular Michelada cocktail (which began using less-offensive tomato juice before slowly embracing the clam), they're definitely testing some rough waters by trying to market this stuff in places like…well, where I live. Even more incredible is that I found the cans not in my supermarket's alcohol section, but in a big plastic bin in the chip aisle. What the hell were cans of beer + Clamato doing in the chip aisle?! I can only imagine that their placement had something to do with the supermarket manager theorizing that stoners raiding the place for chips at 1 AM would be the only possible clientele for cans of beer + Clamato.
It smells just like regular Budweiser without many hints of clammy goodness, but the color…my God, the color! Like carbonated Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid, only it's not Kool-Aid…it's BEER…and CLAMS!
To tell you the truth, I wanted to like it. It's bullshit chic, and that's up my alley. A little foreign class in a can. But…I don't like it. Not one bit. It's not so bad that you have to spit it out and scream an expletive in some exaggerated comedic fashion, but once you know what it tastes like, every subsequent sip takes the same kind of pre-game gusto one must muster before downing some really awful tasting cold medicine. Not that it tastes like cold medicine, mind you. It doesn't. As advertised, it tastes like beer and Clamato mixed together. Peanut butter and jelly have no need to worry; they remain the standard.
Then again, to be fair, it's obvious that something as brazen and new as this has got to be an acquired taste. It took me a good fifteen years to consider even regular beer as more than just "dirty sock water," so perhaps, with time and grueling practice, I could come to appreciate Cheladas much in the same way that I appreciate all of the other drinks that make M*A*S*H reruns so much funnier. Just wish there was a little more incentive for acquiring this particular taste. It's not like there's a bunch of classmates hoarding around me, telling me I'll be less of a man if I don't drink it.
I'm not quite ready to rule this one out as the most disgusting thing ever, but I have strange tastes. You'll probably think it is, which is why I can only suggest buying a Chelada if you're one of those weirdos who likes to display oddball cans on a bookcase shelf. I put mine right next to the bottle of 7 Up Gold. They're buddies now.
PS: Don't make fun of my tablecloth. We had family over last weekend. Family calls for floral print.
We had to pick up flowers for a relative a few days ago, and since it wasn't the kind of occasion that required an all-out $75 spending spree at the florist, we just hit the supermarket for one of the cheaper bouquets that come wrapped in the less-glossy paper. And thank God for that. Our local supermarket has a fairly small flower section, but somehow, in the midst of all the "Happy Birthday" planters and little pots full of bamboo sticks with the requisite not-quite-Buddha statues, there was a section full of Venus Flytraps.
My first experiences with Venus Flytraps came by way of elementary school plant sales. I'm sure the plant sale is a familiar enough entity to most of you. For whatever reason, parents and students alike were invited into a plant shop converted from a science classroom, where we could buy flowers, seeds and all kinds of greenery for no steadily apparent reason at all. It was nowhere near as joyous as the school's annual book fair, but any opportunity to skip class and blow Mommy's money was a welcome one.
There wasn't a heck of a lot for young, male horticulturists to indulge in at the plant sale. Even if some of us found the blazing yellows of a well-watered daffodil assortment striking, it's not like we could've admitted that in front of our buddies. No, at the plant sale, it was all about the Venus Flytrap: God's gift to every small boy who didn't want the social connotations involved with buying a "sissy" plant.
The Flytraps we got back then came in containers somewhat similar to the one seen above, but the plants inside were always young and weak. I've read enough about Venus Flytraps to know that this particular fashion of distribution goes against every expert's rules on how to keep 'em alive, but somehow, the traps in this container looked healthy, active and ready to rain fire on any bug stupid enough to mistake them for lawn chairs.
Kind of pretty in their own little way, aren't they? They need to be. Ugly plants might not seem as inviting to the many bugs that help make up a Venus Flytrap's diet. The "trap" mechanism is amazing. When I gently flick the scary hairy fangs of the plants, the traps immediately slam shut. What's a mere novelty act in my kitchen is actually how the Flytraps survive the "lean years" in their native environments: Bugs land in, shimmy around, find themselves trapped and are then slowly digested until nothing but a hunk of chitin (which looks like rat shit, but is actually an insect corpse) is leftover. If I was going to pick any plant to write about during the Halloween season, it had to be this.
Be warned: There are a ton of kits available that claim to let you grow your own Venus Flytraps, never mentioning how difficult this is for a novice, especially with the tools and directions supplied in such kits. It's not an impossible mission for anyone who spends a bit of time studying up first, but don't be fooled by those kits just because they've got neat graphics of killer plants on the packages. Even if you buy one "live" like this, you'll still need to research a bit if you want your traps to live longer than a week. You can't just throw it under the faucet and feed it dead bugs every few days, unless, by some chance, you've accepted an underworld bounty and have been charged with killing as many Venus Flytraps as possible.
As a second caveat, note that you'll tend to consider your Venus Flytrap as being more "alive" and "feeling" than most other plants. There's just something about them that makes you believe in all that shit about plants liking soft music. You'll probably cry and consider holding a mock funeral when they die, so if you're particularly prone to depression or separation anxiety, you might want to pick a plant that's a little less awesome.
I knew such searches would bear no fruit, but I couldn't help myself from starting the requisite "Mountain Dew Pitch Black III" Google hunt several months ago, hoping and praying that the folks at Pepsi would see the error of their ways and bring back the only thing that could save this MISERABLE Halloween season.
If you're new to this, I'll explain. Three years ago, Pepsi introduced Mountain Dew Pitch Black — a purple, grapey wondercola meant to compliment the spookiest of all seasons. The following year, they broke the mold with Pitch Black II, revising the original formula with an extra sour bite. Grossly mismarketed as some kind of goofy hipster college drink, the drink flopped and ended Pitch Black's tenure as a mass-produced soda forevermore. BUT, we got a small reprieve last year with Target's Pitch Black II ICEE, which was just enough to keep me at a reasonably happy, no-need-for-suicide level.
This year, no such luck. Pitch Black is dead. Still, it doesn't feel right to march through the month of October without paying tribute to the unholy wondercola in some fashion, and while my Google searches provided no information on any new versions or Slurpees or whatnot, they did give me one small glimmer of joy: A drink recipe that mixes Mountain Dew Pitch Black and Jagermeister.
And it's a good recipe, too. Not only is it supremely simple, but its name is almost too offensive so say aloud in front of strangers.
You might be wondering how effective this recipe is when it calls for a soda that's no longer being produced. It really isn't a problem, because both the original and sequel versions of Mountain Dew Pitch Black are pretty easily found on eBay. So long as you're okay with swallowing soda that's technically too old to swallow, you too can offend select denominations sheerly by telling them the name of your drink.
I happen to own a stockpile of Pitch Black and Pitch Black II, and decided to go with the latter drink as it's a little less ancient. As is always the case with Jager, you should leave the bottle in your freezer for as long as possible before making the cocktail. If you're a stranger to Jager, picture drinking freezing cold grape cough syrup. That's pretty much all it is.
The end result is a pretty, purple glass of something that honestly doesn't taste so bad. The Pitch Black helps take the sting out of the liquor, so while it very much tastes like "Jager in soda," you can at least take a sip without making "oh God" faces afterwards. I won't be drinking this on any regular basis, but considering its ingredients, it's perfect for October. Plus, what the hell else am I supposed to do with all of those leftover cans of Mountain Dew Pitch Black? I only needed one for display purposes.
It may be a little late for you to round up some of the Dew from eBay and get everything into a highball glass before Halloween, but I assume the recipe would be salvageable with plain old grape soda.
This isn't exactly a step up from the Pitch Black goodness of yesteryear, but I'm still happy to bring a little dark Dew goodness into the season. Still wish Pepsi would reconsider their stance, though. One would imagine that the Internet is rife with virtual petitions in favor of a Pitch Black revival, but I felt it was my duty to contact Pepsi directly and tell them to treat me better.
And that's how I met Lisa.
If you click into the HELP section on Pepsi's official site, you'll meet Lisa. Lisa is Pepsi's "virtual representative," who will respond to any and all questions with a series of cheeky, automated responses. She's an excellent way to kill an hour, especially if you're already feeling goofy from drinking two Black Nazis.
Maybe Lisa could help spearhead my movement to bring Mountain Dew Pitch Black back into the fold? [more]
As you've grown tired of reading about by now, I haven't felt much Halloween spirit this season. Tried to beat the pissy out of my hizzy Sunday afternoon by going to a bunch of stores that I haven't already scoured forty times since late August.
Aside from the usual run of department stores and pharmacies was Spirit, a Halloween store that I've only normally witnessed as a temporary resident in local malls. This year, they upgraded by taking over a long closed Toys 'R' Us on the other side of town. In the photo above, look close and you'll notice the familiar TRU rainbow pattern. Well, I guess that's not too familiar. This particular TRU was not fond of remodeling to franchise specifications. TRU stores haven't had the bricky rainbows since the 1930s.
Spirit only utilized around an eighth of the store's available space, using crude curtains to block off the rest. This sucked the punch out of my original notion: "A Halloween store the size of a Toys 'R' Us! Wow!" Still, it was ten times bigger than any of the mall stores, and they put the extra real estate to good use with at least 45 aisles worth of Shrek costumes in different sizes.
Halloween stores are generally very expensive considering the quality of the goods sold, and this was no different. Skull-themed squeeze balls that reveal fake blood and rubber maggots inside the eye sockets are a perennial favorite, but we shouldn't be paying six bucks for them. We shouldn't, but we do, because tis the season for being frighteningly frivolous. I didn't come home empty handed, but at press time, I'm only willing to share a few of the purchased items with the general public…
A few of Spirit's displays were dedicated to clearance items, where the thrifty have a chance to buy all of the Halloween stuff nobody else loves at discount prices. I was thrilled to find the neon pumpkin light above, which despite looking like something from a 1986 Spencer's store, was actually only produced a few years ago. Originally retailing for 19.99, the clearance price was 6.97. I'm not sure if I would've bought it if it was 6.99. There's something about that "97" that always gets me.
There were other, cooler Halloween styles available, but I picked the pumpkin because it was the only one with a working "Try Me" demo button. I've been burned too many times on non- or mal- or some other three-letter-prefix-with-a-hyphen functioning clearance electronics, and really, there's no point in owning a neon light if it doesn't help your living room look at least a little bit like that shitty store Tootie built after Mrs. Garrett's bakery burned down.
The batteries were included, and the end result is quite nice. I have the option of leaving the pumpkin on with a consistent glow, or if I'm feeling saucy, I can have him flash on and off until he drives everyone within sight distance into epileptic fits. My neon pumpkin also makes a perfect centerpiece for my Halloween Mood Table™, as it's capable of giving off light without running any special risk of burning the apartment down. My hand-shaped five-wicked candle cannot say the same. On the flip side, the neon pumpkin light is totally at a loss when it comes to dripping wax that looks like human blood. Perhaps, if they work in tandem, the world will be theirs.
I think this is the first piece of real neon lighting that I've ever owned, which is somewhat cathartic considering the amount of time I spent pining for such lighting as a child. Back then, even small lights like this were preclusively expensive, and the only way I could grab one was by blowing one of my "big" birthday or Christmas gift wishes. I wanted a neon light, but not that much. Now that I have this, I can move forward with completing the second biggest treasure hunt of my childhood: That choking hazard poster with the mitt-handed blue guy.
And then, somehow, I let myself buy the two cheap slime toys seen above, which were ludicrously priced at 2.99 each. All told, they cost me almost as much as the pumpkin light! Each toy consists of a plastic coffin, filled with a stretchy, rubbery monster figure who lives in a soup of cold, brightly colored toy slime. It's the weirdest toy slime ever, too. Consistency-wise, it's sort of like that smelly shit we used to squeeze out of those little tin tubes to blow noxious bubbles with using a tiny straw. I worded that last sentence poorly, but hopefully someone knows what I'm referring to. The toy slime feels just like that stuff, and it's nowhere near liquidy enough to drip on any unsuspecting action figures who've gotten on my bad side. On the other hand, I was always warned not to touch dry ice, so I didn't, but I'm pretty sure that this is what it would feel like, and it's good to finally know! MOVING ON.
"Hot Spiced Cider" might sound a little Christmassy, but there are recipes for it in virtually every last one of my 5,000 Halloween craft/recipe magazines. I'm not really a fan of drinking alcohol for the flavor of it all, but rum seemed like it'd get completely lost in a sea of hot cider, and that's right up my alley. Problem is, it's been like 200 degrees out all month long. You can't really drink hot cider when you're already hot. Then you're dealing with "double hot," a term that could only be construed as positive if it was mouthed by some jackoff character in a Kevin Smith movie in relation to the ass of a nearby woman. So, I hungs a left on 2-1 and Lewis, and ended up with the next best thing: Cold Spiced Cider.
All you need is some store-bought apple cider and a nice bottle of Captain Morgan's spiced rum. Technically, what I bought from the store isn't true apple cider, but rather just the usual pasteurized apple juice under a more seasonal label. I don't care; it says "cider" and that's good enough for me. The official recipe calls for ten ounces of cider and two ounces of rum, but that's a bit of a hard sell. You'd have to drink a gallon of cider before you felt anything approaching tingly. I went a little closer to 3.5 ounces of rum for every 10 ounces of cider, and by my third glass, most of what was on TV seemed a lot funnier. So did my sneakers.
I added a dash of cinnamon, along with a cinnamon stick from a jar that was very likely older than I am. I choose to believe that cinnamon sticks are incapable of going bad, and that there's nothing wrong with stirring my drinks with a foodstuff that saw Carter in office. Despite my bravado, I abhor the taste of liquor, and the added cinnamon masks it well enough. I'd look up cinnamon on Wikipedia to try to come up with some metaphysical plusses in adding it, but the truth is, it's just fun to dash cinnamon on stuff and pretend you're some expert gourmand.
And speaking of haute cuisine, Ring Pop has unveiled their new Halloween flavor: Screaming Berry! It sort of tastes like blueberries, but the most amazing thing is that the black portions of the black & orange striped candies are actually black, and not that deep purple that so many candy companies try to pass off as black. I can't believe that this hasn't been heralded as a bigger breakthrough, but I suppose the people who give a shit about candy being black are a fairly silent minority.
The only downside is that truly black candy isn't translucent, thereby robbing us of the usual joy of watching that little plastic "knob" attached to the plastic ring become ever more visible as we suck and suck and suck. But, since I only came up with that gripe so my Ring Pop review could be more than a single paragraph, I'm not sure if it should really count.
I feel like it's been a year since I wrote words and shared them with people, so I apologize if there were any typos or other weirdnesses in the above. It's all about baby steps. Tonight, writing. Tomorrow, proofreading. And the next day, a good excuse for why I won't do either again for another two weeks.
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
Posted by Matt @ 7:48 pm [Link] [193 Comments]
