I've been sick for the past few days, and I'm currently on strong meds. Like, really strong meds. Not to the point of having hallucinations, but there have been some interesting dreams. In one, people from my job were e-mailing me to ask for ETAs on upcoming X-E posts. In another, I was ripping the viscera out of live animals and making large-scale spaghetti art with it.

Somewhere in this haze, I visited Target to see if they've done the big switch from "back to school" to "ghastly ghoul" yet. They haven't. Well, they started to, but the Halloween stuff is still playing second fiddle to copious amounts of High School Musical XXVVI schoolbags. This transitional period, affecting nearly every retail chain, has long been the bane of my existence.

I managed to snag a few choice items, though:

First up, the official Halloween Slinky. The box doesn't dare call it that, but considering the color scheme and the amount of skeletons and spider webs adorning the box, I think it's safe to call it a Halloween Slinky.

It's such a perfect little Halloween toy. I've mentioned how Halloween has inspired its own branch of "stocking stuffers" before, but it's never been so perfectly exemplified as with this item. A Halloween Slinky really paves way for families to make Halloween stockings a part of their annual spooky celebrations, which would totally make up for any bad years on the trick-or-treating front. (Trick-or-treat hauls are always a crapshoot, but it'd be pretty hard to fuck up a Slinky in a big black sock.)

Look past the mesmerizing Halloween icons all over the box, and you'll notice the cutest disclaimer ever on the lower left: "Quantity: 1 Slinky." Maybe it's the meds, but that totally gives me the giggles. I love it when the clarification of contents is hilarious.

The Slinky itself is a orange and black marvel, and would probably double nicely as a bracelet to complete one of those "punk rock" Halloween costumes that people sometimes fall back on when they're too lazy to put any effort in.

Hot Wheels is back with their 2009 Scary Cars set. The packaging is an enormous improvement over last year's collection, looking more like a not-for-sale store display than something you get to keep. Really dig the haunted house/graveyard setting on the header, both for being an archetype Halloween setting and for reminding me of my friend's creepy old vacation house so much.

Sadly, the cars aren't so great. Take a gander. I guess they're kinda spooky, but not really. It's too much flame paint and too little everything else. The back of the box went through the trouble of giving them nice names like "Sir Ominous" and "The Demon," but in this instance, it's akin to me calling the plain yellow coffee cup in front of me "The Devil's Chalice."

Ending on the highest possible note, it's Boo Berry Fruit By The Foot! This isn't a new item, but I was unable to procure a box last year. Of all my many plights, here's the one that stings the most: Boo Berry hates my city, and he only lets his likeness show up here if General Mills forces him to meet some unknown token quota.

I reviewed the Franken Berry versions last year, and even though my heart and stomach prefer artificial strawberries to artificial blueberries, I'd take Boo Berry-flavored anything over sad and overexposed Frank any day of the week.

The official title of Boo Berry's FBTF is "Razzle Boo Blitz," which incidentally is the exact pseudonym I use when I grab my sax and hit the little-known circuit of jazz bars in South Jersey. The candies look like this, and they're delicious. My only gripe is that the back of the box lacks any type of Boo Berry-styled word searches or crossword puzzles, but then, maybe I'm expecting cereal-level entertainment when I really have no reason to.