I want to say that I support breast cancer research and admire anyone who has had to deal with that disease. Cancer is bad. Fighting it is good. However, every time I drive by this display on Franklin Street, I feel like the pink thing has gone way too far:

Pink pumpkins? My drive-by photography doesn’t quite capture the grossness of these gourds. Closeup they look like they were dipped in a vat of Pepto Bismol or coated in pink nail polish, neither of which sounds delectable to me. They are the very definition of BLECH. Pink is nature’s way of saying, “DANGER! Do not eat!” Pink pumpkins are as unnatural as a sharktopus.

In addition, the witch in the top photo was probably strung up to make it appear like she’s flying, but it actually looks like she was hanged by Puritans for practicing her dark arts.

To sum up, this yard display does not get me fired up about either Breast Cancer Awareness month nor Halloween. It does get me excited about using my […]

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So…you know that race I was going to run while wearing a Halloween costume? Yeah, that one. Well, something rained on my parade. More specifically, it was this big, yellow-green blob:

I enjoy a good footrace as much as anyone, and I did trek downtown to gawk at the freaks document the event for you guys, but my costume did not involve an umbrella or a rain slicker, so I decided it was best to sit this one out. Good thing too, because there were two people in pink pig outfits with “H1N1” written on their bodies who looked rather contagious. Between that and the wet leaves littered on the course path, I probably would have broken my neck and then developed pneumonia.

My bystander status meant that for the first time in my life I got to watch the start of a race instead of standing patiently at the back waiting for everyone else to move. Did you know they have people on bicycles leading the runners? I had no idea! I always thought that […]

• Continue reading "Run Like Hell…unless it’s raining"

There is a Halloween store set up in the corpse of the old Circuit City building. I can’t remember if such stores existed when I was a child, but in the past few years they’ve become popular in my town. The Halloween stores appear out of nowhere at the end of September, rent a huge empty space left by a recently deceased store, and then just as quickly disappear by the first days of November, making me wonder if they existed at all. You never know where they’ll show up next year, so you just have to keep a lookout for the big yellow banner hanging outside your local strip mall.

I went to the Circuit City Halloween store yesterday to look for a costume for the Run Like Hell race that is only a week away. It was odd to see rows of ghost masks and sexy nurse costumes lining the walls store, instead of the rows of flatscreen TVs that I remember. It was rather depressing to look at all the female costumes that […]

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I’d never gone to a costume party for Halloween before this year. I know this is odd, but at least I am familiar with the concept of Halloween, unlike a friend I had in middle school who had lived abroad her whole life. I took her trick-or-treating for the first time in the 90’s and she was befuzzled by the concept, asking, “So, we dress up and they’re just going to give us candy?” It is sort of weird when you look at it from the outside in.

The party was held at a bar and part of the fun was guessing what everyone’s costume was. Some people were obvious and were greeted with, “Oh, you’re a butterfly!” at the site of over-sized wings that almost knocked over drink cups all night. Other costumes needed time for all the clues to arrange themselves into the answer, like the guy in a scruffy blond wig and a flannel shirt who I couldn’t figure out until I saw the shotgun. “Kurt Cobain!” (I didn’t say they were all […]

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Woah, did you know pumpkins could grow warts?

I walked into the Fresh Market yesterday and saw a pile of these ugly creatures in the corner past the sliding doors. I thought they must be the victims of a pernicious pumpkin disease, but according to this site they bred these knucklehead pumpkins on purpose. “In fact, it has taken over 10 generations of breeding to obtain the size and consistency of warting for these varieties.”

Now, I LOVE pumpkin pie and pumpkin cheesecake and pumpkin bread and canned pumpkin mixed with instant pudding mix. Pumpkin is my favorite squash. I love that it’s pumpkin season again. These pumpkins are probably just as tasty as their clear-skinned cousins. So, I know it’s looks-ist of me, but I want to take a knife or a bottle of liquid nitrogen and freeze the warts off that orange skin. It looks so gross.

But to each her own. I suppose someone must think these pumpkins look cool if they spent 10 years of their time on it. I won’t be buying any, […]

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