Umm...Boo?

Third of three posts regarding Halloween ’07! Enjoy!

No, it isn’t. I lied.As you may have noticed ‘round these parts, it’s been an exceptionally quiet week here at the YAB Mainframe. I think we launched all of one post into the cyberfunny over the last seven days, and that’s not out of a lack of humor occurring in my world on a daily basis. Nor has it been a particularly busy timeframe, either. There are just sometimes when finding a solid block to write is remarkably difficult, forcing the backlog to an astronomical all-time high. Do we give up in the face of adversity? Of course not.

YAB exists on a plane of stubbornness, overlaid with comedic fortitude.

Our Post-It Note of Hilarity (trademark pending) remains full of funny ideas, and we completely intend to get to each and every one of them. However, when you set yourself up with a scheduling mandate (like the one that kicked off this post 162 words ago), greasing the wheels of a train stuck in the station grows ever harder. My plan was to run a trio of posts about Halloween, and to date, we’re sitting on two. Every day we sit down to write, and we see this order staring us in the face.

You know what? We got nothing.

What started as a nostalgic tirade on the silly costumes our parents put us in for our first Halloweens was supposed to finish with a picture of Clara in a costume of which she had zero say in selecting. I had my share of silly outfits for All Hallow’s Eve, complete with the realization that any joy gleaned from that day decades ago is outweighed by the embarrassment endured once incriminating photos surface on, let’s say, your wedding day. However, this post – the third in the triumvirate – will not come to be this year. Clara, in a clever rouse, decided Halloween would be a grand time to catch a virus.

Thus, negating the nefarious plan of dressing her like a honey pot by her parents.

Drat.

You don’t tell a funny story at a cocktail party if you don’t have a punch line waiting to slay. Similarly, you don’t write a Halloween post about funny costumes if you don’t have a funny costume to show at the end.

Furthermore, as I type out this post, I see that the real date is now November 11th, nearly two weeks after Halloween. There’s nothing worse than forcing someone to think about a holiday that is nowhere remotely close to the actual day of celebration.

You got that, Wegmans?

Starting with about two weeks ago, I could purchase my Christmas tree while getting groceries. And while we haven’t been exposed to Christmas music yet, I fear that the days of The First Noel in the Freezer Aisle are soon.

A Return to Hilarity starts…this week.

Holiday-Encouraged Knifeplay

Second of three posts regarding Halloween ’07! Enjoy!

Yes, it’s no secret that the main custom associated with Halloween involves the costumes and the begging strangers for candy. We’ve got that down. Hell, I think we even spoke of our attempts to participate in the holiday a few years back while exposing the fact that I have an enormous cranium. Little known reason of why people blog: to point out their own foibles.

However, taking silver on the Hallopodium would be the ancient tradition of carving pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns. Why? Apparently in the days of yore, it would turn cold right about this time of year. And since friendship has this uncanny ability to make people feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside, the people of the village would often befriend pumpkins for additional companionship. And since a pumpkin is just a pumpkin if it lacks humanesque features, faces were carved into these oversized gourds. Don’t believe me? Fine, you’re entitled to your opinion. But would the dialogue in Cast Away be as believable had Tom Hanks NOT drawn a face on the stupid volleyball? Yeah, didn’t think so.

My first memories of pumpkin carving involved sitting on the back deck with my grandfather. It was an age when I couldn’t be trusted with a knife – actually, I still can’t be trusted with a knife, it’s just that I’m bigger than anyone who used to tell me I couldn’t be trusted with a knife and rather than argue, I just show them my knife. In this childhood scenario, my only job was to pick out the pumpkin. We’d go to the farm. (in places other than Northern Virginia, you actually go out on a tractor ride and pick your own. No need for Holishax.) I really had only one goal in my selection: “ensure my pumpkin dwarfed my sister’s in size, shape, and technical merit.” To this day, I’m undefeated.

When you can’t do the knifing, you can use your limited skill set to your advantage. The one awful part of pumpkin carving involves the cleaning of the interior. I’ve never been a fan of it. It falls along the lines of those stupid party games where the adults blindfold you, shove your hands into a bowl of wet spaghetti and tell you your touching brains. Who came up with that game? I can’t think of a single holiday so special to me that I’d gladly touch a brain in order to celebrate its personal importance.

There’s a reason I didn’t go pre-med.

Once the pumpkin’s insides resemble a brand new basketball, it’s time to cut. When I was a kid, I lacked imagination when it came to vegetable artistry. Eyes? They should totally be triangles! Nose? What if I used a triangle, you know, so that it can match the eyes!!! Mouth? Why not throw some teeth in there, alternating on the upper and lower lip, so that if the pumpkin magically gains the ability to close its mouth there will be no gnashing of teeth. Hey, stranger things have happened. I once saw a movie where a pumpkin turned into a method of transportation.

Crazy.

So what happens now that I’ve got a kid of my own? She clearly can’t be trusted to wield a knife, and they mere sight of pumpkin guts freak her out. Now Katie did a fantastic job of initial interior demolition, so to this day, I don’t have to deal with the stupid innards. But I like to think YAB has if nothing else made me more creative, so I thought for Clara’s 1st Halloween, I’d try and branch out a bit with my craftsmanship. You’ve got to be determined. You’ve got to be dexterous. You’ve got to have more dedication to art than, say, Celtics rookie Glen Davis: (This is in regards to Davis visiting the Sistine Chapel in the preseason, btw.)

“There’s no way I would take six years painting a ceiling. But I guess you do what you’ve got to do, and I just want to commend Michelangelo.”

Now I didn’t take six years, but rather one full episode of Kid Nation. The finished product is below. Behold my talent. (That’s on homage to my earlier works on the left.)

Regression to an Upset Stomach

First of Three posts regarding Halloween ’07! Enjoy!

It’s not often that I choose to bombard you people with statistical analysis. But as a holder a collegiate and a post-graduate degree, sometimes you need to take your edumacation out of the garage for a spin around the block. William and Mary and GW insisted that some sort of statistics class as part of the course work, although I’ve yet to find a need to find the deviation of anything, standard or otherwise. And since we ate all of our pie charts on account of them being delicious, we’re going to use other means to blind you with numbers. But worry not, intrepid YABbites! We promise the subject matter will be infused with sugar.
But first, a poll.

I don’t know how I came across the poll that ESPN Sports Nation was running the day after All Hallow’s Eve. But when it came down to it, I’m kind of addicted to lists. And seeing that I am a citizen of SportsNation, my failure to contribute a ranking of my own would then make the sample size of SportsNation incomplete. Plus, that would be a lack of patriotism on my part, and in addition to belittling Halloween, my Fourth of July privileges would be suspended.

The task at hand was simple: rank the list of 40 candies from 1 to 40, and while the parameters or performance measures were unclear, we assumed that it was a scale of Awesomitude. My answers are to the right, and while completed quickly, I feel they accurately reflect the correct answers to the quiz at hand.

That’s right. The Correct Answers. Any answers that do not mirror these answers are by definition incorrect. You hear that Sports Nation? And now, my analysis of this saccharine experiment.

• Let there be no mistake: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are the undisputed Number 1 Halloween Candy. Over 8,000 of us are in agreement of this. For some reason, the PB Cup is smaller in volume than your standard candy bar, and yet, you feel satisfied by the amount of candy you just consumed. That’s magic. Whoever Reese is, I applaud his effort to combine chocolate and peanut butter to make the ideal convenience store treat. (Note: Item is 78% tastier if you remember to remove the thin black wrapper underneath the cup.)
• SportsNation has declared the candy corn as the worst candy on the list. I had them ranked at 28. While the texture of candy corn taste mysteriously better in tiny pumpkin form, I feel that there was a miscommunication here on the part of the pollsters. Like moose and deer, corn is a word that stands for both the singular and plural form of the item. When I read “candy corn,” I assumed it was at least a handful of the product, justifying my average ranking. I assume SportsNation figured it was only one – singular – candy corn, relegating to the basement. You know, if you only received one, that would kind of suck.
• Comparing my Top 12 to their Top 12, I see that we share 9 of the same types of candy. What does this go to show? This Candy List is no better than College Football. It’s the same powerhouse teams every single year, with the occasional surprise team that is either having a Cinderella season or a lucky recruiting class comes to fruition. At the top of any candy poll, you’re going to see the same heavy hitters – Snickers, Twix, M&Ms – every single year. It’s the South Floridas and Boise States that are what you really look forward to getting while Trick or Treating. In my case, that would be Caramello. How can you tell it doesn’t normally hang out with the favorites? That’s right. ESPN SPELLED IT WRONG.
• The column in red refers to the number of times SportsNation put each candy in the 1st place slot. It appears out of over 28,000 entries; only 77 give the gold medal to Hershey’s Kisses. And yet, those guys finished a respectable 17th. Conclusion: We can all agree that Hershey’s Kisses don’t suck.
• Mr. Goodbar at 22??? Notice its rightful place on my list at 37. I think I’ve heard this rant before – check the comments, kids.

Additional thoughts? Let’s have them in the comments.