So, I ducked into my favorite local burger emporium last night to grab some take-out. I was in a hurry, because it was Halloween, after all, and I wanted to get back to The Girlfriend’s place before Michael Myers got her, or me. The place looked safe enough on the outside, an island of friendly red neon standing firm against the cold darkness of All Hallow’s Eve. But when I got inside and took a look around the place, I thought the dread power of the Great Old Ones had caught up to me after all and swept me off to some horrible mirror-version of 1986: all the young female counter staff were wearing torn, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts and leg warmers, and they had their hair pulled up into long ponytails worn off to one side of their heads. The lone boy working one of the cash registers up front was stylin’ in a double-breasted, blue-and-white-striped linen sport coat and a fake mullet. It was my high-school yearbook, reanimated without a soul and shambling through the graveyard toward me with ironic detachment in its eyes.

“You know,” I said to Counter-Boy in a small-talkish voice, “I used to have a jacket kinda that one.”

“Really?” he replied. “I got this from my dad.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d probably gone to school with his dad, or that if the, ahem, experiences of my younger self had gone just a bit differently, I could have a son about his same age.

The realization that I’m now old enough to have a teenaged child who would think that my old ’80s clothes would make a good Halloween costume — and that the ’80s are now as mockably distant for today’s kids as the Flower-Power ’60s were for me and my friends — was the scariest thing I encountered last night. Michael Myers has got nothing on the relentless march of time. Not that the damn kids these days would know who he is, anyway…

The Girlfriend was in a very strange mood last night, and now today I find I’m feeling verrrrrryy tired. Weird, huh?

If you like your Halloween a little more shocking and chilling than the tame Disney-style creepiness I mentioned in the previous entry, check out this video:

[Note: Simple Tricks and Nonsense is not responsible for any harm that may occur as a result of viewing this scary video. Do not view while holding a hot beverage, or indeed any other kind of beverage. And it’s probably not a good idea to sit too close to the screen, as that may increase the scariness…]

Here are a couple more links that might help you get in a mildly creeped-out mood for All Hallow’s Eve:

• James Lopez is an animator who has worked with Disney and Dreamworks on a number of high-profile features. He also loves the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. We all do, of course — it’s the coolest ride in the park next to Pirates — but James loves it so much that he’s recreated elements of the Mansion in his own home, and what he does to the place for Halloween is out-and-out inspiring. You can see for yourself if you check out his blog.
• When I was a kid, my parents used to set up stereo speakers in our front-room windows and play a spooky sound effects record (you see, kiddies, we used to have these things called vinyl LPs) to set the mood for trick-or-treaters approaching the house. I remember one especially amusing incident when this little kid rang our doorbell just the sound of a gigantic Oriental gong played. Scared the crap out of him. Ah, good times. Anyhow, Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has similar memories from his childhood; he suggests that science fans can accomplish the same effect as those old records by looping the eerie sounds of Saturn. To explain, the ringed planet emits intense radio emissions, which have been recorded by the Cassini spacecraft, sent back to Earth, and processed so we puny humans can actually hear them. I listened to them myself a little earlier, and they are the perfect ambient noise to induce feelings of unsettled foreboding…

Enjoy!

I love Halloween. Driving to the train station today, I passed a faceless, cloaked, and hooded ghoul riding his bike to school. On the train, I sat next to a middle-aged Raggedy Ann doll. And now at work I’m sharing cubicle space with a cowgirl, a saucy pirate wench, a proofreading fairy (she’s wearing a tutu and a t-shirt that says “I’m smarter than you”), and a short, female Mr. T. It’s awesome…

Halloween is actually the best day of the year for science-fiction fans. It’s the only one when you can dress in an outlandish costume, adopt a persona that’s the exact opposite of your own, and not worry about people thinking you’re strange. And speaking of the science fiction/Halloween connection, here are a couple of suggestions if you’ve not yet carved yourself a jack o’ lantern for tonight:

• The Klingon pumpkin is a simple design that won’t be recognizable to anyone but a Trekkie, but the narrative explaining its creation is a hoot. I especially love the line about how “You will have to carve out the insides, just as Kahless did to his enemies.”
• If Doctor Who is more your thing than Star Trek, try making a Dalek pumpkin.
• If you’re really ambitious, you can make a pumpkin that resembles an old-school Cylon from the original ’70s-vintage Battlestar Galactica — right down to the creepy red “eye scanner” lights! (I’m thinking I may try to do this one next year, when I have a little more time to experiment with the electronics…)
• And finally, after you put in all that effort to create a really bitchin’ jack o’, you’ll want it to stick around for a while. You may have heard about various techniques to preserve them (or at least extend their lifetime), but how can you know which really work and which are just a load of slimy pumpkin guts? Simple… read about this experiment that compared several different methods. Looks to me like you’re better off not doing anything and just letting nature take its course. Not that it matters much in any event; if your neighborhood is anything like mine, every jack o’ lantern on the street will be smashed in the middle of the street by dawn tomorrow…

A couple months ago, I added a new stop to my daily tour of the InterWebs, a site called English Russia. It’s a photoblog that documents the strange, beautiful, sad, and sometimes — like the image above of subway “team sleepers” — humorous aspects of life in the Russian-speaking countries. The photos and occasional videos are described in English so you’ll know what you’re looking at.

I find this site fascinating — I grew up during Reagan’s tenure in the White House, when the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and Russians were mysterious, faceless villains lurking in the dark corners of the world. After the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR imploded, it was if a whole other planet had been discovered, and I went through a phase of intense curiosity about the former Soviet nations. I wanted to know what the landscape looked like, what life was like over there, what the people really thought about things instead of what propaganda had always told us they thought. I even bought a Russian watch and a set of defunct coins, thinking they might be worth something some day. The idea that something as huge and intractable as the US-Soviet rivalry, a paradigm that seemed to my teenaged mind as eternal as the stars themselves, could evaporate almost literally overnight was bewildering to me. If only I’d had access to this web site back in 1990!

Here are some of the recent entries that have caught my interest:

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