{"id":721,"date":"2006-10-31T11:53:37","date_gmt":"2006-10-31T11:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=721"},"modified":"2006-10-31T11:53:37","modified_gmt":"2006-10-31T11:53:37","slug":"pumpkinstuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/10\/31\/pumpkinstuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Pumpkinstuff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;m sharing cubicle space with a cowgirl, a saucy pirate wench, a proofreading fairy (she&#8217;s wearing a tutu and a t-shirt that says &#8220;I&#8217;m smarter than you&#8221;), and a short, female Mr. T. It&#8217;s awesome&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Halloween is actually the best day of the year for science-fiction fans. It&#8217;s the only one when you can dress in an outlandish costume, adopt a persona that&#8217;s the exact opposite of your own, and not worry about people thinking you&#8217;re strange. And speaking of the science fiction\/Halloween connection, here are a couple of suggestions if you&#8217;ve not yet carved yourself a jack o&#8217; lantern for tonight:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/blog\/pumpkin\/index.html\">Klingon pumpkin<\/a> is a simple design that won&#8217;t be recognizable to anyone but a Trekkie, but the narrative explaining its creation is a hoot. I especially love the line about how &#8220;You will have to carve out the insides, just as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Kahless\">Kahless<\/a> did to his enemies.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>If <i>Doctor Who<\/i> is more your thing than <i>Star Trek<\/i>, try making a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evilmadscientist.com\/article.php\/DalekPumpkin\">Dalek pumpkin<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re really ambitious, you can make a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evilmadscientist.com\/article.php\/CylonOLantern\">pumpkin that resembles an old-school Cylon<\/a> from the original &#8217;70s-vintage <i>Battlestar Galactica<\/i> &#8212; right down to the creepy red &#8220;eye scanner&#8221; lights! (I&#8217;m thinking I may try to do this one next year, when I have a little more time to experiment with the electronics&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>And finally, after you put in all that effort to create a really bitchin&#8217; jack o&#8217;, you&#8217;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&#8230; read about this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myscienceproject.org\/pumpkin.html\">experiment<\/a> that compared several different methods. Looks to me like you&#8217;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&#8217; lantern on the street will be smashed in the middle of the street by dawn tomorrow&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;m sharing cubicle space with a cowgirl, a saucy pirate wench, a proofreading fairy (she&#8217;s wearing a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}