Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

After roe, women are no longer free.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Second rate reporter says what?

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

I was promised a recession.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sunday Morning Open Thread: Happy Halloween!

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Happy Halloween!

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  5. 5.

    germy

    parents of girls: my 5 year old dressed as a congresswoman for Halloween this year ❤️ she asked if she could do this for her costume because she wants to be a congresswoman one day

    parents of boys: Hes fortnite fish stick

    — r (@reaghhan) October 30, 2021

  6. 6.

    JMG

    As soon as I finish my second cup of coffee, I will make a jack o’ lantern. It’s a neighborhood sign your home is open for trick or treating. Last year there were no trick or treaters, alas.

    A sign of increasing age. Alice and I will forego our traditional Halloween meal of meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy. When our grown children were trick or treat age, she’d make this meal to stuff them so they wouldn’t go at all the candy as soon as they got home, allowing us time to appropriate, hide and ration their loot on subsequent days.

    Mini-Hershey bars will be our candy for those children who show up.

  7. 7.

    Nelle

    In Des Moines area, the tradition, begun in the 1930’s, is Beggars Night, which is on Oct. 30.  The kids are to tell a joke or riddle before getting candy.  It was a lovely, mild night.  Most of the jokes are groaners.  My favorite was “What is a cat’s favorite color?  Purrr-ple.”  My two year old granddaughter just yelled “Banana pants!!” And laughed hysterically.

  9. 9.

    germy

    When I was a kid, the night before Halloween was called “Cabbage Night” and it was the night for neighborhood mischief.

    I was somewhat relieved we had rain most of last night.  I don’t know what kids nowadays call the night before Halloween, but mischief sometimes happens.

  10. 10.

    Frankensteinbeck

    In the book, Frankenstein’s monster is not made of body parts sewn together.  He specifically refuses to describe how he creates life, although stitches are involved somehow.  The plot happens because when he succeeds, the monster is so hideously ugly that Frank throws it in the trash.  It does not take this rejection well.  Frank does not want to create another of these ugly things, especially a female that would allow more abominations to breed.

    Frankenstein is an asshole and a bad parent.  That the monster has exactly the same asshole personality and they hate each other is the moral lesson.

  16. 16.

    Nicole

    I’m the genius who suggested Zombie Captain America to my son (from What If).  My husband, who is, in his heart, Rick Baker, was up late last night making prosthetics for the costume.  It’s going to be a long day in the makeup chair for the 11-year-old.  At least he’s looking forward to it.

    And I found this entertaining article yesterday on how a cholera epidemic in County Sligo when his mom was 14 provided a lot of the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  (As opposed to, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which provided a lot of inspiration for mocking poor Keanu Reeves)

    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/irish-epidemic-inspired-dracula

  17. 17.

    sab

    What is wrong with me that I don’t like pumpkin unless it is in a pie?

    Better go buy the dogs leftover pumpkins today.

  21. 21.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: I just read Frankenstein for the first time, because my daughter had it as a school assignment and I was curious.

    It’s a remarkably psychologically sophisticated novel for the time. I think Frankenstein and the monster have different types of asshole personality–Frankenstein is this pampered kid who was never exposed to anything unpleasant in his life and never experienced consequences for anything, so he’s completely irresponsible and full of himself and nopes out the moment he sees something ugly. The monster, on the other hand, got no upbringing at all and has known nothing but abuse and rejection–that he becomes a revenge-driven serial killer is actually fairly understandable.

  24. 24.

    sab

    Ponyo, recuperating from cancer surgery she didn’t know was from cancer, is now urgently sucking on the quilt we gave her for comfort when we first adopted her.

  26. 26.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Baud: and @schrodingers_cat: and @Matt McIrvin:
    It is absolutely psychologically sophisticated.  It is a vastly deeper book than the movies portray.  I’ve only seen one Frankenstein movie that even vaguely resembled it.  I must insist on the ‘Frankenstein and his monster have the same personality’ aspect.  If you’ve read it, you’ll remember all the commentary about Paradise Lost.  That is the key to the story itself.  God created Man in his own image, and it was a disaster.  Frankenstein created the monster in his own image, and he hated it.  Which I think is brilliant.
    EDIT – Note that they are both intellectual, thoughtful, polite, but utterly self-centered and do not value other lives except how those lives reflect their own desires.  Frankenstein’s grief over who the monster kills is primarily about his own fears of discovery and blame.  Similarly, he does not care one rat fart about the monster’s happiness or his own responsibility for what he created.  He didn’t get what he wanted, so he wanted it to die.  Same as the monster.  They’re also both shallow as a petri dish.​

  27. 27.

    Leslie

    @sab: Good thoughts for Ponyo’s recovery.

    We moved to our present location in November 2019, so we have no idea how Halloween typically goes here. We haven’t done any decorations or bought any candy yet, so we’ll probably stay dark this year.

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: There’s this one amazing moment when Frankenstein says something like “I started to understand the responsibility that a creator must have toward his creation”, like there’s some dawning realization there of what’s been going on–and then, nope, he doesn’t really take away anything from it except “I have to destroy the monster and shut this down”. When he gives the pep talk to the mutinous sailors on the Arctic ship, it’s like he’s learned nothing. In one ear and out the other.

    The other bit that struck me is that the one person at school who gives any resistance to Frankenstein’s bullshit, the sarcastic professor who thinks he’s a dumdum for studying alchemy, is described as ugly. “Ugly” = “not nice to me” in his mind.

  31. 31.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Which is freaking genius.  You see this in assholes all the time in real life, in abusers and in political discourse with conservatives.  They walk right up to the line of realizing their mistakes, then turn right around and declare it proves their original asshole position.

    @schrodingers_cat:

    It was inspired by Giovanni Aldini experiments with electricity IIRC.

    And unfortunately by a genius 17 year old girl trying to deal with being stuck in a house with her self-absorbed celebrity husband and his sex-crazed best friend Byron.  It is maddening that Mary was one of the coolest people and greatest writing geniuses in history, and thanks to raging sexism we have barely any content from her.

  33. 33.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: …oh, and his response to being called out for getting into alchemy is basically “I’m not even mad” but you can tell he totally was. There are multiple layers of unreliable narrator stacked on top of one another.

  44. 44.

    Gin & Tonic

    Is is just me, or has Halloween become much more of an occasion for adults in the last decade or two? I somehow don’t recall adults decorating their houses with “spooky” Halloween-themed stuff when I was younger.

  45. 45.

    laura

    @sab: You’re good people getting Ponyo a comfy banky and Ponyo using the comfy banky to self soothe. Thank you for the update  and best wishes for positive news for this sweet sweet woozle.

  48. 48.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Gin & Tonic: Absolutely. I read that Halloween is now the second most decorated holiday after Christmas. I also don’t remember adults dressing up and going to Halloween parties. Mind you, I’m not objecting. It’s just a change, as you said.

  49. 49.

    Just Chuck

    @Frankensteinbeck: Meanwhile Byron’s wife was … checks notes … inventing computer programming, undeterred by the minor inconvenience that computers wouldn’t be invented for another century.

  52. 52.

    mrmoshpotato

    Ring-tailed lemurs are seen playing and eating Halloween treats out of jack-o’-lanterns at the Oregon Zoo

    Tasty, tasty GoPro.

  55. 55.

    Jay C

    @Kirk Spencer:

    You’re right: Ada Lovelace – 19th-Century noblewoman/numbers-geek/prototype programmer was Lord Byron’s daughter (his only legitimate child), though they never actually met.

    (it’s Byron: family weird stuff was par-for-the-course)

  56. 56.

    Gin & Tonic

    The meme going around Ukrainian Twitter today is that you can get more done with a kind word and a Bayraktar than with a kind word alone. (Yes, it’s not original, and the Bayraktar is a Turkish-made UACV [unmanned aerial combat vehicle, sometimes called a drone] which Ukrainian forces have used against Russian artillery in occupied Donbas.)

  57. 57.

    JMG

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: There have been elaborate Halloween decorations on (some) homes in the Boston suburbs since I’ve lived in them, which is like 35 years now. One guy in my old neighborhood went full haunted house with sound effects and such back when my son was in kindergarten. He’s 36 now.

  58. 58.

    RaflW

    @Gin & Tonic: I remember people having some more basic decor in the past (’73 to about ’80 were my trick or treat years?). I remember people playing spooky music and some had colored flood lights (easily changed to for Xmas season).

    A bedsheet ghost was common. My mom had this funny handmade witch that rode a rather nice artists paintbrush as a broom for our front door.

    The big increase in inflatable yard stuff in the past few years is quite noticeable.

  59. 59.

    Mike in NC

    Just read that standup comedian Mort Sahl died a few days ago at age 94. A famous joke he made about German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, whose memoir was entitled “I Aim For The Stars”.

    Mort said, “I Aim For The Stars But Sometimes I Hit London”.

  60. 60.

    narya

    I don’t really “do” Hallowe’en–for last week’s run, we were supposed to have our favorite costume (of our own) on our race bib, and I truly had nothing. (I was outed, because I won a hat from the brewery, which my friend promptly grabbed.) Yesterday I was a cooking madwoman: I roasted two butternut, one spaghetti, one delicata, and one pumpkin squash (all from the farm share), roasted the rest of last year’s carrots and some leeks, made two pots of beans (Domingo Rojo and garbanzo), made some breakfast muffins (oat bran, flax, dates, apricots, cranberries, ginger), made a double batch of pate sucree for the freezer, and poached a bunch of pears, later to become a pear tart (they’re in the freezer, too). Already went for a run/walk, and I intend to spend the rest of the day doing as much nothing as possible.

  62. 62.

    Sure Lurkalot

    I’m not a house decorator for any holiday. Am I trying to balance out those who overdo it? Hey niece…looking at you.

    Seriously, I don’t know how I turned out this way but I’m in the shedding possessions stage of life so I guess my fate is sealed. Still, I really like Halloween decorations and I’ve enjoyed seeing some great installations while on walks or errands.

    No one ever comes to our duplex community of mostly olds. And, right on schedule, our 65 degree weather yesterday has turned to 40 degrees today which happens more than not in Colorado. I scooped up about $10 worth of full size candy bars at the check out counter on Friday, just in case.

  63. 63.

    oldgold

    My most frightening  Halloween memory occurred when I was 13.

    My church had a Halloween teen dance. I did not want to go. My mom made me – “OG, you will have fun!”

    All my buddies attended other churches. The kids there were mostly older than me. I had never danced. Ugh! I tried to melt into the Church’s  basement  wall and get through the night.

    Then, I heard a female voice shout “OG!“ Damnation, it was the Right Reverend’s wife with her 15 year old daughter in tow. OH NO! “OG, Gladys would like to dance with you. Now, get out there!”

    Now, Gladys was in no danger of winning a beauty pageant, which was the very reason the Reverend’s wife had matched her with the sorriest ass boy there – me.

    Gladys grabbed me and out on the dance floor I was. As the music played, I shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. Miserable. Then a slow song came up.  I found myself in Gladys’s clutches. She was well endowed. The minister and his wife were standing only a few feet away.   I feared, if the Right Reverend got a close look at me, I was going to be publicly identified as a wretched sinner of the flesh and likely to be torn asunder. I was sweating profusely and praying hard for divine intervention. Instead, the Devil showed up. After all, it was Halloween.

    At some point her parents were distracted and Gladys took me by the hand and led me through secret dark passages that led up to the balcony in the Churches sanctuary.

    Now,  I was greener than grass when it came to interacting with the opposite sex.  Apparently, this was not the case with Gladys. Soon in the darkness of the sanctuary, a boy, who had never been up to batt before,  was rounding second base. My testosterone sodded mind, what was left of it, was racing with two conflicting thoughts: this is GREAT and this is SO WRONG – you are in the church sanctuary with the Minister’s  daughter!

    Boom! The lights in the sanctuary blazed on. I heard the Minister yell, “Gladys?“ My life flashed before my eyes. Off the balcony pew and onto the floor we ducked. Whew, he did not see or hear us.  The lights went out.  After rearranging our disheveled garments, we stealthily crawled back through the dark passages to the church basement. The dance was shutting down, without saying goodbye, thank you or a damn thing to Gladys,  I bolted for the door and literally ran home.

    The next day, Sunday, which that year, like this, was Halloween. I was sitting in the family pew, between my Mom and Grandmother. The Right Reverend was sternly raging against the weakness of the flesh and the grim hell that awaited those who fell victim to it. In the front pew I saw Gladys sitting primly between her Mother and big, burly older Brother – ugh. I glanced up at the balcony. At that moment, a cold shiver ran up my spine that no Halloween fright has ever come close to matching.

  64. 64.

    WaterGirl

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:  There have always been adult Halloween parties around here.  i went to tons of them when I was in college and after.

    My mom died on Halloween.  I had always loved Halloween, and the following year I didn’t know what to do.  I decided to have a Halloween party as I didn’t think my mom would want to see me at home, moping, which was most definitely the alternative.

  68. 68.

    oldgold

    @WaterGirl:  Some say so. But mostly, I am just an old fashioned sinner in need of confession.  And, my tale needs a good edit. Hard to write with the Grandkids milling about. 

    Perhaps, some day, I will tell the tale of that next summer’s church camp!

  69. 69.

    Roger Moore

    @Just Chuck:

    Actually, it was Byron’s daughter who invented computer programming, not his wife.  It’s still a fantastic example of different generations of the same family being great in wildly different fields.

  70. 70.

    snoey

    @Gin & Tonic: ​

    Halioween’s come a long way.

    My mom remembers that when she was a child ~85 years ago there was no trick or treat, just “tricks”, and it started with her brother going out the bedroom window and across the porch roof.
    Part of the adult Halloween celebration apparently started because it was a day when you couldn’t bust gay folk for partying in drag.

  72. 72.

    opiejeanne

    @RaflW: Circa 1962, there was a guy in the neighborhood who scared the dickens out of the kids one night, dancing  in his well-lit garage to a Hawai`ian war chant, wearing a kilt and a t-whirt. Every one of us ran home, and by the time my dad got there the place was dark. Later, none of us could explain why this was so scary.

    This was in the new housing tract built behind ours and our neighbors houses, and another neighbor always put up a big sign telling kids they were going to hell for celebrating Hallowe’en, another sign that said to keep off of HIS sidewalk or he’d call the cops, and at Christmas another sign told us there was no Santa Claus, ask your parents. It was the only place that the owner never did anything about the weeds and rocks left by the builders.  I think it backed up to my grandparents’ place, next door to ours.

  73. 73.

    debbie

    @zhena gogolia:

    Oh, I don’t know. My favorite Halloween decoration didn’t get put up this year. It was a dragon’s skeleton glowering down from the front porch’s roof. This is the same home where the owner placed a large Christmas tree in the enclosed porch and a smaller one above it on the roof so it looked like the tree had poked up through the roof and kept on growing.

    There’s no humor in decorations any more.

  74. 74.

    opiejeanne

    @RaflW: In the 1950s, my dad hid a speaker in the hedge next to our driveway, and spoke to the kids as they were coming up the driveway.

    In the 1980s we owned an old house with a big porch. My husband dressed in a black hooded robe that I made for him, and sat on a rocking chair on our porch holding my great grandfather’s scythe. He would sit very still until the kids were halfway up the walk, and when he heard one of them say, “It’s not real”, he’d slowly lean forward, and then slowly stand and they’d all scream. He never did this with the little kids, only the older ones. The neighbors there decorated with fake cobwebs and funny lights, and “bodies” made of clothing stuffed with newspapers on the front lawn. One house went absolutely bonkers one year, set up a haunted house and allowed a tour; it was so popular that the owners had to make people wait to enter.

  75. 75.

    japa21

    My scariest Halloween experience was back when I was in 4th grade. A friend and I had been collecting for UNICEF. That was back when they used things like small milk cartons with a slow to collect from people. We thought we were supposed to return what we had collected to the school that same night.

    We wander up to the school wondering why all the lights were turned off and nobody else was there. Then we noticed all the windows had been marked up with graffiti. Okay, we thought, let’s go home. The next thing we know a squad car is blocking us from leaving and two officers get out and started questioning us about why we had committed the heinous crime of drawing on the school.

    It actually took us about 15 minutes to convince them why we were there. Apparently we did come across as two dumb kids that can’t follow instructions given us by our teacher to return the collections the next day.

  76. 76.

    burnspbesq

    Baseball on Halloween is a crime against nature. However, baseball in November will bring on the Apocalypse, so fucking Atlanta had better win tonight.

  77. 77.

    opiejeanne

    @debbie: The year after we bought our current house, a “Federalist box”, (symmetrical sets of windows on either side of the front door, no porch roof) we put some old fence boards over the downstairs windows in an X pattern, and hung a really big spider above the front door.

    I was standing in the driveway considering if it looked good when a neighbor toddled up and asked if we’d lost the place to the bank. I just stared at her in astonishment.  If I’d been swift I would have said, “No, but when the spider showed up we told the bank they could have it.”

  78. 78.

    trollhattan

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Those Turkish drones, evidently mixed in with some Israeli ones, were the reason Azerbaijan made short work of the Armenian armor in last year’s conflict. Which I’m sure the Armenians loved, for a variety of reasons.

    Once again, the concept of how to conduct war changes.

  80. 80.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @schrodingers_cat: It was written in the summer of 1816, so she would have been 18.  While you may not care for Percy’s work, he was a rather significant writer.  FWIW he supported her literary efforts throughout his rather short life.

  81. 81.

    New Deal democrat

    @Nelle: It was also called Beggar’s Night in the Buffalo NY area.

    We would get dressed up and carry around empty milk cartons, and beg for pennies by saying, “Trick or Treat for UNICEF!”

  84. 84.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, 5 part thread:

    1/ What if, on Inauguration Day, I told you that in his first year, Joe Biden would cut childhood poverty in half?

    “That’s a good year 1,” you might reply.

    Ok what if he also got the GOP to agree to the biggest infrastructure bill in the nation’s history?

    “No way!” you’d say.

    — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 31, 2021

    And that’s just what’s in these two bills. He’s done much, much more.

    (via CherylRofer)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  86. 86.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Another Scott: I just listened to the O’Bros most recent podcast and they reminded me that Northam was only up by two points in ’17 polls and won by (I think?) 7. I’m not making any predictions but it was good to hear some non-pessmism about that race

    (Also back in ’17, the cast of Morning Joseph was arguing that the release of Donna Brazile’s very weird memoir of the 2016 campaign would doom Northam)

  87. 87.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Lord above, I just saw an ad for Susan Sarandon’s upcoming CBS series, apparently a remake of Empire about the country music business

  88. 88.

    Another Scott

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I can’t see how political polling can be accurate any more.  Too many people don’t answer unknown numbers.  And too many polls are done in bad faith or simply don’t recognize that turnout, etc., is vastly different than it was 5-10 years ago.

    My mantra is “When Democrats turn out, Democrats win.”  Over 1.1M voted early, with NoVA dominating.  We’ve still got lots of determination on our side, and too many people in NoVA saw what happened before and on 1/6 and afterwards – they’re not going back.  Especially not for some plutocrat dweeb who thinks that the biggest issue is “election integrity” – not COVID, not schools, not affordable housing, not jobs, not moving to sustainable energy and addressing climate change, not respect for our system of government, …

    Forward!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  89. 89.

    eclare

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:  Wow.  I wonder who greenlighted that

    ETA> I googled and found an article in Deadline that says it’s going to be on Fox.  On my phone, can’t link.  Oh and of course her daughter is in it too.

  92. 92.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @eclare: I have a theory that good actors are smart, and I think Sarandon is a great actress, but if I had helped elect the two worst presidents in US history, spreading death and misery all around the world and putting US democracy at risk, I think I might learn a little humility.

  94. 94.

    J R in WV

    @Another Scott:

    Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush district court appointee in Dallas who kept trying to kill the ACA, has now decided that Bostock doesn’t apply to sexual conduct, so it’s legal for your employer to forbid you to have premarital sex, oral sex, adultery, etc.

    So Republican of this “judge” to rule like that. Of course, to a Republican, employees are the property of their employer, the feudal way!!

    And George W Bush, the gift that keeps on giving!!

  96. 96.

    Miss Bianca

    @Frankensteinbeck: Late to the party, but Mary Shelley did write a bunch of other stories besides Frankenstein (I have a book of them given me by my sister). it’s just that we never hear about them.

    @Gin & Tonic: My mother went all out with Halloween decorations when I was a kid, and my childhood neighborhood did too, so it seems pretty normal to me.

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