Shrunken Apple Head’s Birthday!
I’m on my horrible laptop, swiping power from a friend’s generator. The storm knocked out our electricity, and it might not be back for a week. (Fortunately, that’s all the storm knocked out. Our problems are trivial compared to the total insanity surrounding us. Good luck to everyone who was affected way worse.)
It’s around 10 PM Tuesday as I write this – just hours from Halloween. Of course, Halloween has pretty much been canceled around here. Parents were encouraged to put the kibosh on trick-or-treating, though I don’t doubt that we’ll still get a few knocks tomorrow. Kids have been waiting a whole month for this candy, and like the Whos of Whoville, nothing can put a damper on their holiday spirit. If there weren’t giant trees falling at every other street corner, I’d admire the romance.
I feel a little guilty writing anything at all, because man, we are surrounded by some awful shit. Anything I put here would seem trivial at best, disrespectful at worst. On the other hand, if I don’t do this now, Shrunken Apple Head will spend the next twelve months pouting like a mofo.
Today was his birthday. Not officially, but when you’re an apple, even a late birthday is pretty incredible. Shrunken Apple Head first appeared in a 2003 X-E article, and then several times more in later blogs. This year, he turned 9. Even after all of this time, he still looks like Doc Brown. Read More…
Madd Matt’s Halloween Party.
I was going to save this for later, but there is no way I’ll have power later. Thus, you will suffer now.
Happy Halloween! If the storm doesn’t destroy me, there’s still more to come. 🙂
Pumpkin Spice Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
It’s 7 in the morning. I haven’t been to sleep yet. Instead, I’m writing about cream cheese, rushing to beat the sunrise, because it will crack my skin and turn me to ash.
I don’t have a choice. According to the news, I’m going to wake up underwater. If I want to tell the world about orange bagel goo, it’s now or November.
Nothing warms my heart more than…a lot of things, apparently. I start off too many paragraphs with some spin on that phrase. It’s time to mix things up.
I was most approving of the thing I spotted in Target’s grocery section, earlier this evening. It was a limited edition Kraft item, and it put an abrupt end to our planet’s four billion year Halloween cream cheese drought. If there was ever a time to know how to spell hallelujah. Ah, it’s in the spellchecker. Good.
Get a load of new PUMPKIN SPICE Philadelphia Cream Cheese, in a tub adorned with a pumpkin and three cinnamon sticks. For reasons known only to Kraft, they used an obviously phony pumpkin for their model. I don’t think the cinnamon sticks were real, either, because look at that one on the bottom. Real cinnamon sticks only unfurl like that like, 1 out of every 50,000 times. I doubt Kraft was that lucky.
I love this sudden boom with foods having “limited edition” runs. I mean, I get it, and it’s true, but it still sounds like permission to treat perishable food like collectibles. Thank God they didn’t go with the more casual “for a limited time only,” or I might feel weird about throwing four tubs of cream cheese into the back of my closet, where they’ll sit next to commemorative coins, baseball cards and other things that are similarly guaranteed to quadruple in value. Read More…
Roseanne’s TUNNEL OF TERROR.
Some of you may skip this review out of some weird distaste for Roseanne, but if you’re into Halloween, avoiding her a huge mistake. Nobody has done Halloween better.
The first few seasons were as popular with critics as they were with fans, but even when the show started going off the rails (the emergence of Fred kind of signaled the Great Turn for the Worse, IMO), I still loved it. Hell, I can even gut through the final season, even if it seemed like an unforgivable character assassination of human god Dan Conner.
Whether you like the show or not, there’s no denying that it produced some of the best “holiday special” episodes ever. This was especially true for Roseanne’s Halloween episodes, which became an annual thing, and with very few exceptions, were the biggest Halloween brouhahas seen on any prime time sitcom.
Today we remember the first of them, and if going by popular vote, the best of them. From the second season, the episode’s official title is Boo. For purposes of this review, I’ll use a title that’s more representative of its unforgettable plot: Roseanne’s Tunnel of Terror.
It’s no understatement to say that this episode helped shape my love of Halloween. It was practically a blueprint detailing exactly how to make Halloween special. Read More…