.We still have a pile of Halloween stuff to go through, so I'll just create some lyrics as we go along.
I have to bang this out by 3 or so, or it will be a midnight publication. We're busy bees today, as anyone with a 9 year old would understand.
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I probably have enough material for 2-3 more articles, so don't be despondent if I missed your house.
One of my favorite time-killing reads are conspiracy theories. Several of them are based in Horror.
There is supposed to be a lost episode of The Simpsons where Bart is killed. He gets sucked out of a plane, it's actually a rather sad episode.
The strange part is at the end. As the Simpsons (who, for some reason, seem to have abandoned the baby character) visit Bart's grave, they walk past other tombstones in the cemetery. They are all the stones of people who have appeared on The Simpsons.
Each stone bears a date of death. For someone deceased like Michael Jackson or Phil Hartman or whoever, the date is exact. The really spooky part is the stones of everyone who is still living. They are ascribed a date of death in the future.
It's all the same date.
My other favorite conspiracy with Horror and Entertainment involves Stanley Kubrick and The Shining.
I was previously unaware of this, but we didn't actually land on the moon. For many years and perhaps even now, we have actually been defenseless against Soviet ICBMs. What I thought was our best defense- our ability to respond in kind- is actually a myth.
You need rocket science to get those missiles flying, and we don't have people who can do that.
When Sputnik hit the air, the Soviets seized a Cold War lead that we couldn't match until we could do the same. We were unable to for many years.
What we can do well in America is make kick-ass movies. More than one war has been won through Bluff, why not this one?
Stanley Kubrick, who had just filmed a groundbreaking space movie, was recruited by the US government to fake a moon landing. Such an accomplishment would make the Russians sweat Fear, and would scare them from even thinking of launching on us.
Kubrick did the job, but guilt set in. Then, a brilliant director decided to dabble in the gutter of Hollywood.... Horror.
If you watch The Shining, you'll see a lot of things that could be read as Apollo 11 references. Other than the kid's sweater, not a lot of them make sense to me. You, however, may be more open-minded.
If so... enjoy.
Top Unsolved Murders In Massachusetts
1) The Molly Bish murder
A teen lifeguard disappears from a lake. The search goes on forever, but they eventually find her body. Her killer is nevr brought to justice.... at least not by Massachusetts authorities, because I think that the suspect from the drawing may have been hung in Iraq.
2) The New Bedford Highway Killer
In the 1980s, a series of junkies and prostitutes disappeared from the New Bedford/Fall River area. Many of them were found along Route 195 and other local drags. They looked at a slew of suspects- including a lawyer, a guy who liked to rough up whores, and even the Lisbon Ripper- but no one was ever convicted for it. Although the crimes have stopped, the suspect may still be at large.
3) The Lady Of The Dunes
A mutilated corpse was found laying among the Provincetown dunes. She was nearly decapitated. They never found out who she was, or who killed her. Whitey Bulger was a suspect, but this was a rare case where Whitey was exonerated because the crime was too brutal.
I work with a girl named Stacey. She's really short. Her husband isn't.
One Halloween, Stacey went out with the kids. She threw on a Patriots sweater because it was cold. She's a foot and a half shorter than her husband, she has a doctorate, and she's in her 30s.
Unless she's fibbing... whenever they would trick-or-treat elderly people, Stacey's two kids would get candy and praise. At some houses, the homeowner would then look Stacey over once or twice, adjust her glasses, look at the husband, make a calculation.... and then reach into the bucket and fork over a Snickers to Dr. Monponsett. "Aren't you just a pretty little Patriot??"
"I was very offended at first," said Stacey, "But as the night went on, I ended up with a fat stash of candy. My husband laughed every time it happened, but he wasn't laughing when I refused to give him any Twix bars. F*** him."
Every picture in this aticle is from one house, which I believe is in Whitman.
We took a lot of pictures. I should remember what town that the best house was in, but I don't. I actually met the lady, too. She was very cool.
Either way, she's leading the tournament right now, although I have a ringer lined up on Washington Street in Duxbury.
We have a pile of shots to go, and we'll add to them tonight when we go hunting and gathering.
We'll have either a late-night update or a Sunday edition, unless football gets in the way.
Feel free to check out our other Halloween Display articles:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
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| HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! |
Friday, October 30, 2015
Halloween Displays IV, and A Rich Man/Poor Man Comparative Analysis
(EDITOR'S NOTE: We lifted this article from a site we used to write for, and it dates back to 2012. "2012" explains why we planned to egg Taylor Swift's house, as she had then been smitten with Konnor Kennedy and had bought a house adjoining the Kennedy Compound. She has since divested herself from both entities.
Also, my kid was Wolverine that year, he's a stormtrooper this year.
The pictures in the article, aside from being Halloween-themed, have nothing to do with the story.
This article is the fourth installment in our Halloween Displays series, and the pictures come from Whitman, Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver, Wareham and Plymouth.)
One way to make a childish activity fun for Mom and Dad is to use your child as the bait in a half-assed sociological experiment. This Halloween, we did just that.
He didn't care. He got to dress like Wolverine, and he hauled in enough candy to bring a dentist to climax.
The experiment was thus: Take a kid trick or treating in two neighborhoods of varying wealth, and try to take note of any differences that might make themselves apparent.
We had to choose two neighborhoods. Mommy had the Whammy, an absolute veto.... which eliminated Brockton, Roxbury, etc... and some pre-Halloween recon eliminated the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port when we found that no one but the staff was around there after Labor Day.
Let the record show that I would have had No Problem At All with egging Taylor Swift's house if she didn't show my people some proper confectionary love. Fortunately, it never came down to that.
The Kennedy logic also eliminated many of the marquee Cape Cod neighborhoods. We have nothing but love for Summer People, but they aren't of much use when you need candy in late October. Demographics are everything. We needed more of a bedroom community, and a wealthy one at that.
We narrowed it down to Jersusalem Road in Cohasset, and Washington Street in Duxbury. Even though Cohasset's main drag has more of a Gatsby feel, Duxbury had the advantage of centralized parking (we used what most locals still call "Sweetser's") and more occupied houses per square mile. The average house goes about a milly or so, and you can bang out a bunch of them without walking a costumed 10K.
As for our seedy site, we chose Wareham. We wanted to use Shangri-La, but the sidewalk/streetlight ratios didn't work out in favor of those with a wandering five year old Wolverine. We decided instead on a trailer park between Mazzilli's Farm Stand and Barnacle Bill's Seafood Shack. The double-wides are too tightly packed to get a car moving through at any kill-a-child speed, and we could do 50 units without any great hardship.
Your average home on Washington Street is owned by someone in the finance industry. Your average person in the trailer park works at Benny's or the Lobster Pound. The average salary on Washington Street is probably equal to the salary of 20 people in the trailer park. The average salary in the trailer park is probably half or a third of what the kid's car costs on Washington Street.
Does it matter? Does it translate into generous candy giving?
Due to us having to pick Mommy up in Sagamore at a certain time, Wolverine and I decided to start in the Wareham trailer park. We got out a little before dark, and we set right to our task. Wolverine (the Michigan yellow/blue Wolverine from the comics, not the leather jacket one from the movies) is five, cute, and fully invested in the candy acquisition process.
In case you think that this article is going to make fun of the poor... don't. Wareham came correct. I'm proud to say that every trailer we knocked on answered, and nobody came cheap with the goodies. Wolverine didn't have to disembowel anyone with his kid-sized adamantium claws due to Grinchy candy withholding.
The only standout facet was that some of the candy was of the cheap variety, a la individual Starbursts, Dum Dum lollipops, and the small solo generic Reese's cups with the gold foil. This was offset by the fact that they gave it out in great amounts. Besides, in this economy, and in that neighborhood, we should have been (and were) happy to get anything.
Some of the trailers were decorated, and some weren't. I may have seen 5 pumpkins... not bad, until you remember that the park is next to a farm stand. Hay bales, corn stalks, scarecrows and various gourds were easily available 20 feet away. I suppose that if a poor neighborhood has to skimp somewhere, they should skimp on decor rather than candy.
Finally, and this is important.... Wareham residents are cool enough to hook up the Elders with a beer now and then. One must be properly fortified when taking the kids about. I even was offered a bong hit, but that doesn't really count because I knew the guy. Either way, my bibulous handouts are important to me, I'm the judge/author, and they factor into the analysis.
I wasn't 100% shocked by the results. I had no concrete reason to think that Wareham would fail to be rewarding. Nothing really jumped out about the candy to cancel the theory one of my friends put forth that "Everyone shops at Wal-Mart."
We were working against the clock, so Wolverine and I hopped into the Benz a bit after sunset, picked up Mommy, and hauled our candy asses up Route 3 into Duxbury.
Now, the wealthy don't have all the advantages when being stalked by a trick or treat posse with a purpose. For instance, wealthy people's houses are farther apart than trailer park homes are. We probably covered 10 trailers in the time it took us to walk up the driveway of the first house we hit on Washington Street. For Duxbury to shame Wareham, the candy-per-step ratio would have to be amazing.
Also, Duxbury residents may or may not have been aware that they were a part of an experiment. They also most likely don't share my view of their role as Giver in the Redistribution Of Wealth theory I was aiming for, as they were more likely to assume that whoever was knocking on the door in costume was just another wealthy person from a nearby neighborhood.
I use the ambiguity because Washington Street has a go-to rep among local trick or treaters, and the residents there may feel an urge towards overkill. We were among 200 or so people trick or treating Washington Street during the hours that we were operating... not too shabby for a town with 15000 people at about 45% elderly.
Here's Duxbury, in a few bullet points.
- There were probably 50-100 yards between houses, if you count the walkways and so forth.
- Every door was opened by a grandparent or a trophy wife. There was one Yummy Mommy at the end of Fort Hill Road who actually could have not handed out candy and just used "You got to look at me up close" as an egging deterrent argument.
- I didn't think that people still put bags of candy unguarded outside of their door with a "Take One Per Person, Please" sign on it. People in 4400 sq. ft bayfront houses do, however.
- People hand out the full size candy bars in Duxbury. Those rich folk gave it up smooth.
- Not only do you get the name brand goods, but you also get the more rare stuff... Caramellos, Hilliards, Pop Rocks, Fun Dip, Flake Bars and so forth. You know... the good sh*t.
- No one handed out money, but it happened a few times during my youth in that area.
- Many residents had the same variety bowl of candy that the Wareham folks did, probably most.
- One house- and I swear I'm not making this up- had a video screen set up in front of the doorway. The homeowner was able to hide in the house and speak to us through the video screen, which showed a Grim Reaper sort of visage. The Reaper spoke whatever the homeowner said. He also had music going through a loudspeaker, which made his house sound like a nightclub from 100 yards away.
But wait...there's more.
He also set something up where horror film images were holographed onto the house itself, so you'd turn around and be facing a 15 foot Wicked Witch. To offset this, he had his daughter and MILF wife outside, distributing the actual candy.
I'd say he spent about $3500 or so on the electronics, and that may be a conservative estimate.
- Beers were not offered in Duxbury. This was not through rudeness. Every cop in Duxbury was on Washington Street, to the point where I would have been able to discharge firearms on other streets with total impunity had I chosen to do so. Public drinking was out of the question.
- People in Duxbury hand out toys, coloring books, Pez dispensers, crayons, toothbrushes, McDonald's coupons, cheap sunglasses and so forth.
Overall, I'd score them about equally candy-wise, with Duxbury enjoying a huge edge in decorations. Duxbury had enough people handing out full-sized candy bars to offset the greater distances between houses. Wareham people are giving enough by nature to offset the median household income differences.
Wolverine did ridiculously well. That bag of candy you see at the top of the article is what was left today, about five days after Halloween, after several sessions where the adults had at it, and after a children's birthday party. The goody bag was full enough that Wolverine was having trouble carrying it at the end of the session.
We'd have had more, but Wolverine likes lollipops. When offered a bowl full of large Snickers bars and lollipops, he'd grab 2 tiny lollipops instead. I actually had to intervene when he chose a Dum Dum pop over a full Milky Way bar... "He wants one of these, too."
I'm just happy that Trick or Treating hasn't faded away to oblivion like Christmas Carols or whatever. That day is probably coming, and the world will be less exciting when it happens.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Halloween Displays, Part III
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| Yeah, that isn't a good start.... |
I told you that we had a lot of material, and here comes a pile of it.
We surveyed Facebook, got some leads, followed up on them, and here's what we came up with. We'll have a few more issues before Halloween plays itself out this Saturday night.
Be sure to check out Part One and Part Two, if you wish.
We ran from Rochester to Whitman and then back South through Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver and Plymouth.
We still have Duxbury and Cape Cod to go through. The weather cost us today and maybe tomorrow, and we may do Duxbury while we're trick-or-treating there.
Duxbury gets their own day, because we know a guy there who might be spending $5K on decorations, and we get full-size Snickers and so forth all up and down Washington Street.
The winds of today's storm may cost us our foliage hunting, which we will take up in earnest on November 1st. The South Coast and Cape Cod turn around then, anyhow.
Halloween is a pagan ritual, adopted by the Romans, modified to fit Christianity, imported from Europe and perfected by America.
Halloween celebrations were banned in colonial New England, as the Puritan forefathers weren't fans of pagan, superstitious celebrations. Halloween was the night before a solemn Holy day. Remember, these were people who frowned on Christmas, because it was too Church-like.
An influx of Irish immigrants helped popularize the Halloween traditions in America, and the traditions have held on to our present day.
It soon became primarily a children's holiday, although it is more of a children-of-all-ages thing.
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| No irony intended, I just had to shoot over a car. |
There are more kids than fathers in America, but you can't handle Dad with two mini Kit Kat bars. You have to at least buy him a tie or something. That adds up.
Kids make it up at Christmas. It's a kid's world, we're just running it for them.
Most Popular Halloween Costumes, according to Google Trends and CNN:
#1, Harley Quinn
#2 Star Wars
#3 Superhero (Non Superman, Non Avenger...generic, Villain or Other, see #5,9,10)
#4 Pirate
#5 Batman
#6 Minnie Mouse
#7 Witch
#8 Minion
#9 Joker
#10 Wonder Woman
My Own Top 5 Halloween Shows/Movies/Stories
- It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
My personal favorite, also the source of the worst overdub video of all time.
- Halloween
I prefer the Carpenter one to the White Zombie one, but I am just one lonesome columnist.
- The Nightmare Before Christmas
I've never seen it, and I'm not sure this is even a Halloween movie, but it seems to be everywhere, so we'll throw it up in the mix.
- The Fat Albert Halloween Special
The Cosby mansion is now the Worst Place To Trick Or Treat in Hollywood.
- The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow
You can't deny the Headless Horseman his spot, he's sort of like Halloween's Santa Claus.
Films That Involve Halloween But Aren't Halloween Films
- To Kill A Mockingbird climaxes on Halloween, which is a sinister sentence to say about pre-teen Scout Finch.
- Arsenic And Old Lace has a Halloween wedding
- Regina steals Cady's BF at a Halloween party in Mean Girls
- The Exorcist, while not a Halloween film, was set in Halloween season.
- You know that Ernest Scared Stupid isn't set on Arbor Day, payer.
Worst Halloween Specials
- The Lou Grant Halloween Episode
- The Paul Lynde Halloween Special
- The Fall Guy "October The 32d" episode
- The Dukes Of Hazzard, "The Hazzardville Horror" episode
- The Smurfs, "The Legend Of Smurfy Hollow"
- Fraggle Rock, "The Terrible Tunnel."
We'll get a few more articles in before Halloween, thanks for checking us out!
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Halloween Displays, Part II
Ain't no stoppin' us now! Cranberry County Magazine is driving through your town, photographing your yard... all in search of cool Halloween Displays! We don't ask, we take!
We posted Part One yesterday, and we'll be laying down the law all week, probably on the daily.
We questioned Facebook, and let the people dictate our travels. We covered a lot of ground, and here's some of what we found.
We caught this family in the act! Busted!
This family, in Plymouth, is unique in that we spoke to them before shooting. I generally avoid doing so. I'm a very large man, and I dress shabbily enough that generous people tell me that I look like a basketball coach... while others say that I look homeless. I'm not the guy you want to see walking into your yard, and I'd fully understand if someone shot me.
"That's the life, that I lead..."
Cranberry County Magazine will always be up in your spot. Jessica's very first article with me ended up with us being spoken to by a Detective, although that was pretty much 105% my fault. Hey, I thought Edaville Railroad was abandoned, like Rocky Point or Pripyat.... honest mistake, the detective understood fully.
I should never get out of the car, but sometimes I do.
No, we don't decorate our own yard. We have a pumpkin, and we may even carve it, but that's about it.
I have a pretty isolated house, not many people see it. No one in my neighborhood has had a trick-or-treater in the ten years I've lived here. I enjoy Halloween vicariously through creative people, just like you are doing right now.
I don't even take my own kid around the neighborhood, nor do any of the parents I see at the bus stop. I take my kid to a high-end neighborhood in Duxbury, where we aim for full-size candy bars. It works better than you'd think it would.
They may be on to me on Washington Street, however. We might have to try Shore Road in Chatham or Jerusalem Road in Cohasset this year.
Jessica, who is considerably smaller than I am, has already refused in advance and (forgive my Latin legalese) ad infinitum to wear a kid's costume and a mask to disguise her adult appearance and double our candy haul. I was kind of hoping for Sexy Nurse.
Also, if I am trick-or-treating with two kids, people will give me beer. Most suburban homeowners keep beer handy, and drop one on an adult herding around a sizable group of kids. A parent needs fortification on cold autumn nights.
Again, this strategy works better than you'd think it would.
Maybe things are different than when I was a kid. Maybe I got too big, and the decorations that scared me as a child now are like the 30" faux Stonehenge from Spinal Tap. Maybe I should blame shoddy Asian manufacturing.
It seemed like every house in Quincy in the 1970s was done up for Halloween. My 1980s hood in Duxbury was a bit less decorated, but that was also a highly isolated village that had maybe 20 people living in it after Labor Day.
It's the hyper-suburban forest/tree question... if you put a pumpkin or your steps and no one sees it, did you really decorate?
That's not a problem the people in the pictures you see today have, because Cranberry County Magazine cares enough to go out and document the fun.
Other things that I never encountered in the 1970s includes our aborted mission to the Pine Hills of Plymouth.
The Pine Hills looked tremendous on paper. Nice houses, rich people, and the sheer size of the place means that there must be a ton of kids. Of course it was going to be decorated.
We paused outside the entrance. We only had a little sunlight left to work with. The question that was stopping us... would a place like that have restrictions on decorations?
Time is money, daylight was wastin', and we didn't have any leads in that neighborhood. We headed inland, to the house with the spooky statues in the yard.
We weren't at Versailles, either.
Don't get me wrong, it was a sweet house, just maybe not statue-sweet. I'm pretty sure that this was Middleboro.
Middle Bro has some cool 1800s houses, and is spooky in her own right, but this yard was trippin' balls. I'd hate to go there at night, and would probably refuse to enter the yard unless they were handing out Kit-Kats or something yummy.
I'm lucky that I don't take LSD anymore, because this house would have broken me if I had been Walking With The King.
This is the most ostentatious flowerpot that I have ever seen. I think that may be Atlas.
The ladder implies that this house isn't finished yet, always a plus mark in the Hardcore category.
We sort of ran three trips so far. We did a Weymouth-Hingham-Norwell-Hanover run that started too late and was interrupted by a nice dinner at Wahlburgers.
The next day, we worked Plymouth, Kingston, Plympton and Halifax.
Yesterday, we finished Halifax after going through Rochester, Carver, Bridgewater and both parts of Whitman/Hanson.
Our two big remaining trips- and this is both weather and auto permitting- are Duxbury and Cape Cod. I may run a Bourne-Wareham trip today if I can sneak away from the Ol' Ball & Chain.
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| Stay Spooky! |
Monday, October 26, 2015
Halloween Displays Around SE Massachusetts: Part One
- We should do a Halloween Display article.
- Very few singular people can give a list of 250 or so houses with cool displays (I am now one of these people).
- Why not use Facebook (I spam our articles over every You Know You're From ____ When... page in the region, and have access to scores of such groups) to get a good list going?
- Gather up the suggestions (we had a few hundred) and start mapping routes for several road trips.
- Spill our results out over a series of pre-Halloween articles.
We rarely start off with that much of a game plan, so this will probably end up working out OK.
We got a bevy of suggestions for where to look. We ranged from Plymouth (the Slenderman-looking Tim Burton guy at the top of the article) to the skeletal Wizard of Oz scene we saw in Weymouth, to wherever else our travels took us.
Facebook was very handy. We got a pile of street names. Some got repeated, always a good sign. I'm still getting suggestions as I write this, but fear not- we have enough pictures for several days of articles on this subject.
We got a few bum steers (we had several in a row on our first run), but we also stumbled onto some cool stuff, so it sort of balanced out. I'm not into Wicca, but I think they're big on Mother Earth and all, and nature loves a balance. My own logic is witchy enough that we went home happy most of the time.
Rich people plaza.... nice setup, though. It needs a Zombie, right in that empty spot near the hay bales.
We drove down a lot of Massachusetts streets doing this series of articles. Some towns stood out more than others, but not by a wide margin (editor's note: we haven't done Deluxebury yet) Most people don't decorate at all. Among those that do, most are subtle. A pumpkin, a scarecrow, a few cornstalks... you know, the regular.
We set out to find people who went in a little deeper. I'm talkin' ten-foot-spider-swallowing-a-human-in-front-of-a-two-hundred-sixty-one-year-old-historical-register-property deep.
Apparently, things get a little more ultraviolent on Bartlett's Green than I was previously led to believe.
The spider also looks like hes doing the Baby Bird with some poor intern, but that was most likely not the intent of the sculptor.
That spider, a Kingston resident, doesn't dare try that act in Duxbury. If he did, he'd get tuned up by Duxbury's legendary Green Dragon. The GD holds it down off Route 3A in Duxbury. There are those who say that he stares into your soul as you drive by him.
The Green Dragon does year-round duty, but he gets extra powers on Halloween. If you ever look up at the nearby Myles Standish monument and wonder where his sword went.... well, it got busted off quick-fast when Myles tried that St. George stuff with the Route 3A Dragon. You know... back in the day.
However, people who decorate their lawns almost always go for Horror. I checked out almost every town, including yours. I saw a lot of chainsaw massacres and MacBeth-ian witch gatherings, but I rarely saw innocent Haloween decorations. I can think of one, a Peanuts-themed setup in Halifax that I'll get to in another article.
We'll throw in the obligatory warning that I am a much worse photographer than Jessica is. As you see below, we also have some trouble shooting at night.
I may take another crack at this shot above, It's off Herring Pond Road in Plymouth, and I pass it all the time. Even a hack photographer will get lucky if
Our principal value to you is our legs. We covered a lot of ground doing this article, and we aren't done yet.
We'll try to drop an article a day up until Halloween hits. If your town got jobbed this time, fear not. We'll probably get to it in a few days.
Stay Spooky!
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