…Well, of some Jack-o-Lanterns anyway.

 We had a pumpkin carving party Friday night with some of the neighborhood families and their kids. The pumpkins were a product of our gardening efforts, the revelry was a group effort. While the kids enjoyed homemade mini pizzas, the grownups were well plied with my home brews. Pizza, beer and sharp, pointy objects resulted in no trips to the ER, and some really wonderful results, as are displayed in the following pictures:

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!  

…so I’ll be taking the night off and enjoying a number of over-the-counter, and other folk remedies to shake this thing.

Note: Celestial Seasonings “True Blueberry” Tea  rocks: Take 2 tea bags + a generous squeeze from the honey bear + a splash of milk = a Purple Haze.

Yum.

It’s fun to be anonymous: You can say and do whatever you like without fear of consequence. Such is the appeal of any form of communication outside of a face-to-face interaction.

Take comments on a blog:The blogging world is a strange place sometimes. Just like many aspects of technology, blogging (the Internet in general) affords folks a sort of cloaking device. With this invisibility mechanism in place, folks often say and do whatever they feel like doing. Anyone who has bothered to read the comments posted beneath a politically-charged online article can see the vitriol that often accompanies said postings.

I was updating some posts and checking comments today, and a comment struck me as a little odd. In the comments section of my first post on the blog, you will see \’)/* ekibastos. Yes, strange, to say the least. With great curiosity and expectation, I googled this (seemingly) gibberish, to find that if you maintain a blog, this \’)/* ekibastos person has hit a lot of blogs and message boards online for a while now, but always with the \’)/* ekibastos post, and nothing more. I seem to be in a large contingency of folks who post articles online that have been visited by this entity/person/mystery organism. Strangely, I don’t feel special as a result…

Andy Warhol talked about 15 minutes of fame. Assuming ekibastos is in fact a person, I wonder - because there is always a trail of binary code out there in cyberspace from all of our respective Internet pithering - if this is ekibastos’ attempt at immortality? Is this the modern equivalent of the carved bust, or a Great Pyramid?

Anyone?

Ekibastos?

Bueller??

Happy birthday John - we miss you. 

See ya there! 

I’m no fashionista. I wear socks with sandals some of the time, and I think every man, woman and child should have a black turtleneck in their wardrobe, so take any insights I provide here with that in mind.

Fashion Czar Pierre Cardin showcased his fall 2008 through spring 2009 clothing lines recently and I had to comment on one garment in particular… No, I’m not a dedicated follower of fashion (thank you Ray Davies), I just happened to be caught in a moment of morbid fascination with this coat-thing, which frankly isn’t very fashion-forward at all, unless you intend to make your models and potential customers look like a bottom-feeding flatfish:

I personally think that if a garment makes you look like a fish, DO NOT - under any circumstances - wear it, UNLESS it’s Halloween!

(*Note that the fish and the model have nearly identical expressions…)

I’ll bet the coat probably retails for as much as a small condo in LoDo. Sheesh…

…Well, not exactly. But, my cappuccinos come from a cow-colored apparatus.

 There is a bit of a connection though. Please allow me to dissert… The coffee itself is a roasted bean from the coffee plant, in this case grown in Chiapas, Mexico and is organic, fair trade and pretty much guilt-free. The other component - the juvenile bovine nutrient - comes from one of these. Combine the two and one is transported to caffeinated Nirvana: Heaven in a mug with froth.

My loving spouse - we’ll call her Lisa (’cause that’s her name) - ordered me a Mukka Express cappuccino maker as an early birthday gift (it’s October 20th, in case you wondered…)  Apparently, the way this worked out was that originally, I WAS to get the stainless steel version, but the cow-colored one is what arrived. Now, rather than wait for my birthday to lay this particular appliance “mootif” on me, Lisa opted to spring it on me now because she felt that I ought to at least know that she’d been shipped the wrong thing. I thought it was kinda cool, and to boot, it actually makes a killer cappuccino, which I think was the real reason behind her wanting to open the package: She simply wanted to put it to use.

I wasn’t being afforded any real consideration. My wife wanted at my birthday gift…. As a result of our severe caffeine addiction, it’s seen a lot of use in the last day. I lost count after 20, but bear in mind: I didn’t drink all of them myself. Check it out: It is chic…

Mo Mo - one of our two cats - doesn’t seem the least bit interested in it though, despite their similar aesthetic…

My wife has pretty good taste.