Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

  Happy October! I have to say, I've had a rough few months , but now that we're officially knee-deep in autumn (albeit with some distinctly summery heat in the Bay Area), it's nice to be able to find some comfort in the spooky trappings of the season. And speaking of spooky: I recently had to clean out two storage lockers chock-full of stuff that had hardly been touched in years, and the thick layers of dust, perilously teetering mystery piles and abundance of spiders and harvestmen definitely brought to mind an old fashioned haunted house. Much like being murdered by a vengeful ghost in one of these houses of horror, this experience was absolutely dreadful. I mean, look at this photo...this is of just one of the storage lockers, after hours of work: It's like a giant lasagna made of garbage. However, there was an amazing payoff for sifting through these giant junkheaps in the form of a heaping haul of Halloween treats! Yes, this is going to be a photo-heavy post. Let&

I feel like closing out October with something classy. And since we're no stranger to Halloween poems around here, let's celebrate the onset of All Hallow's Week with some verse, courtesy of the man himself, Jack Prelutsky. Prelutsky is a distinguished poet whose work tends toward a younger audience. I could give you a full recap of his history, but instead I'll just directly lift this quote from his Wikipedia, which is just...wow: Jack Prelutsky was born on September 8, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York to Charles, an electrician, and Dorothea, a homemaker. While he was still a baby, a fire killed his family and he was saved by his Uncle Charlie, who was a dad of 56 ( Wikipedia ) First of all, this is incredibly tragic and heart-wrenching. Second of all, that 56 has to be a typo, right? Perhaps fittingly given the horrors of his early life, Prelutsky is best known for his dabbling in some darker material. The best example of this is 1976's Nightmares: Poem

It's an annual tradition: when October rolls around, it's officially Oingo Boingo season. Well, let me back up a bit. For me, it's always Oingo Boingo season. They're my favorite band of all time, despite being defunct since the late 90's. For the uninitiated, Oingo Boingo is the brainchild of Danny Elfman, who is better known these days as the composer of the score of pretty much every Tim Burton film, the guy who created the theme for both Batman and The Simpsons , and just basically a divine gift from the heavens above that none of us are worthy of. Before all that, there was Oingo Boingo and their weird, anarchic new wave/ska/surf/punk sound that sounds like it should be absolutely terrible when I describe it that way. They were far greater than the sum of their parts. Basically, they skewered social mores and explored strange and dark topics with biting humor, infectious hooks and more trumpet and saxophone than you can shake a Cherry Poppin' Daddy at. A

In a dark, dark mobile home, there was a dark, dark cupboard... And in that dark, dark cupboard, there was a dark, dark shelf... And on that dark, dark shelf, there was a goofy, rainbow-colored record player... And in that goofy, rainbow-colored record player, there was... THIS RECORD! I've spilled a lot of virtual ink in my numerous online missives about scary stories, particularly Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its two sequels . But Alvin Schwartz was not the only author to produce collections of scary stories for younger audiences, and he certainly wasn't the first. Maria Leach, for example, had been doing an excellent job laying the groundwork for macabre collections to come in her compendiums of chilling folklore like Whistle in the Graveyard . And then there's this curious little number: 1970's Scholastic release The Haunted House and Other Spooky Poems and Tales . I was introduced to The Haunted House long before I ever read it. In fact,