It’s Halloween, or, on this site, Black Caturday! In just a few short hours we’ll have the Parade of Black Cats, including 69 dark moggies sent by readers (I had no idea there would be so many). It’s a bit chilly today, and sporadic rain may dampen the spirits (and candy bags) of the trick or treaters who will flock to American houses this evening in search of sweetmeats. When I was a child, we were allowed to trick or treat without our parents coming along (something that would never happen now), and I would head to the area where the Rich People lived, for their candy was better than anyone else’s. Sometimes they’d give you a whole candy bar! Now, however, parents are always along, and some towns have places where you can X-ray your candy for inclusions like razor blades. Such is the tenor of the times. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having Deep Thoughts, but I suspect that her “theory of relativity of everything” means how all the objects in the Universe relate to her.
Hili: I’m thinking.
A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: About the general theory of relativity of everything.
Hili: Zastanawiam się.
Ja: Nad czym?
Hili: Nad ogólną teorią względności wszystkiego.
She does look like she’s bending spacetime a bit more these days. Must be winter coming.
I too used to go to the richer homes to trick or treat. Once, I brought my dog and dressed her as a dragon (basically, I put a blanket on her). She was a black lab and she went up to a kid, whose face was at the same height as her own, and took the lollipop out of his mouth, crunched it up and spat out the stick. The kid started crying so I hot footed it out of there afraid the story would be exaggerated and my dog would be accused of attacking a small child.
Well…it is all relative….
I might have email working again sometime today, relatively considering.
b&
For reasons I cannot fully explain, my wife’s favorite holiday has always been Halloween. Might have something to do with being atheist so Easter & Christmas are not even listed. Where we live now, there are no trick or treat kids so she misses that part.
However, the greatest Halloween spectacle we ever experience was living in Okinawa. We lived in a 9 story apartment building with 8 apartments on each floor. There were several of these building in the area so you could guess there were lots of people and lots of kids. Trick or Treating on Halloween was restricted to two hours but it never lasted that long because no matter how much candy and stuff you had, it was usually gone in half an hour. You just opened the door at 7 pm. and shoveled candy as fast as possible until it was gone.
“Hili: About the general theory of relativity of everything.”
Reminds me of Fritz Leiber’s classic, “Space-Time for Springers.”
” the general theory of relativity of everything”
… comes right after thinking about the special theory of relativity of “me”.
Statistics seem to show that it is not more dangerous for your kids to go out on their own than it was in the past. How many candy bars have actually shown to be contaminated with poison or razor blades having a place to xray candy bars is over the top. Nowadays the mediablos everything out of proportion from the nearness of an asteroid to the health benefits or bad effects of eating this or doing that. It is time that the media was stopped from exiting and frightening a gulliable population into taking knee jerk reactions to perceived threats.
Okay, I know I’m late in commenting to this, but what the Hell, here’s my comment, anyway.
“I would head to the area where the Rich People lived, for their candy was better than anyone else’s. Sometimes they’d give you a whole candy bar!”
I live right now in one of those areas with a reputation as the place to go for Halloween, but I think it’s gone so far that it’s back-fired. The closest I have to a count for the number of kids that come to our house is from a few years ago when a neighbor bought 1600 pieces of candy and gave out two pieces of candy per kid – 800 kids altogether, and he ran out of candy at least half an hour before we did. Things have gotten better the past few years now that cops show up to direct traffic and keep people from parking on the roads and blocking emergency vehicles, but we still gave out around $200 worth of candy this year. We just get so many kids that we can only give out a few pieces per kid, or else our Halloween candy budget would be huge.