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This time with feeling

Full gallery after the jump

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My buddy, Lou Cantolupo, designed this ghastly pumpkin diorama (click to expand the image) well before The Simpsons aired this year's "Treehouse of Horror" episode, in which the Grand Pumpkin, in a blood-soaked ode to the old Peanuts' Halloween special, goes on a rampage. Lou got his inspiration, instead, from this site. My wife, Carrie, has some smart things to say about Lou's handiwork. As for me? I'm thinking the homicidal pumpkin represents the average American voter who's sick to death of the presidential campaign and would like to stick some strategist's head on a pike.

Mike Mozart has some ideas on how to put the trick into tonight's Halloween treats.

Just in time for Halloween, the third installment of "Five Minutes You'll Never Get Back" is live over at The Sexist. Listeners can look forward to Bobby "The Intern" Allyn's savvy street reporting, Hess' name-calling, and more un-PC references to the Goddess/Whore archetype than ever before!

This Food Network segment on how to make candy corn brought back some fond childhood memories. I always ate my corn from the top down, one colorful segment at a time. It was a psychological tactic more than anything. I wanted to extend my eating pleasure for as long as possible. Frankly, I still employ similar tactics when I encounter good food, which fortunately goes way beyond candy corn these days.

Food & Wine magazine (hey, no hard feelings for not hiring me!) has a creepy slide show on its home page breaking down the world's seven scariest dishes. I have to admit, it's the best food-oriented Halloween feature I've seen so far this year. (Aside to F&W editors: So you're liking my tone now, aren't you?)

Anyway, it's impossible to flip through a photo feature like this without asking yourself: Would I eat these suckers? So let's make it official. Grab a pencil and a piece of paper, and let's do this thing. My answers are below. Give me yours in the comments field.

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Does anyone really think dressing up as a taco or a banana or a PEZ dispenser is a good idea for a Halloween costume? Halloween is all about creativity--and free candy. C'mon, folks. Use your imagination. Going as a piece of meat is just a bad idea on all fronts. Going as a walking product placement for McDonald's or Wonder Bread without remuneration is even dumber. (Yes, I say that even though I'm wearing an Adidas hoodie as I type; but I'm not wandering from house to house either.)

If any of your kids want to go as a food product, veto that idea with extreme prejudice. Help them make their own costume instead---maybe go as gestation crate pig. At least they'll be making a bigger statement than that they support a faceless multi-national corporation.

This Friday, the 7th District police station will turn itself into a haunted house. Congress Heights on the Rise has the scoop. This is allegedly for children (of all ages). I don't know about you but I have real low expectations for this. Police see bad stuff all the time. Are they really gonna want to make their police station all that scary? The one thing 7D has going for it is its incredibly ugly purple building.

You all can post lame taser jokes in the comments.

Via the Cleveland Park message board, a Porter Street resident warns:

"During the past several years, vehicles belonging to my wife and I were vandalized while parked behind our Porter Street house, on either Quebec Place or Rowland Place. On Halloween Eve in 2006, my wife's car was egged pretty well...

And in 2007, my motorcycle got more of the same (despite being covered), damaging the paint and cracking the windshield (and resulting in a faint "burned omelet" smell when I rode it, no
matter how hard I cleaned it). Both times, it happened behind our house on Quebec Place -- but if memory serves, others reported similar incidents elsewhere as well.

So this year, I'm parking elsewhere -- downtown if need be. Just thought I'd remind folks in Cleveland Park that we do have a history of this taking place, and that you may want to take similar precautions on Friday night."