Welcome to the 2023 Countdown to Halloween!

 

Welcome one and all to the 2023 Countdown to Halloween!

Yes, boils and ghouls, it's time to rise from our musty coffins after 11 months of very deep sleep, and celebrate the feast of All Hallows E'en. How do we do that? With commercials, cartoons, movies, music, and anything else that fits the Halloween spirit. They'll be hardcore stuff, cutesy stuff, grown-up stuff, kid stuff, and many other kinds of stuffs.

As always, a grave, er, great thank you to Dex, Naila Moon, and everyone behind the main Countdown to Halloween site. Please please PLEASE check that site out for dozens of other great Halloween sites full of tricks and treats.

I hope to entertain you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between now and the big night with maniacal marvels sure to tickle your fancy.

Without further ado, let the 2023 Countdown to Halloween begin!

[WARNING: GORY VIDEO BELOW!]

My First Halloween Shopping Trip of the Season

 

Hello everyone! I hope you are getting back into the post-summer groove easily and smoothly.

October is less than two weeks away, and I'm sure you are already prepping for Halloween. I'm a late bloomer compared to most out there, as I don't start celebrating Halloween hardcore until October 1st. I'm a slacker, I know! But I did make a couple of shopping excursions for the big night, only one of which bore any fruit, but I'm happy with what I bought.

First up, a family-size box of Carmella Creeper (Walmart, $3). I still have plenty of Monster Cereal I didn't eat from last year, but I couldn't pass up the first new Monster Cereal character since Fruity Yummy Mummy in the 80s. I've heard mixed reviews on the cereal, but I enjoy caramel apple flavor, so I'm looking forward to trying this next month. Until then, I need to eat last year's cereal!

Next up, a 3-DVD collection of Beetlejuice, Gremlins, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch in a new glow-in-the-dark slipcase (Walmart, $9.96). Even though I already have Gremlins on a VHS tape my wife bought me 20 years ago, and I have Beetlejuice on a not-so-great dubbed VHS tape from the late 80s, I thought the DVD upgrade was worth it, especially since I don't have Gremlins 2 in any format. Plus, the entire collection was less than $10. The new slipcase was just a fun bonus!

Next, a pair of skeleton gloves (Dollar General, $2). My wife bought a skeleton costume from Target on clearance last year, and I thought these gloves would complement it. They're a bit snug, but they'll do.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: a very cheap, off-model Michael Myers mask (Dollar General, $8). It's made of vinyl, it's only a half mask, and the hair is also vinyl, but considering how many bad Michael Myers masks there are out there, if I'm going to buy one, I'd rather pay $8 than $20 or more for one.

In a separate outing, and without even looking for it, I found a bottle of Fanta's foray into the "mystery soda flavor" gimmick, What The Fanta? (Wawa, 2 20 oz bottles for $4). I got the zero sugar version, and the artificial sweetener seemed to throw off what the intended taste should be, so I have no guesses, just something fruity. I want to try the sugar version for a better taste test.

So, what do you think? Is this a decent Halloween haul for my first trip of the season? It's still early, so I plan on doing more scary shopping in the coming weeks. If I find more good stuff, I'll share it with you.

And remember, the Countdown to Halloween starts here at the blog on Sunday, October 1st!

Thanks!

Happy September 1st!

Happy September 1st! Welcome to the best four months of the year! And I must start them off as I do every year. I must maintain the natural order of things. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

Let's make it a great rest of the year!

Alice Cooper and The Group Image on WKBS-TV Channel 48

 

Hello, and welcome back!

Today is the 40th anniversary of the sign-off of Philadelphia's beloved UHF TV station WKBS Channel 48. One of my most popular articles is a love letter to this station, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice it to say, it was the TV home of my childhood.

In looking up some footage related to the station today, I came across two musical performances that were recorded at the station during the late '60s to be featured on a local dance show hosted by late radio host Hy Lit. They are nothing I would have expected to see on Channel 48 in general or Lit's show in particular, but here they are in their psychedelic glory.

The first performance is by a band called The Group Image. I hadn't heard of them until today, and considering they only released one album in 1968, it's doubtful many others have heard of them either. But they seem to be having a great time in this fun performance, shown here in raw footage meant to be edited into the final cut of the show at a later time. Here are The Group Image performing their song "Hiya."

Also from 1968 is a particularly interesting performance, as it has to be one of the earliest TV appearances of Alice Cooper. Here they are performing "Reflected," a song off their first album that they would later rework into the song "Elected," which appeared on their legendary album Billion Dollar Babies.

If the song is unable to stream via embedding, you can watch the performance directly on YouTube here.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend! I hope you had a great summer, and here's hoping we all have a fantastic fall ahead!

Bye Bye, Desktop Computer!

 

After many years of lying dormant, I finally put our 20-year-old tower-style desktop computer out to pasture. It hasn’t worked correctly for years (I don’t even know how many), and even if it did work, it’s far too obsolete to be valuable today.

I took it to a local computer repair guy because my wife and I wanted to save any personal files we had on there (family photos, old teacher files of my wife's, music files, etc.), if they could be saved at all (the computer didn’t even start up correctly, so I was skeptical to say the least).

Fortunately, he was in fact able to get the files off of the hard drive. He saved them to a separate drive as well as giving us the old hard drive. I looked through the files saved and couldn’t believe what was on there. There was stuff I didn’t remember we had. Some of it personal, some of it inconsequential, all of it no more recent than 2014. It was like time travel!

So anyway, above is the shell of the desktop, keyboard, speakers, and monitor. We bought this in the early 2000s; definitely before 2006. It ran on Windows XP operating system, and it only had 256K of RAM when we bought it! Soon it will be picked up by an e-recycler or just put in the trash. I can’t imagine any use this equipment would have today.

I can’t say I feel nostalgic about this computer—it really wasn’t very good—but just the fact that it sat in our basement for so, so long—over 15 years at our current home, and at our previous house for a few years before that—and now it won’t, feels weird.

End of old computer rant.

The Rise of Female Music Artists in the '90s

Hello all. Here's a departure from my usual blog material, but I thought why not share it here? I've also posted this on some of my social media accounts.

Even before Sinead O' Connor's death, I was thinking this week about the rise of women music artists that made it during the '90s. They really defined much of the music landscape of that decade, and I don't think that's been realized and discussed nearly enough.

Think about it: Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Sinead O' Connor, Tracy Chapman, Alanis Morrisette, Liz Phair, Courtney Love and Hole, Jewel, Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, k.d. lang, Mariah Carey, Gwen Stefani in her No Doubt days, Natalie Merchant, Paula Cole, Britney Spears, Christine Aguilera, and I'm sure I'm missing some. Look at this list...wow! And I'm sure I'm missing several more.

I'm not sure any other decade has had that many female music stars before or since. And yet I don't think people think about this when they think about 90s music.

Sure, the decade is also defined by grunge and the evolution of hip hop, but wow, what a decade for female artists!

I don't know where else to go with this, but I thought it was worth sharing.

One last thing: I'm listening to Sarah McLachlin's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album from 1993, an album thirty years old, as I write this.

100 Days Until Halloween 2023!

 

Hello one and all! This is just a quick note to let you know that Halloween night is only 100 days away! This is my yearly reminder to let you know that the blog is still active and will take part in the Countdown to Halloween 2023! It's my blog's biggest event of the year, and I look forward to scaring you and entertaining you this year.

This Halloween looks to be another great one, with products such as:

--the brand new General Mills Monster Cereal, Carmella Creeper! The first new Monster Cereal since the '80s!

--Lucky Charms with Halloween monster marshmallows!

--there will even be It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown cereal! Yay!

Plus we have Disney's new Haunted Mansion movie coming this very Friday, the return of Mountain Dew VooDew soda, a black Halloween soda from Fanta, new animatronics from Spirit Halloween, a new giant skeleton from The Home Depot, and who knows WHAT else is in store!

Please bookmark this blog, if you haven't already, and stay tuned October 1st for the Countdown to Halloween!

Until then, enjoy your summer!