10 Halloween Urban legends

So the original Cos-play holiday is coming.  Good old All Hallows eve.  I like it for semi creepyness.  But more Halloween is the gateway to that holiday roller coaster. Once Halloween goes by it seems like the rest of they days and nights fly by with unparalleled speed.  Soon enough you are toasting a new year and wondering just what happened to the rest of the year.  Well as a kid Halloween was one of the bang up beat all holidays.  You would get to dress up as something weird, horrific or cool and go get free candy.  Nothing better.  At that age, Christmas is light years away.  Once you are older, you're lucky if you can taste Thanksgiving's pumpkin pie before you are done opening presents.  Well this list is more about the urban legends that I remember hearing during Halloween.  I can't verify one of them and I'm not going to snopes.  Here we go...

10. melt the candy -  This one was about kids who's earth grown druid hippy parents didn't want them having any candy but they didn't want them to miss out on all of the fun of the holiday, so they would let each of their children pick out one candy item and then melt the rest in a big pot.  Sometimes instead of melting the candy would be crushed so nobody could make use of this horrible capitalist treat.   No this story didn't make any sense but it did teach me a grave disdain of granola chewing hippies.  No candy, humph!  They must be communists!

9. The cat lady - This was a local tale and a bit more involved as it required people to trespass onto a persons property to witness rows of tiny cat graves.  That's the assumption anyway.  Was I ever able to prove it?  no.   I had heard about it from those that had.  Oddly enough nearly every locality has some kind of story like this that involves someones secluded property and some very tall assumptions.  If you ever have the chance to trespass on private property, I don't recommend it. It's scary at best.  Illegal at worst and these poor people are probably not at all what you think and would just like to be left alone.

8. apple razor blades - This one has been around for ages.  The kid hater that finally gets their revenge by sliding some Remington steel razor blades into a bushel basket of red delicious and hand them out as treats to all the miscreant kids wandering around.  Looking back I keep wondering what kid would be dumb enough to take a bite of an apple without looking it over.  Not to mention the parents examining the candy for potential bombs.  The truth is, no self respecting kid would ever have seen that apple make it home.  An apple is right next to a tooth brush from your neighborhood dentist in the Parthenon of sucky Halloween treats and would probably have been thrown away...or something.

7. kidnap kids - Oh yeah I heard this one a lot growing up.  There were bands of bad people scooping up kids by the dozen and kidnapping them.  Nobody would know the difference because it was Halloween.  I have yet to hear about a kidnapping during Halloween, and if there is, I don't want to hear about it.  But honestly how many witnesses are there on the streets?  Then again, nobody ever accused a criminal of being smart.  It was because of this that I never went into anyone's house to experience peeled grape eyeballs and cold spaghetti guts or the mini hallway of terrors.  I just knew I was going to suddenly be abducted.  I envisioned some kind of giant steel cage filled with costumed kids wishing they had taken heed of their friends mothers advice.

6. old folks giving away full candy bars - If I was only the one street over I would have made a HAUL!!!  Usually the day after Halloween I would hear from my friends about some house or street full of old folks that just loved the young-ins and were giving away a kings ransom in candy.  Full size candy bars of many varieties.  Take one, Take a few!  Enjoy your youth!  For some reason I never found the Eldorado of elderly handing out packaged confections.  I was just happy to have a bag full of small candy and pixy stick dust in the bottom of the bag.

5. kids getting their candy stolen - I had heard about roaming bands of punks that were stealing kid's candy.  I had never witnessed it myself, but it seemed plausible.  Those older kids were capable of anything.  Certainly stealing from the law abiding 8 year olds of the town was not beneath them.   Once again, I had never had my lollipops purloined.  In fact the only thief of my candy was mom and dad and it was never the crap candy either.  They always went for the peanut butter cups and chocolate bars leaving me with peanut butter taffy and smarties.

4. Pop Rocks Mikey - Once pop rocks started coming on the scene, they were a big deal in the Halloween candy rounds.  They were rare and wonderful.  If you did happen to get any, you would immediately hear the inaccurate tale of Mikey the kid from the life cereal commercials and how after eating more than his fair share of pop rocks he downed several carbonated soft drinks the name of the brand escapes me.  Close after he would have to be rushed to the hospital because his stomach exploded like he had an alien exchange student in his small intestine.  Never happened.  Thanks to one of the very first Mythbusters shows this was proven to be particularly impossible.  Great story though.

3. Near Death Ghost experiences - What better time to trot out the Halloween themed story about a ghost or someone you knew that was playing with a ouija board or holding a seance?  My dad had several he liked to entertain us kids with.  One he told was of a local group of 3 friends that decided to go into an abandoned house to play with a parker brothers brand ouija board.  By the end of the night.  They were all hospitalized and were unable to say anything about the horrors witnessed, but they all had shock white hair from the experience.  Oh yeah, it was a chiller.  Dad didn't appreciate a lot of followup questions about a lot of his stories, so we took him at his word.  It was vivid enough that I still remembered the images I had imagined as a kid of these poor shocked kids that were foolish enough to play with the Devil's Telegraph.

2. LSD Candy - This was the more modern version of the razor blade apple.  It was lsd laced candy.  Since LSD was often ingested on a sugar cube, why not on candy?  Once again, hippies ruin everything.

1. Hot Pennies - Along with the razor blade apples I had heard of bitter old people only scant days away from their final death rattling breath that wished nothing but ill for the youth.  The tale goes that they would heat up stacks of pennies and put them in the kids bags.  The pennies were so hot that they would melt the candy and go right through the plastic candy bag rendering it some kind of time lapsed pinata.  I'm sure they would peer out their window and laugh their bitter cold laugh as kids tried to collect their nights booty as it was spilling out into the street.  Never witnessed, but heard nearly every year.

Once again, I thought maybe this was it.  But then another idea crept into my addled brain.  Who knows?  maybe it will happen again in 15 days.  Come back and find out!

Top 10 Candy Bars

This weeks top Ten takes me to a place that is close to my heart. Candy Bars. It must be an easy blog subject, because if you Google top 10 candy, you will find myriad blogs (probably better than mine) but I'm writing it anyway. I love candy for several reasons. First candy is sweet and tasty. Like so many things we deal with in life, It's usually bad for you, but not in a really bad way. Candy usually has some of the most creative advertising/marketing of any product you can think of. The reason is, they sell candy to kids, and kids like all candy equally. Sure they have their favorites, but the truth is, unless they really hate it, they will eat it.

There are two kinds of candy. Chocolate and Plastic. Chocolate is fairly obvious. Plastic is any sugar based candy that doesn't have chocolate in it. This would include licorice, jaw breakers, jelly beans etc. It all seems like plastic. This doesn't mean it's not tasty, it's just different.

I'm basing this top 10 list on nearly 6 years of experience in running my own candy store in the Company I was working for. They were kind enough to allow me to continue on with that activity right up until I was let go. Now before you say 'well that will show you for running a candy store in a company' That really wasn't very close to the reason I was let go, but I'm sure it didn't help ;). And if that company had me back for some reason (like all the other people on the planet suddenly died) I would not resume my candy store activities.

So without further blather, I give you MY top 10 Candies.

1. Snickers - Numero Uno, The big daddy in the candy, vending business. This juggernaut of chocolate confectionary outsells all other candy bars. Is it the nuts? is it the chocolate? is it the caramel and creamy nougat? Who knows. The fact is, I'm not a huge fan of snickers myself. It's just too busy and I like my flavors more simple. On the other hand, if you are at a convenience store and can't find anything hearty to eat. Sinckers...satisfies. Say, that should be a jingle of some sort.





2. Marathon/Curly Whirly - Long ago, there was a magical candy bar that sat in a 1 foot wrapper, yes, 1 foot. Most other candy bars are about 5-6 inches long with a couple of notable exceptions in the Butterfinger/3 musketteers range at roughly 7 inches and the Big Hunk/Charleston Chew could give the Marathon a run for the money, but only the Marathon had a ruler printed on the back of the wrapper. In order to make other candies feel more confident, the Marathon bar had several different lengths down to a 7 inch model. On the other end of the spectrum you find the lowly Chunky ringing in at a nearly laughable 3 inches, but it's a cube, so you can't blame it. After all, it's how you taste, not how long you are right? right? Anyway, the Marathon bar was a lovely bit of braided caramel wrapped around by a coat of chocolate. One of my personal favorites. Sadly, they don't make the Marathon bar anymore. Imagine that normal store shelves are built to house the marathons lesser endowed brothers, not this candy freakshow. On top of that, most people found that a marathon bar was more candy than they wanted in one sitting. This deadly combination took the marathon bar out of our candy lexicon. But wait! the Cadbury company has a eeriliy similar candy bar called the Curly Whirly. If you are aware of the marathon bars magnificent visage, you will see it mimicked in the Curly Whirly. Look it up on the web, you can get em for about a buck a bar plus shipping etc.

3. Big Hunk - When you are tired of complicated candybars and strange milk chocolate that gets all over the place and ruins your diet, you can turn to your good friend the Big Hunk. This slab of corn syrup infused with peanuts is a dieters lifeline. You can dump about 1/4 of the calories if you just pick out the nuts. No, this definitely does not make this a 'diet' candy bar. There really is no such thing. If it's diet, it sucks and is not candy. The big hunk is perfect if you smack it while it's in it's wrapper and then open it and pick out the pieces. If you want a comparison, think of a Large oversized Bit-o-Honey. Just the Bit-o-Honey contains crushed nuts and more of a honey flavor than it's behemoth brother. This candy will give your jaw such a workout, you will know you've had one after you are done.

4. Twizzlers - While these fall under the licorice category, Twizzlers and their rather odd cousin Red Vines have very little to do with licorice as far as flavor. In fact, the closest thing to it would be the black NIBS that also bear the Twizzler name. All licorice types of candies are much closer related to a cookie than a candy bar. they have a lot of flour in them. The new Twizzlers have a rainbow of flavors in tube form. Chewy and fun, the Twizzler is among few candies that rate TV commercials. Apparently they make mouths happy. That's good. Because not brushing off the red stain from off of your pearly whites will make your mouth sad.







5-Twix - Otherwise knows as the Raider in Europe. The TWIX bar is awesome. two thin cookies with a layer of caramel surrounded by a very good milk chocolate. Twix are terrific for many reasons, the least of which is that you can easily split a twix with a friend because there are 2 separate candy bars in the package. Cool! The candy suffers one problem. If you happen to get a twix and store it anywhere that's even remotely warm, you will find that all of the caramely goodness on top of the twix will find itself on the downhill side of the candybar. A big lump of caramel on one side, and a rather thin essence of caramel on the other surrounded by a chocolate shell. Usually when this happens, you will also find the caramel has escaped it's chocolate bonds and flows freely in the candy wrapper. The Twix came in many flavors for a while, but the standard caramel remains a popular favorite. My own favorite was the cookies and cream. yum.


6. Almond Joy / Mounds - Coconut is among candy lovers deal breakers in candy. It ranks with raisins and nuts as potential detour signs pointing to other less controversial candies. The Almond Joy has a bed of sugared coconut surrounded by milk chocolate and has 2 lovely almonds in each bar section. While the mounds has dark chocolate and no nuts. They often will be advertised together. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't. The problem with this candy bar is once you have had one, you don't really crave another for a long time. So it sits on the shelf for a while and as a result the candy isn't as fresh and good. If you can get a really fresh Almond Joy, it's a pretty darn good candy bar.








7. Milky Way - Another personal favorite. The Milky way took a snickers and traded the nuts for more caramel. It's a very rich very creamy kind of candy bar. It's also very consistent. Since it doesn't contain any nuts or dried fruits in it, it has a good shelf life and doesn't change in flavor much from fresh to less than fresh. In a true testament to advertising, when they started making ads with people craving that last little whirl of caramel even if it was found on a tabletop I noticed a definite increase in Milky Way sales.







8. Mars / Snickers Almonds - The mars bar. another favorite. Built much like a snickers but instead of peanuts, it had almonds and a much fluffier nougat. Very sweet and light, the Mars Bar was very popular in it's own right. Only recently did Snickers create a candy bar called the Snickers Almond. It's a Mars Bar. I'm not sure if the Mars folks decided that they would benefit from calling their candy bar Snickers, or if Snickers decided they wanted to rub out some competition by creating a 3rd party candidate in the Candy bar elections. hmmm...It TASES like a Mars bar, but it's wrapped like a Snickers...It's the best of both worlds!





9. Skittles - The king of the plastic candies. Skittles spawned many a different flavor combination. These little buttons of fruity flavor fall out of the package like a rainbow. Wow, that would be a good idea for an ad. Regular came in the default flavors to colors, while the Berry Skittles were only in the berry category of candy. There were also the less popular Tropical Skittles and the now discontinued (sniff! and my favorite) creamy Skittles. The Sour Skittles on the other hand are a favorite with the kids. The great thing about skittles was they tasted great no matter how you ate them. A handful was just a chaotic bunch of flavors, but they all worked together. I tend to categorize mine by color and eat them in order so I can maximize my flavor enjoyment across the candy spectrum. I know this is very OCD, but the truth is, I don't want to be left with a big handful of lemon ones at the end, I would much rather have a couple of each. so I will line them up in their colors and then plan a 2 skittles from the longest rows until they match the length of the next longest row. then I will include that row in the selection process until I have 2 of each color to enjoy at the end. That was probably too much Information.

10 M&Ms - These little chocolate gems were a favorite of the GI's in the War. Back when the world was a much bigger place and everyone didn't have everything available. Chocolate bars were kind of a big deal. You could curry a lot of favor from the locals if you had Chocolate bars (and nylons as well, but that's a different Top 10 list entirely). The problem was. If you carried Chocolate bars in your pack all over the place, they would tend to break and melt. So they developed the M&M. Little tiny chocolate pieces that wouldn't melt in your pack even if they got a little warm. While M&M's have many colors, they all are just sugar flavored. There are certain colors in the M&M world that are rumored to impart an interesting behavior and it's not envy as the color would suggest. That's all I'll say on the matter. M&M's also came up with some rather interesting flavored experiments including the Dark M&M's and the peanut Butter M&M's along with almond and cherry flavors. Of course the regulars are just chocolate, or chocolate with a peanut in it. This most versatile of the candy universe often finds itself in cooking and desert decorating. Try putting them in the microwave for about 8 seconds. It warms them up just enough that the chocolate is a little bit liquid. Longer than that and they turn into little chocolate grenades, so stick with 8 seconds.

I know, your favorite candy bar isn't there. The peanut butter cups didn't show up, not for any other reason but because I think they are too rich so I'm not as big a fan. For the record I had a fairly politically charged blog that I wanted to write, and while I'm not squeamish about printing it, I do think that my top 10 lists lend themselves to lighter subject matter. I may on the other hand begin another blog just for my philosophical musings. I don't know. I'll have to think about it. It's already boring me and I haven't written it yet.

Top 10 Crappy Halloween Treats

Yes, I'm well aware that Halloween is past. I know that it's November. But since I went to the store on November 1st and saw all of the left over Halloween candy pushed into a lonely corner on one end cap next to Kitty Litter and Kitchen aids I realized that everything around it was glowing a red and green Bing Crosby Christmas. That's right, CHRISTMAS. I don't blame the stores being antsy to get the Holiday season going what with the bad economy and all but PLEASE can I have just one weekend of Turkey and Pumpkin Pie before we go full bore into the Xmas fanfare?

In a move that is directly opposite the stores, I am moving backwards into Halloween again to talk about the candy. Those of you that know me know I have a penchant for the sweet. One of my favorite pastimes was running a Candy store at a company I used to work for. After seeing my son come back from his All Hallows Eve door to door night o' beggin looking like a burgler that had just come back from the biggest heist since Oceans 11, I watched him sort through his candy with a seriousness that rivals young brides sifting through diamonds. He was putting them into piles according to his tastes. This is what has brought me to this list of notable crappy Halloween treats.

10. Coupons - Did I say candy? Well I meant candy, but this is even better kids! A coupon for 1/2 off of a BIG candy bar! Not some lame 'fun size' candy bar. You can use this baby when all of your other candy has been eaten and puked all ready. LAME. I got this one when I was about 10 years old and wondered who if anyone would actually use a coupon for halloween candy. This is very very much like trying to buy off a hit man with S&H Greenstamps to not kill you.











9. Tooth Brushes - Hey Mark Didn't you say Candy? Well, technically I said treats, which could be nearly anything. This one is a little worse than number 10 because you really are adding insult to injury. Not only are you not getting candy, but you are getting anti candy. The biggest problem is these tooth brushes are usually inferior quality brushes that you wouldn't scrub grout with in a Frat house bathroom much less your own pearly whites.














8. Red/white Mint Discs/Candy Canes - This is Halloween right? Just because you had to clear out your Christmas decorations in order to get to the Halloween ones doesn't mean you can try to foist last years yucky candy canes and mint discs on those unwitting kids this year. You should be ashamed of yourself. You cheapen the Spirit of Halloween.














7. Live Fruit - What are you? My Mother? An apple? REALLY?! Everyone knows you put a razorblade in there anyway. At least that's how the urban legend goes. How about a little tiny plastic bag with baby carrots in it? Wrong answer. If you don't make with the sweet and gooey pretty soon, you will have a hard time distinguishing your house from egg salad.









6. pennies - pennies. I got pennies in my bag a few times as a youth. I don't blame them too much because it was usually on the last few houses on the route and they had run out of candy. When I was a kid, there was a point in time where I wasn't certain that there WAS any curfew on Halloween. So I would be ringing doorbells WELL into the night. So I very likely deserved the pennies. I had actually heard that there was someone that was giving out baked pennies that were red hot that would melt through those pumpkin head treat buckets. Probably not true, but I think Iwould like mythbusters to check it out.



5. Plastic Spiders - This is not a treat and it's not a Toy. It's a crappy Plastic spider that you can get from the oriental trading company for about 3 dollars for a gross of them. Nobody plays with these. In fact they are thrown away nearly as soon as they are found and shown to mom with the appropriate fake look of terror response. I would have had more enjoyment out of 1 peanut m&m.








4. Milk Dud(s) - If you perchance to look inside a childs Halloween haul, you will find one or two of these little boxes of glory. Any one of these little 'butes could rip out a filling in 2 chews. It's a wonder that Dentists weren't giving these away by the gross. They are in a box that will contain anywhere between 1 and 4 milk duds. In candy biz these are called 'FUN' sizes. Fun my sweet mothers girdle. If a regular candybar is normal or 'business' size and these sorry excuses for candy are FUN size. I suppose those little candy sprinkles that you find on cupcakes could be packaged individually and sold as 'Riotous Living' Size.

3. Smartees - The reason these make the list is sheer numbers. These little discs of compressed chalk are rolled up into tubes and called SMARTIES. They have an off brand kosher cousin called Fizzers. They Fizz about as much as smarties make you smart. I have nothing against these candies normally, but if you eat about 5 packages of them, you get really sore taste buds that take roughly 2 days to heal, and everyone knows that one of the essential pieces to Halloween is gorging ones self on candy to the point of nausea. This doesn't help that cause.









2. Peanut Butter Taffy - In their Trademark Black and Orange wax paper wrapping this little treat was a staple of cheap handouts in the 70's and 80's and I have still seen them today. The taffy is ok, but there is just something wierd about a process candy that has no logo and no company information. If you would like to try the RETAIL version of these things, go and find yourself an ABBA-ZABA, they are the same. For all you know, that old lady handing them out made it herself with Exlax to get back at the neighborhood kids for spray painting rude words on her silhouetted cowboy leaning against her house.



1. Pixie Sticks - Yuck. These little paper tubes filled with crushed smarties are horrible. they either broke in your bag and left a residue that contaminated all the other candies and made your hands sticky just from handling them. Or worse yet, they survived and you ate them with very unsatisfactory results. I suppose they ARE candy, but really, they aren't much of a candy. In fact, mostly they are just the promise of candy. One year my brother and I decided to try to pool our resources of pixie sticks and pour them into a glass of water in the hopes of discovering a new replacement for kool-aid and thus quenching a growing world thirst for that fat glass man's smiling pitcher of liquid delight. We failed miserably. We used too much water and not enough pixie sticks. But the truth is, there isn't enough pixie sticks in the world to make something good out of them. More bad, just equals more BAD.

As always thanks for reading! and Merry Xmas!