Dear Madame Zoltar

Hello, my hearty harvesters! How are you? Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend, so the mornings will be a little brighter, for awhile, but soon our evenings will darken quickly. No wonder that people think about ghosts and goblins at this time of year. When the wind starts rattling around all of those leaves in the dark, I get a little jumpy, too. Usually, a snort or two of my tonic calms me down nicely.

There were no missives, manuscripts, or messages submitted this week:

Well, I don’t want to toot my own horn, but it looks like the good spell that I cast on our beloved Racine last week may have already started to pay off. A lot of the riffraff in our city was cleaned up in the recent raids, our mayor is actually working towards jobs for our residents, and the proposed city and school tax hikes “aren’t as bad as they could have been.” I guess that’s one way of looking at it. We have a wonderful town on a beautiful lake. Let’s keep making it shine.

I have to admit to you, my friends, that I almost forgot about this week’s blog; or rather, for some reason, I thought today was yesterday. I didn’t realize a blog was due until the last minute. Getting older can be a lot of fun as long as you forget the bad parts. So, I’m going to keep with last week’s theme and the seasonal motif of Halloween, one of my favorite holidays. First is “The Life and Death of a Pumpkin,” Winner: Best Short Film and Best Concept, 2006 Chicago Horror Film Festival, October (Chicago, IL):



The following is a video montage of one family’s Halloween pumpkins for four consecutive years:



And finally, something to serve as a sobering reminder of the seriousness of the holiday - a squirrel drunk on fermented pumpkin:



The people who posted the above video noted: “This squirrel in a Minneapolis neighborhood was drunk from eating fermented pumpkins. THIS SQUIRREL WAS FINE THE NEXT DAY. Fermentation is how alcohol is made and animals get drunk in nature all the time.”

All the time? Oh my. You can tell that Madame Z is scraping the bottom of the beer barrel when she hauls out the drunken animal videos. As I said, this has been put together hurriedly, but I still appreciate each and every person who takes the time to read my blog, especially my regular Irregulars.

Please don’t forget to send your grocery lists and random doodles to: madamezoltar@jtirregulars.com.

Bundle up against the weather, dears, and wash your hands like an obsessive compulsive neat freak to ward off the flu. Boraxo®!