He'll search in every pumpkin patch, haunted houses far and ear

[austin_dern]

bunny_hugger and I were saying for ages that we needed to get pumpkins for carving. So last weekend we went up to Uncle John's Cider Mill, to wander through their pumpkin patch and make our selections. It also gave me a chance to see their apple cider machine in operation for the first time. October it turns out is Cider Mill peak season, and they had a big crowd and carnival rides and a couple-person band and everything going on. Happily for us it was also a nice warm day, around 70 degrees, so we could just hang around.

Less happily most of the pumpkins in the field --- cut off their vines but left where they were --- were those rejected by folks who'd been there earlier weekends. bunny_hugger found a charming one with a lot of branches still attached --- it hadn't been fully cut off, either --- and I found one that was part orange, part green, like it had hybridized with a squash. I liked the split-face appeal of this.

While her pumpkin was in good shape mine turned out to be nearly rotted: when I cut it open there was a damp stew of pumpkin innards. This made it easy to empty, at least, but the remaining shell didn't have much structural integrity and its holding out to Halloween would depend on luck.

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Meanwhile over on my humor blog, are things to read. Last week's big piece was ``Remember This! Also: How To'' and I expect that's useful for some folks. Run since then have been:

• Krazy Kat in: Weenie Roast, another attempted adaptation of the comic strip to the cartoons and how it goes really weird.
• Statistics Saturday: Perils Of Modern Childhood, Based On What I See In Comic Strips, a side project of that whole mathematical comic strips thing I do.
• In Search Of Happy Coaches, which I don't see in football even when they win.
• Comic Strips I Don’t, Do Understand, continuing the mystery of what Compu-Toon even means, or might mean, plus a link to my mathematics blog for its comics.
• Franklin P Adams: Monotonous Variety, sharing a cute poem of value to writers who need verbs other than ``to say''.
• The Screaming (?) Skull, based on a Halloween cutout from around these parts.

And then there's this week's big piece, ``It's Great Being Tall, In Case You Wondered'', letting you know what you're missing out on if you aren't. Sorry.

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Trivia: In 1915, John D Rockefeller could have paid off the United States national debt --- $1.191 billion --- by himself and still been the richest man in the country. Source: An Empire Of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, John Steele Gordon.

Currently Reading: Pioneers, Reformers, and Millionaires, Elizabeth A Homer.

PS: How To Hear Drums, about one of the great applicable mathematics problems from the 1960s and its answer. First of these since my last roundup.