Ah, fall! Leaves and trees and hiking and shit. All this nature, isn't it lovely? It's so lovely that it has all the colors: from orange to red to green, green like stacked wads of cold, hard cash.
Halloween digs itself out of the chilly autumn ground for a few weeks each year, too weird and primal for governments or religions to claim. It is an ancient pagan harvest festival and a leering plastic skeleton in a front-yard cemetery of styrofoam tombstones. It is candy and liquor, sex and death, and the only "moral lesson" of Halloween is a sneering threat from a child in the night: Give me mine or you'll get yours, mister. It is the only honest American holiday.
It's officially fall again, and that can only mean three things: Everything tastes like pumpkin; monster-themed breakfast cereals are back on the shelves; and no freshly raked pile of leaves is safe from sneak attacks.
Pringles, a potato-based snack that does not actually self-identify as a "potato chip," has recently announced that they will be introducing new "holiday flavors" to the Pringle family. The new flavors? "Pumpkin Pie Spice," "Cinnamon and Sugar," and "White Chocolate Peppermint." Why? God only knows.
A nor'easter hit the, uh, Northeast yesterday, like, October 29 yesterday, dropping as many as 19 inches of snow on a region stretching from Pennsylvania through New England in what was for most places a record-breakingly early snowstorm. Three people died overnight—an 84-year-old man was killed by a falling tree, a 20-year-old man accidentally touched a downed power line, and a third person was killed in a Connecticut traffic accident—and at least 2.3 million people were left without power.
Just watch this giant pumpkin growing in Ken Desrosiers yard in Broad Brook, Connecticut. The 1,487 behemoth took only two and a half months to grow and Desrosiers captured the entire thing with time-lapse photography. We haven't seen this dedication to Halloween since old Roseanne episodes.
As if global warming hasn't already done enough for us, guess what we're gearing up for now? That's right: "one of the worst, and longest, allergy seasons yet." Don't worry, we're here to help!
The days will soon get shorter, the weather will get colder, and you'll soon have actual things to do at your job now. The end of summer sucks, doesn't it? But at least there's going to be all sorts of new stuff on television! Let's look at everything that will give us a glimmer of hope this fall.
[Some fall foliage peeks through the Indiana fog today. Autumn would be great if winter weren't right behind it. Image via AP]
Summer's over. As we turn off the grill and step back inside, it's time to settle into our couches for the annual crop of new TV shows. Here are the dramas, comedies, and reality trainwrecks to get excited about.
