Quotation Saturday: Hallowe'en
Mamacita says: It’s Hallowe’en, and I’m ready.
Big bowl of filled treat bags for little kids: check.
Big bowl of filled treat bags for bigger kids: check.
Big jar of assorted body parts: check.
Skulls: check
Pumpkins: check.
Forty googly-zillion ladybug beetles crawling on the ceiling: check 
Motion-animated singing zombie on front door: check.
Bring it, kids.
1. I’ll bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween. –Author Unknown
2. A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween. –Erma Bombeck
3. Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night. –Steve Almond
4. Halloween is huge in my house and we really get into the “spirits” of things. –Dee Snider 
5. Hold on, man. We don’t go anywhere with “scary,” “spooky,” “haunted,” or “forbidden” in the title. –from Scooby-Doo
6. This Halloween the most popular mask is the Arnold Schwarzenegger mask. And the best part? With a mouth full of candy you will sound just like him. –Conan O’Brien
7. Those seemingly interminable dark walks between houses, long before street-lit safety became an issue, were more adrenalizing than the mountains of candy filling the sack. Sadly Halloween, with our good-natured attempts to protect the little ones, from the increasingly dangerous traffic and increasingly sick adults, has become an utter bore. –Lauren Springer
8. Where there is no imagination there is no horror. –Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.
9. There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. –Joseph Conrad
10. If a man harbors any sort of fear, it makes him landlord to a ghost. –Lloyd Douglas
11. Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn’t even the star of his own Halloween special. –Chris Rock
12. True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about but few have seen. –Author Unknown
13. They that are born on Halloween shall see more than other folk. — Unknown
14. A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night. –J.M. Barrie
15. Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story. –Mason Cooley
16. Proof of our society’s decline is that Halloween has become a broad daylight event for many. –Robert Kirby
17. There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask. –Colette
18. Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates. –Fernando Pessoa
19. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. — Marianne Williamson
20. You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. — Eric Hoffer
21. Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. — Sir Francis Bacon
22. Halloween was confusing. All my life my parents said, “Never take candy from strangers.” And then they dressed me up and said, “Go beg for it.” I didn’t know what to do! I’d knock on people’s doors and go, “Trick or treat.” “No thank you.” — Rita Rudner
23. Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. — Theodor Adorno 
24. The chief difference between Horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won’t walk backwards. A Horror fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll step on the cat. — Aaron Allston
25. Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect Horror. — Carlos Fuentes
26. When you do find it, you’ll define horror the only way it ever really has been defined – by each reader and writer, in an individual way. — Paula Guran
27. A thousand fearful images and dire suggestions glance along the mind when it is moody and discontented with itself. Command them to stand and show themselves, and you presently assert the power of reason over imagination. — Sir Walter Scott
28. One might say that the true subject of the Horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses. — Robin Wood
29. The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. — Krishnamurti
30. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. — H. P. Lovecraft
31. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. — Mark Twain
32. For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light
sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in
terror and imagine will come true. — Titus Lucretius Carus
33. One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. — Emily Dickinson
34. Halloween is the perfect time for oozing, bubbling, eye-catching science! — Steve Spangler 
35. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. — Nietzche
36. I have never met a vampire personally, but I don’t know what might happen tomorrow. — Bela Lugosi
37. Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. — Arthur C. Clarke
38. Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter. — Oliver Goldsmith
39. Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I’m afraid of them. –Marquise du Deffand
40. Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory. —George William Curtis
41. Public opinion is like the castle ghost; no one has ever seen it, but everyone is scared of it. —Sigmund Graff
42. Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. — Aung San Suu Kyi
43. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. — Don Miguel Ruiz
44. The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness. — Dorothy Thompson
45. Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. — Stephen King
46. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. — Bertrand Russell
47. True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. — Kurt Vonnegut
48. From ghoulies and ghosties and long leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! – old Scottish prayer
49. A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it. — George MacDonald
50. Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is. — Yvonne Craig
A spooktastic Halloween to you all.
Happy Hallowe'en. Eat Up. Sing Along. Read Up. Jerk Down. Smash. Freeze. Blow Up. Enjoy.
Mamacita says:
Of course, you all probably already know that if you mix candy corn and salted peanuts together in a big bowl, you’ve got handfuls of PayDay bar goodness.
Peanuts are a meat substitute, and candy corn is pretty much fat-free (paraffin never hurt anybody) so really, a big bowl of candy corn and peanuts is GOOD for you.
Eat up.
Oh, and THIS IS HALLOWE’EN!
In case you are wondering, the word “Hallowe’en” is SUPPOSED to have an apostrophe in it. It’s an old spelling, but I like it so I use it. I think you should, too. It would help us all remember what the word actually means.
I learned it from the literature book my mother used when she was in the third grade. I loved that book as a child, and I still do. Wonder of wonders – and oh MY, how veddy, veddy politically incorrect – that book contained actual, honest-to-pete LITERATURE! Yes, actual literature, not those stupid, insipid, limited-vocabulary travesties some teachers call “literature;” heck, I wouldn’t even call that stuff “stories.” It’s most certainly not literature.
But that third grade book had excerpts from Peter Pan, and Les Miserables, and Little House in the Big Woods. That little schoolbook is why I read those novels when I was in lower elementary school.
Back then, schoolbooks were purchased, not rented, and Mom loved that book so much, she kept it, and re-read it many times. Once I learned to read, so did I.
I don’t think I ever had a Language Arts book I liked well enough to want to keep, even if it had been permitted. Watered-down abridgements are the devil, and I mean that in a truly satanic way. And you really don’t want to get me started on “limited vocabulary” selections. Kids learn new words by exposure to new words. No exposure = no new words added to one’s vocabulary.
No wonder so many of our kids today aren’t interested in reading for pleasure. Our schools don’t give them anything worth reading. Some of them graduate – or don’t – without ever having been exposed to a single interesting, challenging thing worth reading.
And this from someone who actually liked Silas Marner.
But speaking of Halloween, my favorite person, my mentor, my idol, Steve Spangler, will be on “Ellen” again tomorrow, Friday, Oct. 30! Check your TV Guide for the time in your area, and be sure to watch! Then go to his blog and tell him how breathtakingly beautiful awesome he was!
Here are some things Steve Spangler has done on “Ellen” in segments past; sit up straight and pay attention when he gets to those pumpkins – it’ll knock your socks off, if you’re wearing socks. If you’re not, it’ll curl your toes. If you have no toes, well, I cried because I had no shoes.
If you go thou and do likewise, don’t forget your goggles.
Remember: You simply MUST watch Ellen tomorrow – Friday – because Steve Spangler is her guest.
There will be a test. There will also be prizes.
I’m not kidding.
Social Media: An Innovative Way To Complete an Assignment
Mamacita says: I have long been a fan of Chris Brogan, and now I think I might love him madly.
As a teacher, I am always on the lookout for new and better things to do, and for better ways to do what I have always done, and Chris’s daughter Violette has shown me yet another way that social media can be utilized and thoroughly enjoyed in and out of the classroom.
What an AWESOME IDEA, Brogans. Thank you for sharing.
