I must say: the fun of getting emails from Rocky Sullivan’s bar in Red Hook about their quiz nights nights is reading Scott Turner’s funny writing. I enjoyed this one. BTW: Rocky’s is having an election night beer with Obama Hops.

I bet crying in your beer doesn’t radically change the taste.
Then again, depending on how the vote tallies, that bitter aftertaste
might not be the beer.

There’s more to be said about Halloween.  I saw a
news report tonight filled with warnings for trick-or-treaters’
parents.  It was pretty sad, an entire laundry list of "don’ts."  I
don’t think there was a single "do."  Growing up, I straddled the great
divide between the Ages of Halloween Innocence and LSD in Chunky Bars.  In the late ’60s us six- and seven-year-olds up in Yonkers went
door to door, apartment building to apartment building, well after dark
(who the hell did Halloween in the daylight?), snacked on all the
homemade cookies, candy apples and brownies.  The biggest worry?  How
much we could fill our little pumpkin-shaped buckets.  By my last
trick-or-treating, when I was 11 in 1971, we were under strict orders
to watch out for scary adults, had to toss all the homemade stuff, and
were frightened by the neighborhood scuttle about razors in apples,
never mind everything that, according to the grapevine, was finding its
way into the aforementioned Chunky Bars.

Surely kids today don’t know what they’re missing.  They walk the
streets with parents, uncles and aunts all young enough to not have had
free-flowing Halloweens either.

 

Yes, this is an old man’s "hey, you kids, get off my lawn" rant.

 

Oh, and this thing about redistribution of wealth that McCain is tossing at Obama?  Here’s a severely truncated list of Americans that redistribute wealth on a daily basis:

 

George W. Bush to his friends in big business and the oil industry

Bernanke and Paulson to the financial industry

Congress to every pork project they can

the Amish every time they build a barn

every non-profit organization in the country

the I.R.S. to and fro with breakneck frequency

the United States’ foreign policy

Social Security to everyone over a certain age

Mayor Bloomberg to Bruce Ratner for the virtually dead Atlantic Yards project

Every one of else every time we buy something

Every one of else every time we volunteer our time and services

neighbors who bring food over when someone’s sick

employers

employees

every dyed-in-the-wool free-market capitalists (of whom none are in Congress or the White House)

 

Barack Obama at a rally in Columbus, Ohio — image courtesy Republican National Committee

 

In fact, the percentage of the country’s wealth that’s actually redistributed by honest-to-Che
soclialists and communists is, well, the few hundred of us left will
have a long unproductive meeting and get back to you with a figure.

 

But it’s infinitesimally microscopic.

 

At any rate, have fun trick-or-treating on Thursday, voting
on Tuesday, have fun with the national holiday, and lets get this
nation back on track.

 

The Where and When

Pub Quiz this Thursday evening October 29th
Rocky Sullivan’s of Red Hook
34 Van Dyke at Dwight Street in Red Hook