It turned raw on Thursday morning. Cold mean rain. Snow that perished the moment it hit the sidewalk. White dusting on the green lawns. It’s begun.
Didn’t dissuade the trick-or-treaters and also NO ONE CARES to hear the report of how many you got. The only thing that interests me, because I am just that kind of guy, is how many said “thank you” unprompted. The number has been constant for a long time, if I’m honest, which is to say not enough to make me happy but just enough to give me hope. One kid stuck his hand in the bowl and tried to take an entire handful, and as I tweeted, I gave him the look like Matthau at the end of Pelham 123. It worked.
With some of them, it’s all about what they can get away with.
And by "them" I mean "humanity," I guess.
I will not discuss the most popular candy, except to say that Friday’s Substack has some thoughts on the Jolly Rancher. It was not the place for any discussion of the Jolly Rancher history; that's more of a Bleat thing but even here, nah. I will not recount the Jolly Rancher history.
In detail, that is. Basically, a couple invented it, made lots of them, sold it to a bigger company. Ta-da. What you might not have known: they also had an ice cream, and they franchised this out. And so:
Sidney, NE. The building still stands.
Jolly Rancher ice cream sounds weird. Like it’s embedded with hard shards that abrade your gums. Anyway, the Substack concerns the philosophical nature of the Jolly Rancher. Subscribe! It's cheap. And there will be much more to come at no additional cost.
End of the month - well, in Bleat terms - so that means it's time to visit the web ads that angered me the most this month.
We have been trained to instinctively reject these as real. We know it's AI. We know there will be nothing like this in the list. We know there will be more than 34, and that we may never get to the end of the list; we will tire of ads for diet pills and neuropathy quack-cures and back out, feeling degraded, some how.
AI bot threw a gear here. Also, she's been married ot the same guy since 1996.
"Health Trition."
I checked. He does not.
Somehow I suspect that this reads differently in other states. You know the building, right? Ridiculous.
Liza Nest? LIZA NEST?
Most of the stories at "Liza Nest: are "reprinted" from PetsReporter, which is another unread site full of chumjunk. Dead Internet.
There was a guy walking around at the State Fair, stopping at booths that sold knick-knacks, climbing up on a ladder to knock off carvings off a shelf with a rock, which seemed to be a carving of its own. He said he was destroying art with art. I paid him five dollars for it so he wouldn’t do it again.
I was at the State Fair to give my show; the boss was there. But then I found myself in downtown Minneapolis, getting lost in a large and mostly empty cowboy bar.
. . . .before finally realizing I had missed the Fair speech, and people would be disappointed. There was no point in doing it the next day, since it wasn’t advertised.
(Note: this dream preceded by several months the Annus Horribilis at the paper.)
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
Yes, yes, Halloween is so over on the first of November, but I have all these "NYC Times Square Halloween" examples. They're just what I love about low-prompt AI art: insanity.
PUTTIN' ON THE RITZ
The AI keeps putting dark horned shadows into the background.
Things would be wrong if you came across this. Things would be very wrong indeed.
I mean, this is what nightmares look like.
"Scary" illustrations never seem unnerving to me.
This is unnerving to me
Let's see what a Times Square diner would look like . . .
Oh no
Oh no oh no
Lance in full exposition mode:
Ha ha he was wrong it actually was the dame, he jumped to conclusions without knowing what had been said before he arrived
