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I bitch a lot about how Christmas season in America lasts for two months, which is two months too long. But it's still 3 months until Halloween, and Kroger has already rolled out Halloween decorations before the kids were even back in school.

You might interpret my criticism to say that I'm anti-Halloween, and you'd be right. I'm no fan. However, there's always been plenty of time for me to dislike Halloween during the month of October. There's no reason for it to take up a quarter of the year. There's got to be time for me to hate other things.

I don't know what this sprinting from one commercialized holiday to the next without any regard for the time in between says about American society in the 21st century, but I do know that it can't say anything good.

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Only 2 more days until Halloween, so let me hurry up and post the rest of my Jack O'Lantern Spectacular jack o'lanterns! Keep in mind that these pictures represent the best of my pictures, but only a small sampling of all the pumpkin art there was to see.

Many pumpkins, like this Irish Setter, utilized black paint for added contrast.

Bright lights can turn pumpkins into organic Lite-Brites.

Some carvings were more elaborate than others.

White paint and deep carvings make for a shiny, shiny pumpkin.

The Greek section had a pumpkins designed to look like urns, gods, and mythological creatures.

Not every design was horrific.

My art school roots are showing: The Great Wave off Kanagawa was probably my personal favorite.

This amazing Chinese dragon had a tail made of scores of small pumpkins that wound between and around several large trees. It was a fantastic work that was the highlight of the exhibit. Definitely something you're unlikely to see in your neighborhood this or any year.

(If you missed it, there were more pumpkins in yesterday's post.)

[UPDATE: I should have mentioned that this year marks the 20th anniversary of my First Place finish in the 1993 Emory University Pumpkin Carving Contest. I only entered because my dormmates bragged that they could carve better pumpkins that I could. As I proved, they could not.

I thought that pumpkin was pretty good, but it didn't hold a candle to most of anything I saw in Louisville. The state of the art of pumpkin carving has come a long way in 2 decades!

(For the record, the prize was $100 to spend at the University Bookstore, and I still have the $60 sweatshirt I bought with it.)]

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I've told you that Mom and I went to Nashville, but I still haven't told you why. The real reason for our road trip wasn't to see the Vanderbilt game. No, Nashville was a mere detour from our real objective: the Jack O'Lantern Spectacular in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Spectacular is 5,000 pumpkins arranged along a nature trail. That's a lot of jack o'lanterns. There is no way I can really convey the experience of walking a nature trail at night lit only by jack o'lanterns all around you. "Spectacular" is an appropriate word. Most impressively, So far as I could tell, none of them were duplicated.

Some stood out, even among thousands of similar carvings.

One of the carvers must have a thing for star-shaped eyes.

This skull looked like something I might try.

There were several of these "splatter" designs, my favorite of the styles I saw repeated.

To me, this looks more like a pictogram than a face.

Lest I fool you into thinking that all the jack o'lanterns were the traditional kind you might find in your own neighborhood, you need to know that scattered among the more mundane carvings were a smattering of true pumpkin-carving works of art.

I'll showcase a few more of these later this week.

In any event, know that it was worth the trip to Louisville for the experience.

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Reuters reports that medical clinics across the country will be working overtime on Halloween night x-raying candy to ensure that it is free of harmful foreign bodies. Says one grandmother, "scanning candy is a really good idea because it can detect a lot of things, like glass, that you can't see through the candy wrappers." Damn those candy companies and their reckless practice of hiding glass in their candies.

That's all fine and good, but that won't help the citizens of Los Angeles. The LA Police Department is warning parents to screen Halloween candy for marijuana. X-rays aren't any good for that. ABC News adds that parents should be aware of the following symptoms: "kids may become giddy, constantly repetitive, they may stare off in space, may have some hallucinations." Or, in other words, they may act as though they've just eaten a lot of sugar. Good luck with that, parents.

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This week I was forced to swerve my car because the driver in front of me had was braking to avoid two deer. No, this was not on the highway as you might expect, but in a Food Lion parking lot. It can't be a coincidence that deer would be invading our shopping centers as we gear up for the merchandising bonanza that is Halloween. That's right: deer are out for your candy. And they'll take it any way they can get it.

This insidious menace is only the latest escalation in the Great Deer Uprising of 2010. Unable to enter the city of Newnan legally, the deer are now resorting to a crafty ruse in order to sneak into town under cover of darkness and steal the candy that our children earned the hard way: by going door to door and extorting it under threat of violence!

If we let the deer get away with this, we'll only be letting the terrorists win! (Terrorist deer, that is. Make no mistake, terrorist children should still encouraged: it's the American way!) So this year, check under that mask when a cute ne'er-do-well comes banging on your door. There's a chance you'll find that he just may not be human. Far worse than zombies or vampires, he could be a deer in disguise!

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The internet was "born" 40 years ago yesterday with it's first connection between nerds in California colleges. Credited with making the graphic world wide web profitable, banner ads celebrated their 15th anniversary on Tuesday. And of course tomorrow is Halloween. Keeping all of that in mind, I present to you a complete convergence:

Image and caption stolen borrowed from Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts, courtesy his article "5 Reasons It Sucks Being a Joss Whedon Fan" at Cracked.com.

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