I hope you’re all stocked up with toothrot for all the little zombies who’ll be knocking at your door this evening. My daughter and I ran over to Target this morning to pick out supplies for the Apple household.
Snickers, Milky Ways, Reese’s, 3 Musketeers, Starbursts and Skittles. No tricks here, please.
My wife, Sharon, is slightly peeved at me for buying what she calls “the good stuff.” That tells me I must have done well. The big shame of its all: As a diabetic, I can’t even eat the leftovers. I mean, I can. But I might not wake up the next morning.
A few folks shared interesting Halloween treatments with me this week. Let’s take a look at ‘em…
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INDIANA DAILY STUDENT
Student paper, Indiana University
Bloomington, Ind.
Matt Callahan, art director of the Indiana Daily Student, writes today:
We had a zombie walk tonight just off campus and we figured nothing says Halloween quite like the walking dead.
We went a little bit tabloid-y on our centerpiece, and I’d love to hear what you think!
What do I think? It’s disgusting! I love it!
My only beef — and this is a minor one: Anytime you get cute in a place other than your features section, you need to worry about unseemly juxtapositions. In this case, I worry about the walking dead person next to the headline about a meningitis death. If the meningitis headline were smaller or further way on the page, I wouldn’t mind it so much. But it’s big, bold headline and it’s very close to the art. So it bothers me just a bit.
This isn’t a professional newspaper: This is most definitely a student paper. So this isn’t a major problem. It is, however, something you need to be aware of. Because you certainly don’t want to do something stupid like these guys did today.
Anyway, kudos to the IDS — and to photographer Clayton Moore — for a great top-half of the page. And kudos to the young lady in the photo.
I didn’t want dinner tonight anyway…
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FREE PRESS STAR
Toledo, Ohio
Circulation: 115,000
Q: How do you one-up a picture of a zombie?
A: With a picture of the zombie: Rob Zombie.
James Molnar of the Free Press Star sends us this front page from last Wednesday and tells us:
While not as bloody and gory as years past, it features Rob Zombie on the cover.
This cover referred to an interview inside by staffer Allen Sculley.
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PLAIN DEALER
Cleveland, Ohio
Circulation: 246,571
Chris Morris created this nice puzzle page for last Saturday’s Plain Dealer.
Click for a much larger look.
There are so many nice little moments hidden in that illo. My favorite: Count Dracula’s plus throw-rug.
Vintage Chris Morris.
In addition to that page, Chris included even more stuff online. He tells us:
I have three kids and I knew we needed to be able to make more than one puzzle.
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TULSA WORLD
Tulsa, Okla.
Circulation: 97,580
And finally, photo editor Christopher Smith of the Tulsa World writes to share…
…a project we undertook to accompany a food page story about using leftover candy for desert recipes. We created a stop-motion animation as a web element to accompany the story. It’s only thirty seconds so it’s a quick view.
Oh, what fun!
The story itself — along with recipes like “chewy Butterfinger cookies” and “candy bar pudding” and “white chocolate candy corn bark” — will send you into a sugar-fueled coma just thinking about it. Find the story here by staffer Nicole Marshall Middleton.
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THE APPLE HOUSEHOLD
Every year, I like to make a big production out of designing fun faces on our pumpkins and then Sharon carves them. This year, however, I was tied up in production of my latest freelance project — more about that later, perhaps — so Sharon decided to take our uncarved pumpkins to school today and see what she and her aide, Wendy, could do with them.
Sharon came back home this afternoon with a terrific likeness of Jack Skellington from the Nightmare before Christmas…
…while Wendy and her students created Perry the Platypus from the animated TV show Phineas and Ferb.
Notice Perry’s Indiana Jones-style super spy hat and his construction-paper tail.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Hmm… Perhaps I should be too busy every year to carve pumpkins.
