October 1, 2008 -- You know what that means

Science Gone Mad's annual Month of Halloween celebration is underway!

This morning I flipped the Monster Movie calendar to October and was greeted by the poster for "Wasp Woman." In true Roger Corman hyperbolic fashion, the poster belies the content of the film; you would expect Susan Cabot would turn into a wasp of a size to rival Kong or Gojira, instead of growing a hydrocephalitic bug head and claws(?) which she uses to sever jugular veins.

Life can be like that sometimes, man; you think you're getting one thing, only to end up with something else. It's not a good or a bad scenario to be in, certainly; judgments of "good" and "bad" don't always necessarily apply to chance events. Take the biggies, for example: Marriage, divorce, birth & death. Traditionally, these concepts are considered "good," "bad," "good" and "bad," respectively. Unless you marry an abusive spouse ... divorce someone whose affections have grown distance ... brought into the world a child with a handicap ... or seen a relative give up that last breath to cancer. Then, the question is, what's good and bad, anyway?

That's Halloween, in a nutshell. It's considered many things, some erroneously by extreme religious pundits who are quick to call all things secular "works of the devil." It's a harvest celebration, it's the devil's holiday, it's a herald of a Catholic holiday ... it's all of this stuff and more. The costumes, either scary or religious (for the abundant "Hallelujah Night" celebrations that churches do), are either assumed to be personifications of evil (nope) or are historically used to scare off evil spirits (yep).

Misappropriation, man; it's the downfall of American culture as we know it.