Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn finds Anakin on the planet Tatooine and is convinced that Skywalker is the “Chosen One”, foretold by a Jedi prophecy to bring balance to the Force. He also goes on to discover that Anakin has the highest known number of midi-chlorians, a measure of strength in the Force.

Step into the role of one of the most famous of all Star War characters in the Anakin Skywalker Child costume. This blockbuster movie costume will take you to a Galaxy far, far away.

The long sleeve sandstone tan tunic has a fold over front and waist sash with printed belt. The matching pants have attached boot tops and detailing below the knees. The Star Wars costume includes a pvc mask so you will be is ready to race and win. It’s time to zoom to victory and feel the force.

Remember to listen to Yoda and your Jedi teachers. Even though the force is strong, you may be misled. Fly straight and fast into adventure in the Anakin Skywalker Child Costume. May the force be with you.

I saw my favourite stories come to life, the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding hood, Alice and the White Rabbit, I even saw some old friends. Dracula and his three brides, The Wolfman and Frankenstein and his Bride, they all seemed to forget what they should be doing.

Dracula didn’t even glance at the bare neck of a passerby; he was concentrating on his Candy collection. The big Bad wolf was Helping Little Red with her overly heavy bag of candy. The Wolfman never made a peep when all of these delicious little Goat shaped children passed by.

I just couldn’t believe it, what had happened; nothing was as it should be. No havoc, no bloodshed, everyone was smiling and happy as they walked around on a crisp Halloween night, forgetting the roles they play and just having fun.  As I watched them, something happened within my cold dead heart; I had no desire for havoc or bloodshed anymore. All I kept thinking about was talking with my friends, having a good time and boasting about all the candy we’ve gotten as we run around without a care in the world. Without knowing it, I found myself walking out my front door, bag in hand, ready to accept candy from strangers, wanting only the candy and nothing more from them.

I guess Halloween brings out the child in everyone, even someone as old as me. I can’t wait for next year.

With all the wars waging even today, this is the only time of the year where Angels and Demons, Cops and Criminals and every type of person who should normally fight against each other can come together and fight for one greater purpose: who will get the most candy and of course to egg the occasional house that decides to hand out a Healthy Alternative; like a Banana.

So keep this in mind, it will save you hours of scrapping dried egg and silly string off of your windows; the next time you’re about to grab a sack of apples instead of that delicious 50 pack of mini chocolate bars, remember that this is the one night of the year that you can help a Lion and a Goat come together to fight for the same thing: good candy, good fun and lots of memories that do not end in bloodshed, unless you decide to come to my Halloween party, but I promise it won’t hurt….much.

1. Watch The Original Series. These are still aired on TV on some channels, though it would be best to watch them on DVD as to see them in order. Remember, the special effects are bad because it started as a low-budget show back in late 1966. There were three seasons of TOS (The Original Series). All three seasons can be found for free at the cbs website under “classic shows”.
2. Watch The Next Generation. Once again, watching them on DVD is best, so you can see them in order. There are 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
3. Watch the movies, Star Trek I-VI (1-6), Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, and the newest Star Trek movie. Even if you do not agree with the new movie, it still bears the label of Star Trek, even if it is a non-canon story.
4. Read the books! They are still being published and there are hundreds to choose from. Maybe at first just focus on the books to accompany your favourite series. To consider yourself a true Trek fan and not a ‘dabbler’, you must have read some books.
5. Review your knowledge. Make sure you know the technology, as well as the ships. At least know how a warp core works.
6. Continue watching the spinoffs. Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise. Be sure to pay attention to technology, terms, creatures, and characters.
7. Look on eBay or similar sites for The Star Trek Encyclopedia. This contains detailed information on STV ,TOS, TNG, and DS9, as well as the movies. It is the Star Trek BIBLE. And if you’re going to be a fully fledged Trek fan you’re gonna need a reference book, for those times in the middle of the night when you absolutely NEED to go check what episode a certain ship was in, or what year Harry Kim was born.
8. Learn more about the Star Trek universe by reading Memory Alpha, a wiki dedicated to Star Trek. It has more info than the ecnyclopedia as it is constantly updated as new information is created. You’ll need it if you want your knowledge to extend further than Voyager’s fifth season.
9. GET A UNIFORM. This is a must. All real fans have uniforms. They are increasingly hard to find nowadays – you’ll need to try costume sites and eBay and be prepared to pay for shipping. (Do not fret – there is a new line of costumes soon to be realeased with the new movie in 2009)
10. WATCH IT. READ IT. LOVE IT.
11. LEARN TREKNO-BABBLE! Trekno-babble is the fast “techno-babble” conversation that people on Star Trek always have that only a true trekkie could understand. You will be expected not to get lost just because they talk about all this future stuff.
12. YOU MUST LEARN TREKKIE SLANG!! Trekno-babble, series abbreviations like STV,TOS and TNG, and stuff like that are musts. It would be so un-trek like of you to say, “I got lost in all that high future stuff talk.” Instead say, “The trekno-babble threw me off.”
13. Be smart and say long run on sentences like Data. Also, learn stardates. That way, if someone asks “when is the movie opening”, you can wierd ‘em out by telling ‘em the stardate. A good place to learn about a common version of stardates is freewebs.com/savethetrekkies.
14. YOU MUST GET INTO THE HABIT OF saying universe instead of world. Like instead of saying you’re the best mom in the world say you’re the best mom in the universe!

As for me, well I prefer something a little more rare, but will settle for some delicious Halloween Candy. Oh, how I dream about them, Tootsie Rolls prancing by, Smarties dancing by, M&Ms falling down like rain and mmmmm, the Sugar Babies I had when I was younger, I can taste them now.  I would have to say that I miss Candy Corn the most. It has been years since I’ve had a piece, the wonderful Halloween colors intermingled to create something so delicious. Halloween really is the best time of year, all the excitement, candy and costumes. Maybe I should dress up next year, I think as an Angel, it’s a nice escape from what I really am….. What do you think?

This bride costume includes a full skirted wedding gown with puffed sleeves narrowing at the mid arm into a fitted sleeve. The neckline is dressed with a white bow. The skirt has two overskirts to create a full elegant effect. The veil is made of white tulle and hangs waist length.

Your child will look angelic in this fairytale costume. As the years go by you will be asked to show her the pictures of when she was a bride. You might even want to save them for her grown up wedding. Childhood goes by so quickly and preserving the first time your darling dressed as an angelic bride will be a life long treasure. Go ahead and order the Bride Fairytale costume and make a lasting memory both you and your daughter will treasure.

The National Confectioners Association estimate 20 million pounds of candy corn are sold each year. October 30 is National Candy Corn Day. Although regular candy corn is most popular at Halloween, it is available year-round.

According to Brach’s Confections, Inc., the top branded maker of candy corn, each year Americans eat enough Brach’s candy corn that if the kernels were laid end to end, they would circle the Earth 4.25 times.

Candy corn is made primarily from sugar, corn syrup and honey. Originally, candy corn was made by hand. Manufacturers first combined sugar, corn syrup, and water and cooked them into a slurry. Fondant was added for texture and marshmallows provided a soft bite. The final mixture was then heated and poured into shaped molds. Three passes were required during the pouring process, one for each colored section. Few changes have been made to the process or recipe, with machines now performing the tasks formerly done by people. Candy Corn can be found at most popular grocery food stores in the USA.

I mock, but only because these myths of Halloween are so eminently mockable. As it happens, Halloween has generated a host of safety myths, turning a once wholesome celebration of zombies, vampires, and other dead, undead, and half-dead things into something rather more sinister. Let’s examine some of these myths:

• The candy is poisoned: Every year, we are bombarded with warnings to search our children’s candy carefully for puncture holes, opened wrappers, and so on. Homemade treats; popcorn balls, candy apples, and the like have completely disappeared from the Halloween repertoire for fear of poisoning. And yet there has never been an instance of a child being poisoned by Halloween candy given her or him by a stranger. Never. The only incident in which Halloween candy has been used to poison someone was a little boy in 1974 who ate Pixie Stix laced with cyanide (rat poison, essentially) by his father, ostensibly to collect on the child’s life insurance policy.
• There’s needles/razors in the candy: Unlike the fear of poisoning, this one has actually happened, though nobody’s ever been badly hurt. Almost all reported cases of needles or razor bladed being concealed in Halloween candy or other treats have been hoaxes, and the 10 or so that have been confirmed resulted in no injury. All but one of those have been pranks carried out by older siblings or friends. The one exception occurred in 2000 when a man stuck needles into Snickers bars and handed them out; nobody was injured. As it happens, needles and razor blades are easily discovered and not all that dangerous (and you can’t get HIV from them except under conditions that Halloween trick-or-treating simply can’t produce).
• There’s child molesters roaming free in my neighborhood! You might have looked at one of the scare-sites (appropriate for Halloween, I suppose) that show you how many registered sex offenders live within spitting distance of your house, maybe even mapped their addresses. What you might not have known is how someone gets to be on the sex offenders registry. Many are folks who slept with their 15-year old girlfriends or boyfriends when they were 16 or even when they were 14 (some states prosecute underage sex regardless of the age of the participants). Most, though, are in fact guilty of molesting children almost always their own (or closely related). There are very, very few cases (less than 5%) of children being accosted by strangers the number of cases over the last decade is in the hundreds, out of many thousands of child abuse cases.
• The dead walk the earth: This one’s true. Give them candy. And pray…

The reality is that your children are fairly safe from victimization by your neighbors. Statistically speaking, you and your family are the greatest threat your children. While it makes good sense to teach your children to be aware of themselves and their surroundings in the company of strangers, the feverish panic that breaks out every year in the weeks before Halloween is way out of proportion to the actual threat posed to your children.

So where does the panic come from? At least part of it has to be pinned on local news organizations and their addiction to the scare story as a way to drive ratings. “Poisoned candy rampant in the Southland! Are your children at risk??????” I can only assume that people respond to this kind of thing, since news broadcasters keep doing it, risking their credibility and seriousness in the process.

But the more important story lies in the anxieties we as a society have fostered over the last several decades. As we’ve become more and more isolated with the rise of suburban living, greater job demands, the availability of in-home and solitary entertainments, and so on, we’ve grown distrustful and suspicious of our neighbors because more than at any other time in human history we don’t know who they are. We don’t rely on them and they don’t rely on us, we don’t have any obligations to them and they don’t have any obligations to us. We are literally surrounded by strangers.

And along comes Halloween, and what do we do? We allow our children to go door to door among those strangers and beg for candy. In anthropological terms, feeding someone and eating together are powerful markers of intimacy and demonstrations of solidarity but we aren’t intimate with our neighbors and there is no sense of solidarity. So we worry. And one way we express those worries is by telling each other urban legends about the dangers of strangers with candy, especially on Halloween. This may also be a defensive strategy, allowing us to ignore the fact that the most real source of danger to our children is their own family.

So don’t panic. Take reasonable safety precautions; make sure your kids are visible in the dark, have them carry flashlights, teach them traffic safety principles, supervise young trick-or-treaters, and don’t let Halloween pranks get out of hand. Don’t let these perfectly normal anxieties develop into irrational fears that end up polluting Halloween for yourself and your children.

Do be sure, however, to teach your kids about the dangers of the walking dead. Because that fear is totally rational.

The monster’s namelessness became part of the stage tradition as Mary Shelley’s story was adapted into serious and comic plays in London, Paris, and France during the decades after the novel’s first appearance. Mary Shelley herself attended a performance of Presumption, the first successful stage adaptation of her novel. “The play bill amused me extremely, for in the list of dramatic personae came, _______ by Mr T. Cooke,” she wrote her friend Leigh Hunt. “This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good.”

The name of the creator, Frankenstein, soon came to be used to name the creation. That happened within the first decade after the novel was published, but it became cast in concrete after the story was popularized in the famous 1930s Universal film series starring Boris Karloff. The film was based largely on a play by Peggy Webling, performed in London in 1927. Webling’s Frankenstein actually does give his creature his name. The Universal film reverted to the empty cypher, however: the film’s credits list the character Karloff plays as a question mark. Nevertheless, the creature soon enough became best known in the popular imagination as “Frankenstein”.

For this Halloween, breathe life into your very own Frankenstein costume and wreak havok on those around you. This Frankenstein mask is a replica from the original Frankenstein’s Monster film from 1930. It was the begining of a great villain. Or you could choose a different version of the beloved Frankenstein, either way, you’ll be sure to have a blast in this great costume.

Jelly Belly Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans

What’s the big deal, they are just jelly beans? Well, if they were just jelly beans they wouldn’t have a huge price tag attached to them and they certainly wouldn’t still be in production. Sure, the 3.5 ounce ‘wizard bag’ isn’t as popular as it once was but it is still an incredible seller. The biggest thing to know about this is that you are only getting twenty select flavors with the pouch version. The last time I counted them up there were over 150 different flavors and when you get into combining them, well, the potential for flavor mixes is endless. The wizards pouch is nice but it isn’t anything that you are going to hang on to unless you are a huge Potter fan.

The 3.5 ounce wizard bags contain twenty flavors but you are not guaranteed to get each and every flavor in the bag; is that clever marketing or what? There is a small fold out on the flavors and it shows a photo of the Every Flavor Bean along with the name. Some of the colors of them are enough to turn your stomach but if you are brave enough to try them, well, I tip my wizards hat to you. The flavors are: Grape, Rotten Egg, Black Pepper, Cinnamon, Booger, Ear Wax, Buttered Popcorn, Earthworm, Grass, Lemon, Sardine, Soap, Bacon, Toasted Marshmallow, Green Apple, Tutti-Fruitti, Very Cherry, Vomit, Blueberry and Dirt.

What are the best and worst flavors? Sometimes you can’t go by just the name of something, the Butter Popcorn wasn’t any real shock since that is one of the old school Jelly Belly flavors. The Lemon, Cinnamon, Blueberry, Tutti-Fruitti and Toasted Marshmallow are the normal run of the mill jelly bean flavors; the true taste is there but they are all a little overly sweet. Green Apple is tart but with a pleasant aftertaste to it, Grass tastes like a mix between lime and some type of industrial hand soap you wash your hands with in a public bathroom and Earthworm tastes like cocoa but very gritty. The brood said it tasted completely different to them so every person is going to have a different “taste interpretation” of them.

If the myriad of flavors in the 3.5 ounce bag is too much for you, you can get this in dedicated flavor selections like the ten flavor pack that includes Boogers, Rotten Egg, Earwax, Dirt and Sardine. Getting them in this format allows you to know what flavors you are actually consuming thanks to the little flavor guide that comes with it. If you want to experience every single flavor, well you are going to have to spend about $49.99 and get the massive four pound container of Bertie Bott’s but the upside is you do get a complete color guide to all the flavors. Some of those include Salmon, Brussel Sprouts, Centipede, Sushi, Worcestershire Sauce, Paprika, Baked Beans, Curry, Frog Legs, Sand, Onion, Toe Nails and Squid. If you want to get the newest flavors you will have to settle for the smaller 1.6 ounce boxes since they are the newest off the production line.

The Bottom Line

So the Bertie Bott’s are too tame for you? Then perhaps you need to check out some of the other gross Potter offerings. Here are some of the Harry Potter candies that are still in production; “Chocolate Frogs”, “Blood Pops”, “Cockroach Clusters’, ‘Acid Pops”, “Jelly Slugs”, “Fizzing Whizbees”, “Cotton Candy Bubble Gum”. The real appeal to the Bertie Bott’s is that there is an unending combination of flavors that you can make with them. If you can get past the flavors on a solo level then you should be able to handle any combination. I was the human guinea pig for several of the broods taste experiments and suffered through it for the sake of science, well, at least that is what they conned in into thinking.