Halloween

I'm not a Halloween fan. Ever since I was too old to go begging for candy (and old enough to just buy my own bag of it if I really wanted it) the holiday has lost some of its appeal.

Halloween has taken a turn from how it used to be. It's getting increasingly harder to send kids out to trick-or-treat with all the crazies out there. The trend, at least in Utah, seems to be the Trunk-or-Treat, which can occur weeks before the actual holiday. As a result, the fun of Halloween gets spread out over the month of October and the actual holiday is more and more ignored.

That's okay in my opinion because it's a pretty lame holiday anyway (what are we celebrating? I don't get it.)

A couple years ago, though, I stumbled across a web site that gave me a glimmer of hope that Halloween still had an aspect worth exploring. It's www.cockeyed.com. It's a guy from Sacramento named Rob Cockerham that has a unique approach to life. He's very curious and very creative.

His primary claim to fame is his "How Much is Inside" series where he, well, tries to determine how much is inside stuff. He calculates how many feet of spaghetti are in a box, how many CDs can be labeled with a Sharpie marker, and how much space $1,000,000 in cash would occupy, among 39 other things.

The Halloween-related thing that he does is create elaborate costumes, and then shows the step-by-step process in pictures so that other people can do the same. Some of my favorite costumes that he's done are:

• The Dwight Schrute Bobblehead
• The See's Box of Chocolates
• Dr. Octopus
• and the American Idol Judges costume

He's currently working on one for this year (he's probably finished, but he hasn't posted all the pictures yet). Follow his progress with me here. I can't figure out what he's making, but I'm excited to see it. Maybe one day I'll try making a costume of my own. We'll see.