Behold, my nephews Owen and Austin slamming their sippy cups into a counter for 1 minute, 30 seconds.

It’s like beating your head against a wall, only funner!

At last, I can now blog at work. I mean, I can blog and not feel dread and guilt and a whole host of other anxious sensations as I post.

As part of my diabolical plan to give the the magazines I work on a half-decent website, I’v also been helping to coordiante four new blogs (all of which will feed into them). The first of these, and also the only one that I expect to contribute to, is Suburb-arazzi (link: suburbarazzi.lohudblogs.com). It’s actually my colleague Robert Zeliger’s baby (I’m just a subordinate blogger), but the conceit is, dare I say, brilliant. Thing Gawker for the Suburbs.

If that doesn’t knock your socks off — well, then you’re clearly not wearing any. Or else you’re one of those faggy octogenarians who wear garters.

Anyway, the blog will be all about the celebrities that populate the Lower Hudson Valley (i.e. Westchester, Rockland, Putnam counties). Some of the naysayers at The Journal News have raised an eyebrow or two over the idea — “Are there really any celebrities to write about?” To which I can only say, come on, puh-lease? We got Bedford’s DMX getting arrested every other week, Stephen Baldwin going absolutely looney with his new skateboarding+Jesus “Breakthrough Ministry,” not to mention Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, and literally dozens of film and TV stars. We’ve got the deck totally stacked.

I’m gonna make a bold promise (and one I would never pledge here): Three posts a day before noon.

For at least two or three days.

Last Sunday, we headed up to the Westchester town of Croton with the Doug Mann clan for the second annual Great Jack-O-Lantern Blaze. There were more than 4,000 hand carved pumpkins, with themes ranging from underwater creatures to a giant spider web to one group that appeared to depict Queen-Anne style chairbacks. Pretty wild stuff. And the detail in the jack-o-lanterns — intricate portraits, 20-pumpkin full-body skelatons (one for the skull, two for the hands, and so on) — was staggering. So staggering that I was able to forgive the fact that thousands of them, especially the ones that were roped off and impossible to get a close look at in the pitch-black evening, weren’t actually real pumpkins (I think they were styrofoam).

At any rate, the kids all had a great time. Especially baby Philip (in this pic with us), who appears to have a ball fetish these day. And what’s better than bouncey balls and soccer balls? Try 4,000 round objects with fire inside.

See a slideshow from our visit by clicking here.

DSCN1992,
Uploaded by heyjupiter.

The John Hodgeman-spawned “H in Sunrays” project keeps getting better and better. This picture on Flickr just makes me want to throw open the window and scream out, a la Howard Dean, “I’m mad as hell. And I’m not gonna take it. And I want to hobos to rise up and eat pot brownies! Now! Yeaaarhhh!”

It’s here. “Secrets of the Alchemist Dar,” the sequel to “A Treasure’s Trove,” came out late last month, and it took only a few days for my brother and I to get our hands on shiny, new first editions. And then it took even less time for us to realize that, hey, this is fucking impossible!

Whereas the first treasure hunt book, leading readers to $1 mil in bejeweled broaches, was accessible and seemed at least vaguely solve-able, this one is just baffling. The last third of the book is an upside down spell book written in ambigrams (word spelled the same upside and down), creepy symbols, and rorschach inkblots. Although I’m not giving up just yet (we’re still talking about $2 mil in rings this time, after all), the book will almost certainly not take over my free time the way the last one did. No obsessive 2am decoding sessions, no late-night phone calls to friends in Iowa and Andy’s relatives to go searching for tokens in state parks, and no frenzied high-speed races down the Taconic.

At least, not until someone manages to crack the first clue and posts their solve to the message boards (either Tweleve or the official Dar board). Then all bets are off.