Oy, I'm been so busy blogging about Halloween that I haven't even bought candy yet, and we will need tons of it on trick-or-treat night. You see many posts this time of year about the best and worst treats, always written from the perspective of a trick-or-treater. Well, take it from a jaded parent, we don't buy treats to please trick-or-treaters. We buy treats to make them go away. And the more I must buy, the cheaper the candy will be.
We had a lot of Halloween fun this week here at Neatorama! If you've only browsed the main page lately, you're missing out on a lot of great Halloween costumes, recipes, artwork, and funny and scary videos you'll find by looking through the Neatorama Halloween blog. And we had some marvelous exclusive features.
Jill Harness gave us 20 Amazing and Geeky Matching Parent/Child Halloween Costumes and also a bunch of Stories and Photos From A Variety of Halloween Weddings.
John Farrier wrote Borg Floppy Disk Drives and Other Facts You Might Not Know about Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Our pop culture historian Eddie Deezen brought us The Story of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" and The Final Marx Brothers Film Appearance: The Story of Mankind.
Nation Geographic provided us with lovely pictures illustrating The Escape Velocity of Emperor Penguins, posted in large size at the Neatorama Spotlight blog.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader told us A Real-Life Ghost Story. It was even written up in a medical journal!
And mental_floss books provided us with the background on some Evil Creatures.
Over at NeatoBambino, we have extra stuff about babies and kids, including a video of a teenager who bought a junker Fiero with babysitting money and is rebuilding it herself- even though she's still too young to drive!
The Neatorama Book Excerpts continue! We had two this week, to give you a taste of something you may want to read the rest of. First was Wonderful Life with the Elements by Bunpei Yorifuji. We gave away a copy of the book to Kanga, drawn randomly from possibly the most erudite comment thread we've ever had. Congratulations, Kanga!
We also showed you some neat artworks from Hello Kitty Hello Art! by Roger Gastman. You still have time to leave a comment at the excerpt post so you can win a copy of the book.
In the What Is It? game this week, the pictured object is a Scandinavian nutcracker. The first with the correct answer was Anker, who wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from Thom1, who guessed it to be a steampunk Pac-Man! So Thom1 also wins a t-shirt. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who played this week! Also thanks to the What Is It? blog for providing us with this contest. See the answers to all this week's mystery items at the What Is It? blog.
Is your foot in proportion to the rest of your body? Find out with this week's Drawn to Facts. Catch another illustrated fact every weekend, and browse the Drawn to Facts archives for more.
The posts with the most comments this week (outside of the three giveaways) were:
1. Book Bench
2. 11 Brain-Twisting Paradoxes
3. America's New Fastest Road
4. Can Men and Women Be "Just Friends"?
This list is to make it easy for you to join in those interesting discussions today.
Remember, Neatorama has recently joined Instagram and Flipboard, so there's two new places to interact in addition to Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. See you there! Oh yeah, and