(Image: Dan Piraro)

The glorious month of Movember is upon us! As winter descends upon the northern hemisphere, people participate in the annual practice of growing beards and mustaches so that they may be both warm and awesome.

Let the testosterone flow through you and out of your face. Like Nick Offerman, you can enjoy an impressive slice of facial hair.

We at Neatorama appreciate a virile face full of hair. That's why, this Movember, we're holding a facial hair contest.

Submit photos of your facial hair. Do you have an awesome beard, mustache or set of sideburns? Email us a photo at john@neatorama.com. The winner gets a t-shirt or mustache-related product of his or her choice from the Neatoshop.

We will announce the winner on Monday, November 18.

(YouTube link)

Graham is a cat who hangs out at the Pets at Home store in Boston, Lincolnshire, UK. He doesn't belong to anyone who works there, but he's not a stray, either. Graham comes and waits for the store to open every day, then wanders the aisles, playing with cat toys and occasionally chewing open a packet of treats.

“He first showed up around three months ago and he’s here most days,” said staff member George Tarbox. “Initially we discouraged him from coming in, but he kept coming back. We thought it wouldn’t be very good to keep shooing him out as pets are always welcome at Pets at Home, it’s just that they usually come in on a lead with their owners!”

Staff decided to give him the odd cat treat to discourage him from stealing, and occasionally play with him using toys that aren’t for sale.

Can you blame him, really? The store has everything a cat could want, including fish and small animals to covet! Graham has proven to be good for business, as customers love to see him. -via Arbroath

Dan Whalen of The Food in My Beard made this appetizer with Halloween in mind, but it’s really appropriate for any get-together. In the absence of sufficient quantities of earwax, he used a pesto sauce. The Q-Tips are balls of mozzarella cheese and lollipop sticks. Mr. Whalen made the ear-shaped bowl himself.

-via Make

I guess we should be able to recognize Sir Patrick Stewart out and about tonight for the Halloween festivities! He posted this just this afternoon. Wouldn't it be great to run into him at a seafood restaurant dressed like this?

One day, Shawn Carling wanted to give his father a unique Christmas present. Earlier, Carling had found an old Farmall tractor dashboard, so he decided to turn that into an old-timey lamp for his dad - Carling thought that it's the perfect gift for his dad, who grew up in a farm.

The lamp was a big hit, and plenty of farmers, who heard about him by word of mouth, approached Carling to create custom lamps. Thus a craftsman's business was born: Carling has now sold hundreds of Machine Age Lamps.

Our new architecture and home design blog Homes & Hues has a gallery of Carling's fantastic steampunk-inspired creations. These gorgeous lamps - complete with gauges, gears, and cast iron plumbing pipes - would look great in any room. Take a look: 18 Gorgeous Steampunk Machine Age Lamps.

This one below is Carling's aviation-inspired Machine Age Lamp: it's made with a salvage airplane part!

More from Homes & Hues:

• 8 Spooktacularly Easy Last-Minute Halloween Decorations
• 10 Staircases That Really Take It To The Next Level

Inspirational Homes:

• Lilyfield Warehouse by Virginia Kerridge
• The Chatsworth House: A Hollywood Classics-Inspired Modern Home

After a summer of watermelon and popsicles, today we enter the season of candy holidays: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter (and someday they will figure out how to sell lots of candy for Thanksgiving). For kids, Halloween is all about the candy, since there isn't much about the holiday for them outside of trick-or-treating. But parents worry about that big bag of candy their children will haul home tonight. That many sweets can't be good for a child, right?

Many parents restrict the amount of sugar available to their kids as an ongoing habit, and are tempted to confiscate or ration trick-or-treat candy. But unless your child has an underlying medical condition such as diabetes, a once-a-year binge will cause no lasting damage. And science says that restricting your kids' goodies may make them crave them even more.

This idea isn’t just based on speculation. In a 1999 study, Penn State researchers identified three types of snacks—wheat crackers, cheese fish-shaped crackers, and pretzel fish-shaped crackers—that a group of 4- to 6-year-olds found equally tasty. Then they split the kids into groups and seated them around tables. They allowed all of the kids as many wheat crackers as they wanted but put either the cheese fish-shaped crackers or pretzel fish-shaped crackers in a clear container in the middle of the table and told the kids they couldn’t have them. After several minutes, a bell rang and the groups were each allowed to eat as many of the formerly banned crackers as they wanted in addition to the wheat crackers. The researchers found that the kids talked positively about, asked for, and ate whichever type of cracker they had been denied—far more than the always available wheat crackers. Interestingly, the kids who became most preoccupied with the forbidden crackers were those who had parents who restricted certain foods at home.

Further experiments show that restrictions will even increase a child's desire for treats they don't even particularly like! Of course, any child can excitedly overindulge on trick-or-treat candy and become sick, but that's temporary and they might even learn a lesson. As kids mature, they learn to respect their own limits, but only if they get an occasional chance to test those limits. Read more about the science behind candy craving at Slate.

(Image credit: Flickr user Rochelle, just rochelle)

Americans love their corn, but while we think of it as a staple of a basic diet, the Japanese think of it as a tasty novelty treat. In fact, InventorSpot has a great list of 8 crazy corn-based snacks you won't believe exist -like corn Kit Kats and corn sushi. Some of it has to be converted into soup before it's made into a snack first though. For example, KFC makes fried corn soup and a frozen treats company makes porridge popsicles.

If you really want to go weird though, try the corn porridge Ramune soda because nothing says refreshing like corn soup.

If your dog is not going to be a monster for Halloween, she might as well be a badass monster-fighting warrior! Nadine Gilden's pug Pixel is all dressed for Halloween as Michonne from The Walking Dead, complete with her katana and her pet zombies trailing along! Pixel won the Scariest Costume prize at the NYC Pug Meetup Halloween Bash, which happened on the same date as the season premiere of The Walking Dead. Pixel is also a contestant in a photo contest sponsored by Petco.

A beautiful and idyllic landscape painting or a Norman Rockwell classic may look like finished pieces that belong on the wall to you and me, but to Robert Brandenburg, they're merely starting points for his artwork. You see, Brandenburg takes (or some say, hijacks) existing artwork and adds his own twist to create an entirely different effect.

We recently spotted a bride and groom to be getting slaughtered by Jason, but if that still wasn't a gory enough couple, perhaps you'd prefer this great wedding cake featuring both the bride and the groom decapitated. Now that's romantic. After all, few people really mean "til' death do us part" when they say it in their vows. 

The lovely bride and groom held their wedding at the famous Alamo Drafthouse, which seems an ideal venue for such an "alternative" wedding couple.

Via Geekologie

Today I was so excited to find all kinds of adorable Halloween animal images in my inbox (jill@neatorama.com) and I can't wait to see what comes in over the next few days as Halloween edges closer and closer. First off, we have little Banjo the sheriff sent in by reader Jan, who cuddled the sherrif, but did not cuddle the dupty.

(Video Link)

Then we have a video of little Tommy dressed as an ewok with his pumpkin and his trick or treat bucket loaded with delicious biscuits. I really love the epic music put along with the almost shaking little chihuahua, as it really ups his shy cuteness level.

Once I read that caption, I just had to post this image from Turning the Book Wheel, the tumblr blog of the Smithsonian Libraries. It’s an illustration by Theodor de Bry (1528-1598), a master engraver and illustrator from what is now Belgium.

In 1590, he published Wunderbarliche, doch warhafftige Erklärung von der Gelegenheit und Sitten der Wilden in Virginia, a collection of images showing life in America. As you can see, little has changed over the centuries.

Go to any convention these days and you're bound to see plenty of Daleks, but Costume Works reader Michelle might just have made the ultimate Dalek costume for her little Whovian daughter. That's because it doesn't just have a great outer shell, but it even has a gross, shriveled Dalek body bursting from the inside. 

And, if you look closely, the little girl inside is wearing a red dress, which could be a shout out to everyone's favorite Dalek minded human -Clara Oswin Oswald. Best of all, her sister even went as a TARDIS. If I saw these two trick or treating on my street, I'd just give them the whole bowl of candy and tell all the other kids I just ran out because these two won Halloween.

Redditor joowee used the opportunity of Halloween to impersonate Glorious Leader Kim Jong-un. Pretty good likeness, wouldn't you say? This simple getup won a costume contest.

We had a costume contest at work earlier in the week. I took first place. Of course, I had to win anyway. Bwuahahaha...

There may have been "consequences" for any judge that selected another costume, if you know what I mean. But you don't know how good this really is until you see what joowee looked like before the transformation. Continue reading for that.

This photo from 1944 shows a papier-mâché cow owned by the Women’s Land Army, a women’s auxiliary organization in Australia (and other Commonwealth nations) during World War II. Mrs. Mellor, an officer in that organization, is securing the cow to her car. She’s taking it to an experimental farm outside of Victoria where it would be used to train people how to milk a cow.

-via Modern Farmer