Enjoy the Holiday today.

Have fun with the kiddies, dress UP, eat a lot of candy, and let yourself go!

My favorite Halloween Treat is “Candy Corn and Peanuts” mixed!

It tastes like a Pay-Day Candy bar, and is easy to make.

Buy a bag of candy corn, buy a jar of peanuts, dump together, stir, and enjoy!

Halloween is supposed to be fun.

Recently in the AJC and on TV and the Internet, I’ve run across posts, articles, and shows that advocate a Healthy Halloween.

Bull!

OK, people, Halloween is a night to rake in the goods, real candy, good candy, none of the cheap stuff, and enough candy to make a six year old hurl for three days!

All you Earth Shoe wearing freaks need to drop out of ‘Occupy the Pumpkin Patch’ and get with the program!

Hit Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, and the A&P and pick UP a bag or two of good, gooey, fattening, yummy candy!

What kid wants Lite pop corn balls?

Fruit drink boxes.

Boiled peanuts.

BRAN Muffins…ok, who are we kidding her?

String cheese.

Raw Veggies.

Deviled eggs!

Cereal bars, trail mix, pumpkin seeds…this is madness!

Jello Jigglers.

One dentist is giving out tooth brushes and floss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One guy is going to give containers of Pumpkin Soup, which I’m sure will look lovely splattered on his car!

A man in Atlanta, along with is completely brainwashed daughter set UP a cemetery in his front yard; it has a tombstone that simply said “Candy Bar”.

He’s giving homemade play dough as treats.

I’m waiting for the follow UP story on how many parents are going to sue his sorry ass him when the kids are rushed to the hospital because they swallowed the play dough thinking it was candy.

Let’s just say, if I show UP at your house trick or treating and walk away without a Milky Way…well, someone’s gonna’ need new tires!

Barbara Kingsolver has done it again.  Deprived me of sleep with her book The Lacuna.   Seriously, I stayed UP way to late reading it, I could not stop.

A Lacuna is simply a gap.  Not the store, but a real gap in time, in space, in the earth.

Set in Mexico and Asheville, NC, this novel covers the life of a fictional fiction writer named Harrison Shepherd.

American by birth, his Mexican mother takes him to Mexico after leaving her husband.  Harrison takes the reader with him though history, drama, and love…of sorts.  Along the way we get to meet Diego Garcia and Frida Kahlo, Trotsky and more.  Garcia and Kahlo were “active” communists, what ever that means.  In reality, they were lousy communists;  seriously,  they were really bad at it.  Maids, drivers, cooks, servants, lots of money, fame, they were rock stars avowing communism and living a life of luxury.  This, of course, is not Ms. Kingsolver’s point, but she makes it nonetheless!

Harrison says in the book, “The most important thing about a person is the thing you don’t know.”  And that’s so true.  Not only in the book, but in life as well.

I’m a big Barbara Kingsolver fan, I’ve read most of her published work.

The Lacuna takes you from the early part of the 20th century through the McCarthyism of the 1950s.    She paints a picture of the characters, both real and fictional, as if she had watched them surreptitiously. You, the reader, along with Ms. Kingsolver are the proverbial fly on the wall.  Ms Kingsolver isn’t subtle. Her points are well taken, and her beliefs transparent. She doesn’t shy away from controversy.

But she can really, really write a great novel.  And this is a beautiful read.

It’s a must read!

…that wears the crown. – Shakespeare. (Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1).

Let me start by saying that I won’t miss Muammar Khadaffi, Qadhaffi, Ghadaffi or however you want to spell it.  He was a tryant, a murderer and should have been taken out long ago.

I believe in the justified assassination of political tyrants, and frankly think the civil and just leaders of the world owe it to the millions of enslaved, bullied, terrorized citizens of the regimes ruled by thugs.

Having said that, I was shocked last week when the body of the Colonel was displayed so proudly as a trophy after his ignominious end.   He deserved to go, but no human being deserves that.

Libya was a kingdom until 1969 when, we’ll just call him Mo, over threw King Idris in a a coup d’etat.   Fortunately the King was in Turkey for medical treatment at the time.  You know what they say, if the revolutionaries won’t kill you, the doctors will!

Idris, like every other Libyan ruler before and after him was a thug.  The nation on the Mediterranean has been ruled by bullies, tyrants, and thugs, since the days of Alexander, as has much of the region.

Over the centuries, unjust kings and dictators have met horrible ends.  Their demises may have been deserved.  The display of brutality and aftermaths of these assassinations are a testament to the inhumanity to man.

Julius Caesar in 44 BC took shivs in the Senate back in Rome.

The Russian Royal Family was slaughtered in a cold Siberian basement in 1918 in Yeketerinburg.  They were told to prepare for a photograph, and when the family filed in, they were advised they had been condemned to death and the Bolsheviks opened fire. When the girls, who had sewn 1.7 kilograms of diamonds and other jewels into their clothing, wouldn’t die, the soldiers shot them at close range in the heads and bayoneted them to death.  But at least, they were buried, and their bodies weren’t put on display.  The Russian Czars were tyrants, they were autocrats and despots by law.  Their reigns were mostly inhumane, and the monarchy should have gone lone before it did.  But not in the way it did go!

King George I of Greece was assassinated by a Socialist because of the king’s Greek Expansionism.

Anwar Al-Sadat was murdered because he got too friendly with the Jews.

Trotsky was killed in Mexico when a “friend” hit him in the head with an ice pick.

Ghandi was shot by an extremist.

So was Indira Ghandi (no relation to the bald guy). Her extremist shot her three times, and she still lived long enough to make it to the hospital.

Saudi King Faisal was murdered by  his nephew.

Another Ghandi bit the dust, when Indira’s son, Rajiv was killed in 1991.   Thenmuli Rajaratnam approached him in a public place and bent to touch his feet, an expression of respect in India.  As she bent, she pushed the button on her explosive belt.  The explosion killed Ghandi, several people around him, and the cameraman who caught it all on tape. The tape and the camera survived.

Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan was murdered in 2007 . She was a thug, she was OUR thug, but she was a thug!

In almost every case, the successor was worse than the one in power before.  And of course, it looks like Libya is going that way too.

Yes, we got bin Laden and Anwar al Awtaki, leaders of Al-Qaeda.

Prior to that, we got Saddam Hussein; but at least he had a ‘trial’!

The American Shores have not been immune to political assassination either.  Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield – the President, not the cat – and JFK.  We’ve lost Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evers.   Others have survived assassination attempts. None of our murdered leaders were despots nor were they tyrants.  But, we were forced to watch most of it on TV.

Being a world leader is a dangerous job!  Being a tyrant is a deadly one.

Though news happens every day, and death is inevitable – hour after hour of horrific television is a choice.  And my choice is not to watch.