COLUMN: What’s really scary this Halloween season
Boo!
According to the “seasonal” aisle in your favorite grocery store, Halloween is “almost” here this year. However, without a calendar or an ample supply of hypoglycemic children handy, I can only judge the timeliness of a Halloween column on what happens at the “seasonal” aisle annually near Christmas.
Clearly, this means that Halloween will occur sometime in the next three and a half months. However, it could also be tomorrow, so better safe than sorry.
From my experience, Halloween centers around two entertaining ideals:
1.) People scaring the crap out of each other, or
2.) People ingesting enough candy to make them scare the crap out of each other.
Either way, Halloween seems to center around terror and crap.
And of course, the hypoglycemic children, but they’re a given.
Sometimes I may get startled by things that go bump in the night, things that jump out from the bushes, or dogs that are competitive in the annual world’s ugliest dog contest, but there aren’t many things that really make me scared.
A good scare does more than make my body launch into the air or require me to obtain a clean pair of pants.
A really good scare haunts me indefinitely. It makes me cringe and shudder when I think about it, and if I don’t find a cure, it’ll inevitably begin to scar me emotionally.
Sounds like a bad case of diarrhea. This is of course the terror/crap combination I know y’all thought about just a minute ago, but are too dignified to admit.
I’ll admit it. I’m not dignified – and a bad case a diarrhea is terrifying.
But trust me, it could be worse.
Junior could have used up all the toilet paper in the neighborhood for his mummy costume.
But seriously, over the next couple weeks, I plan to give you, the reader, a little glimpse of some things out there that really give me the creeps.
Let’s start with the US Air Force.
I’m not particularly frightened by large planes, deadly missiles or nuclear bombs. I’m not even really scared by fairly burly men or women in uniform.
What terrifies me is the origin of many people who make a career in the Air Force.
Every school day I ride the Aggie Shuttle to and from campus, and while sitting among a throng of oddly smelling college students, I attempt to relieve several minutes of boredom by browsing the onboard advertisements.
One ad that has caught my eye over the last month and a half is the USU Air Force ROTC poster that tries to ensnare recruits by seemingly simple logic.
What recruiters are trying to say in the poster is that Air Force ROTC and USU make a winning combination. This could be a straightforward statement. However, military intelligence eludes them.
The poster reads, “You’re in college, you do the math. USAir Force ROTC + Utah State University = A winning team2”
Apparently the designers of this poster never took math in college and cannot construct a legitimate equation. When two dissimilar items are added, the result can never be a new item squared.
Even more startling is that no one else in the Air Force ROTC has spotted the mistake and pulled the ads.
I’m in college, and I’ve done the math. In fact, with a physics degree, I’ve done way more math than I ever really wanted to do.
Thinking about Air Force ROTC kids eventually controlling large planes, deadly missiles and nuclear bombs without a grasp of simple math really scares the crap out of me and should scare you too.
Boo!
Garret Wheeler is columnist for The Statesman. Send comments
to wheel@cc.usu.eu.edu