This is no Jack-O-Lantern, it's a pumpkin grown in a mold shaped like a human face! Creepy, huh? The clipping is from 1938. Link -Thanks, Dana!

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You know people who turn into certain characters when they've had too much to drink. This funny ad is part of a public service campaign from Heineken, called Know the Signs. Go to the site and play a game of spotting the people who've had too many. Then learn how to handle them and even send a warning to a person who fits the profile. Link -Thanks, Paul van Veenendaal!

Talk about absentee voting! US citizens Michael Fincke and Greg Chamitoff are 220 miles above the earth in the International Space Station. But thanks to a bill passed in Texas in 1997, they will be able to vote by secret ballot on election day.

A secure electronic ballot, generated by the Harris and Brazoria County Clerk's office, is uplinked by NASA's Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center. An e-mail with crew member-specific credentials is sent from the County Clerk to the crew member. These credentials allow the crew member to access the secure ballot.

The astronauts will cast their votes and a secure completed ballot is downlinked and delivered back to the County Clerk’s Office by e-mail to be officially recorded.

Almost all NASA astronauts live in Houston. Link -Thanks, Jerse!

Steven Martin collects pictures of Halloween from long ago.

"My theme is 'Halloween in the Time of Cholera,'" collector Steven Martin told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. "The idea being that people back then were probably on a more intimate level with death — and that would have affected the way they celebrated Halloween."

See a gallery at Wired. http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/10/gallery_old_halloween http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/ to Martin's Flicker stream.

A 26-year-old man dropped his phone into a toilet on a French train and reached in to retrieve it. His arm became stuck, and firemen had to rescue him!

The high-speed TGV train had to stop for two hours while firemen cut through the train's pipework.

The man was carried away by emergency services, with the toilet still attached to his arm.

"He came out on a stretcher, with his hand still jammed in the toilet bowl, which they had to saw clean off," said Benoit Gigou, a witness to the man's plight.

This is why you should not carry your phone in your pants pocket. Use a secure clip. Link -Thanks, Christophe!

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Macs don't get viruses! OK, it has to happen sooner or later, and when it does, it will be worse than you ever imagined. -via Viral Video Chart

Monks in Thailand's Sisaket province collected a million beer bottles and built an entire temple! The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple is constructed of a combination of green Heineken bottles and the brown bottles of a local beer. See more pictures at Treehugger. Link -via Unique Daily

Check out this vintage ad for a children's laxative. This is wrong on so many levels. Link -Thanks, contrariwise!

They like to do things big in Texas. On Sunday, the world's biggest beach ball was dropped on Elm Street in Dallas. The ball was produced by Carnival Cruise Lines, and was accepted into the Guinness Book of World Records. Exact dimensions of the ball were not included in the article, but it was required to be more than ten meters in diameter to break the record. Link (with video) -Thanks, Brian!

Um, I think you kids should just skip this house when you're out trick-or-treating. Link -Thanks, David Mertl!

A man in Japan was arrested on suspicion of arson after the hotel he was scheduled to get married in was set on fire. No one was injured in the early morning fire at a resort hotel in Yamanashi Prefecture.

Tatsuhiko Kawata, 39, had gone along with wedding plans despite already having a wife, the Yomiuri newspaper said.

"I thought if I set a fire I wouldn't have to go through with the wedding," the Yomiuri quoted him as telling police.

He should have just said "No." Link

(image credit: morak faxe)

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An allegory for the life of an architect, set to the dreamy tone of Eastern music.
Created as a gift for my brother's birthday (he is an architect by profession), and derived from two verses of his poetry:

(loosely tanslated:)

"I awoke with fog behind my window
As if a cloud of Paradise.
The people fled, their dwellings and the crane
All vanished with the Earth.

The fog wreathed everything around
Devouring all the world contained
And all that inspired and that soothed
Remained encloistered in my room."

Music credit goes to Shahram Nazeri, the Pavarotti of Persia.

-Thanks, Kirill!

How much do you know about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System? That's the question today in the mental_floss Lunchtime Quiz. I scored 38%, even with the help of my video game-playing daughters, since none of us have ever owned a SNES. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/19595

An article in Popular Science from 1953 urges citizens to take pictures of flying saucers to help the Air Force study them! Oh, but they don't want just any old photographs. Included are instructions for rigging your camera with a diffraction grater grating. This enables experts to determine the kind of light source your photograph captures.

Of course, if the Air Force discovers that your negative indicates the existence of an element not found on this planet, you and your camera will go down in history.

Apparently, that hasn't yet happened. http://www.thekeyhoereport.com/uncategorized/retro-ufology-from-1953/ -Thanks, David Duncan!

Amanda Joyner made this Death Star Cake featuring space vehicles made from gum paste, so even those parts are edible! Link to part one. Link to part two. -Thanks, Amanda!