Happy Halloween!

From Off the Mark; h/t: WEIT.

Happy Halloween

I can’t find the original at thepoke.co.uk but this made me laugh when it popped up in my Facebook newsfeed…

Avenged Sevenfold - my kind of Nightmare for Halloween

Not as cute as black cats but it seemed appropriate to make a Halloween post about an album with death and graves and stuff on the cover. I've already covered Rage (although I notice that Blogpress has eaten my pictures) so now is the turn of a band that are a much more recent discovery for me but remind me somewhat of the Scandinavian riffmonster rockers: Avenged Sevenfold and their most recent offering, Nightmare, which is my album of the moment. (I only got it last week.)

Avenged Sevenfold (or A7x to fans, as I now consider myself,) were recommended to me by a good friend. I was a little put off by the first album I got through emusic, Waken The Fallen as the vocals tend a bit too much towards screaming for my tastes in places (although the music still rocks) but I was reliably informed that it gets more rocky and less metalcore as the albums progress. It's true, and Nightmare is a fantastic collection of tunes for those who like crazy drums and wild fret-wanking guitar riffs - as well as good tunes, of course. (I do!)

Besides, how can you go wrong with a band whose lineup consists of M. Shadows (vocalist), Synyster Gates (lead guitarist), Zacky Vengeance (rhythm guitarist) and Johnny Christ (bassist). Their (replacement) drummer for Nightmare, Mike Portnoy, needs to do something about his name if he's going to join the band on a permanent basis!

A couple of black cats for Halloween

And if Halloween is not your thing, the latest Henri video might be for you. This is not a happy time of year for a black cat who does not suffer fools.

(The pumpkins are getting a lot of love from the trick-or-treaters this year, which is gratifying.)

It's pumpkin time!

Halloween is approaching and, thanks to an unexpected work trip for my wife, we have had to accelerate our preparations slightly. Last night, therefore, was pumpkin-carving time! We never really did anything for Halloween when I was a kind, so my first pumpkin carving experience had to wait until a few years ago.

In the past, we have made use of hand-drawn designs inspired by the internet. (For my first pumpkin, I was only involved in the design and my girlfriend (now wife) did the actual carving.) This year we got a pumpkin carving kit from Ocado that cam we a few designs, so we decided to use a couple of those. They were quite big but we got a couple of "monster" pumpkins from Sainsburys. Sitting on our dining room table, I think my "monster" lived up to its name!

I was a bit lazy and did not scoop the inside out as much as I should have done but I think the end result (below, left) was still pretty good. The carving tools in the pumpkin kit were pretty effective and a little less scary that hacking away with a knife or scalpel, although we still used one of the sharp pointy tools from Cait's Uni dissection kit to poke the outline of the designs. My wife remains the pumpkin champ of our house, though, as her haunted house (below, right) shows. (I'll try to get some better pictures on the night but these were just quick iPhone snaps should any evil befall our pumpkins in the meantime!)

Zombie pumpkins (but not pumpkin zombies)!

Halloween is a time for reanimating the dead, so here are a couple of dead pumpkins from a previous year. First up, the first pumpkin I was involved with. We called him Henry:
The next two don't have names. Mine is the simpler one on the right. (Not sure you can have a zombie ghost!) The fancy one was carved by my wife, the pumpkin expert of our family!

Happy iHalloween

This photo is of the pumpkin that my wife carved for Halloween this year:
It was taken on my iPhone, uploaded to Dropbox, downloaded onto my iPad, cropped using PhotoPad and then blogged with BlogPress*. Isn't technology wonderful?

[*I'm actually a bit annoyed with BlogPress at the moment as it is refusing to pull anything down from online. Hopefully, iOS5 will sort that out, once I can persuade my work PC to let me upgrade. (My recent Windows 7 upgrade has done something strange to iTunes.)]