Weekend Open Thread: Skeletons, Witches, and Goblins, Oh My…

H. Clay Aalders
Weekend Open Thread
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Howdy folks. It is Friday once again and I am shaking my head at how fast it went by. Press Day is next Wednesday, so apologies in advance if the Newsfeed is a touch sparse the first half of next week. Our big lacrosse tournament is Saturday and Sunday. I need to finish my Knife News column without much home time to do it.

 

Poor Freddy. Jason is having a good day anyway…

How is everyone doing? There is only 1 knife show on the calendar this weekend…

Art Knife Invitational

But it is a cool one.

Not cool.

I actually am not terrible arachnophobic. If a spider is outside, I will let it be. Inside, I try to move it outside versus killing it with fire or foot.

Organic is best.

 

How are everyone’s pumpkins? What was your tool of choice in creating it?

We haven’t carved ours yet. I guess it will be tonight, better get on with things…

Selfish bastard…

Steve T. is the winner of the first Gerber. He gets his choice of the 4 new releases, the Lockdown multitools, or Fuse and Zilch knives.

Winning a knife will hopefully enable him to forgive me for this…

Sorry Brother.  I probably just jinxed my Buckeyes who play Penn State this weekend.

Deep Thoughts: There is a brief point during cremation where you are a perfect medium rare.

The above person wins.

Fuckerberg loses.

That is about all I have for today. Gotta get back to deadline writing. Have a good Halloween Weekend everyone.

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H. Clay Aalders

H. Clay Aalders is a lifelong edged tool user. He spent the past 20 years as a woodworker and fishing guide in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Tennessee. While guiding in Idaho, Clay worked part-time writing for a local newspaper, and upon moving to Tennessee began writing for the blog The Truth About Knives - spending his last 5 years there as Managing Editor. His background is in fixed-blade hunting and bushcraft knives, but has jumped into the world of vintage slipjoint collecting with both feet since coming to work at Knife Magazine. Clay’s primary role is as Digital Editor, curating and creating new content for our website and blog, as well as maintaining the Knife Magazine social media accounts (FB/IG: @theknifemag, Twitter: @knifemagazine). He is also a contributor and Associate Editor of the print magazine.

17 Responses

  2. Check out “The Hellstrom Chronicle”, 1971, which describes in a semi-documentary fashion the “almost fictional” plot of survival between insects and humans. Spoiler alert . . . Centipedes, scorpions, earwigs, paper wasps, . . . OH MY!!

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    1. they screened that film at our junior high school when i attended.
      the images of the insects being destroyed by raindrops were memorable.

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      1. “Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head . . .Ouch! Referencing “bugs”, gnats are useful for what? “Mukado” would be a good name for a “multi-blade”. Food for thought: Crickets.

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        1. butch cassidy at the valencia theatre might have been the same year.
          gnats are like plankton of the air.
          but you gnu that.

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  3. Moving into the first floor of the dorm freshman year of college the upperclassmen warned us to check our shoes before we put them on in the morning because of scorpions. Supposedly they liked to crawl into them overnight. I checked for a couple weeks then figured it was a snipe hunt type of thing. Months passed. The following April the the dorm was awakened to a blood curdling shriek a little after 6 a.m. A guy 2 doors down was getting ready to go to work. Picked his jeans up off the floor and got tagged in the neither regions. Seems scorpions came out in the Springtime. I never left my jeans on the floor after that and always checked my shoes before putting them on. It was instrumental in forming my view of creepy crawlers inside!

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  4. i eliminate the ghostly pale yellow house spiders, don’t care for them. all else go undisturbed, including giant centipedes… they bite but are otherwise beneficial. i intended to shoo the giant garden spider in the living room that spun a huge web from the arbacola, but she crawled off some where. maybe she starved… not much to eat in my house. if she laid eggs i’m going to have an infestation come spring. eh, la.
    this time of year if i find a mantis i know they’ll freeze soon so in they come to feast on a banquet of hand picked camelback crickets from the dank spots in the cellar. life extended for many months. when i lived in jeff park i brought the largest one i’ve ever seen home and all the kids on the block had a great time handling her.
    inexplicably, the paper wasps that built just outside my front door in the cotoneasters abandoned their hive… maybe the queen took off. when i freed the nest from the twigs a bunch of earwigs fell out scrambling. maybe they were raided by murder hornets.

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    1. I got bit on my head by a giant centipede once when I lived in Hong Kong. Hurt like crazy and than son’bitch fought me off for quite a while before I got my retribution, feisty bugger!

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      1. the asian ones are insane- searchup japanese centipede, the mukade. might look familiar.
        something similar attempted to cross a dirt road in the jamaican blue mountains. all the village kids formed a circle around it and pelted it with debris. it took quite a lot of sticks and stones before expiring. they said there were cases of infants dying from being bitten by one. i guess, maybe. nasty thing durnnear half a foot long, mebbe more.

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  5. The “Plumber Pumpkin” climbing the fence is very creative! It “cracked” me up! I never hurt spiders . . . inside or out. They were earthlings before humans. I leave insect predators to their natural business. There was a beautiful praying mantis about five inches long on my living room window screen. Regarding “skeletons”, a neighbor has a set-up of several boners playing beer pong. On the way to the county dump, I saw a “Paul Bunyan-sized” one (. . . had to be 8-10 ft.) kept in place with guide wires.

    Regarding “scary movies”, the original “Halloween” gets some stars. BUT, back in the ’50s and ’60s, when I was an impressionable kid, the “Tingler”, “House on Haunted Hill” and “The Fly” affected me beyond my imagination. Heck, “The Blob” was thought-provoking. Who feared getting eaten by Jell-O???

    “Spooky Swabs’, MCMLVII, was the final “Popeye” cartoon by Paramount. I watched it this Saturday morning. Summary: Popeye and Olive Oyl are on a raft in the ocean playing checkers . They see the “Sea Witch” adrift since 1678 (. . .the year is on the bow) and board the derelict. The English-speaking crew, i.e. ghosts, go active to remove the duo. There are knives and cutlasses wielded by the ghosts. Popeye’s derring-do enhanced by the absorption of the “King’s Spinach” thwarts the ghosts. Olive Oyl sews the defeated ghosts into a mainsail ( . . . think bed sheets) and she and Popeye sail off into the horizon.

    “I YAM WHAT I AM AN’ THAT’S ALL I AM” (RIP: Jack Mercer)

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  6. Clay, awesome news. I’ll take the lockdown pry tool (lower right in picture). I’m not sure your vol me is accurate, I’m pretty sure that the skeleton would have turned to dust by now lol.

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  7. We’ve had some huge yellow and black spiders in the front hedge. Fascinating but creepy. I’m not nearly as kind as Clay. My deal with creepy crawlys is I don’t bother them as long as they stay outside. Come inside and you’re toast. Several reputable companies make quality spider sprays. I prefer to nuke them, swat them than stomp them; not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead!
    There is one guy in the neighborhood who has 15-20 skeletons. They’ve played football, poker, bowling. He changes up the front yard weekly. Currently, half the yard is a jumping rope, croquet on the other side! There are several other skeleton croquet games around town. Is that a thing this year?

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  8. Life long arachnophobe here, and the size of the hairy buggers hanging off houses in our street as ‘decorations’ can be terrifying this time of year. Happily, a few beers, gin drinks and rum drinks and I’m all calm. After all ’tis the season for self medication, no?

    Reply

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