Would this poor sawn in half, green stockinged, torsoless pumpkin lady make you switch to Verizon?

What happened to the cheerful ads of happy young waspy white couples smiling after a marriage proposal over the phone or a sweet little child phoning his tycoon mum to say goodnight at the office or something pleasant like that to cheer you up and show you that being a verizon user keeps you in touch with your loved ones? Instead we get this poor pumpkin lady, who looks she was an unlucky magician's assistant and got sawn in two by mistake, is she supposed to terrify you into becoming a Verizon user? Is shock and fear tactics part of a new marketing campaign in our global war on terror. This town is absolutely Halloween crazy and nobody dare not enter the spirit and the festivities. Does Halloween paraphanalia sell more phones? Does this lady light your fire?

I went up to this smiling, green Trash and Vaudeville stockinged bodyless creature to ask her ever so politely if she would like to be featured in my blog this week.

"Excuse me, mam, I must tell you these green stockings are fabulous, very Trash and Vaudeville. Black leather shorts too, very sexy. That's where you got them, thought so. Listen hen ( that is what we call ladies in Glasgow), I don't know if anyone has mentioned it to you yet but when you got dressed this morning, you forgot something. Yes. Your body. A handkerchief, I can understand, but your whole upper half? Didn't it feel kind of chilly without it? Is that pink shelf serving any useful purpose? i suppose you can rest your lipstick on it or your head for that matter.

You are on what? the CR diet? You read in the New York magazine this week it increases women's sex drive and is the secret to eternal life. Look how thin you got. You want to look hot for all the handsome customers."

For those of you who have not read that article yet, the Calorie Restriction diet's central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer you will live. A nice side effect is that you get a euphoric high and it is free. Apparently on some hideous lab test in the 30's they found out that mice who have severely limited diets have consistently lived as much as 50 per cent longer that their cheese fed peers- as old as 160 in fact, although what a mouse would do to occupy himself for 160 years beats me.

"Mam," I said, "I read that article, that diet is very tough indeed and very limited. All you can eat is arugola,quorn and strawberry ricotta parfait, the New York version. Plus if you don't mind me saying without your top half isn't sex a little reduced in options? Sure, lady, you lost a lot of weight, the diet was extremely effective in your case, but I think you sacrificed too much to get thin. Why not try the Mastercleanse fast instead?"

"You want eternal life more than anything. You met someone, a cool customer and so far it is going well and he is very into your bottom half."

SP Followers, there will be a sad, heartbreaking end to this poor lady. She wants eternal life so desperately but come Wednesday November 1 she is finito, pumpkins, no matter how skinny and sexy, will be yesterday's news. She will probably end up as soup or if she is lucky she will perhaps be an ingredient in some cheery family's thaksgiving pie, that is at very best. I could not break that news to her. That customer she likes so much probably is well aware of this too and is just taking advantage of her CR increased sex drive. Well at least she is immortilzed in this blog and we will always love her, even if she is a PORT, person of restricted torso. Holiday fads can be so cruel.

At home in bonny Scotland, Halloween is a far more simple matter with not so many lovesick pumpkin casualties.
We settle down to a fireside reading of our national poet, Rabbi (Robert) Burns "Tam O Shanter" What could be more frightening than these words from our beloved bard ?

" Ah Tam! Ah Tam! thou'll get thy fairin! (reward)
In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin! (herring, a popular Scottish appetizer snack)
In vain they Kate awaits thy coming! ( that is his wife, a sulky sullen dame)
Kate soon will be a woefu' woman!" ( Tam will probably not make it home as the witches from the graveyard are going to chase him)

Now this is drama - written in 1750's,this comes after the fabulous scene when the drunken lout, Tam O Shanter sees the witches dancing on halloween night in the frosty graveyard and gets all excited as they are in their "cutty sarks", threadbare vests, fashionable in those days for witches. From one century to the next, men are all the same.

To find out if Tam ever makes it home alive read Robert Burns, Tam O Shanter, but I suggest you leave the light on.....

Happy halloween however you celebrate it.