Halloween: I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire…

Who’d of thunk it (who was it that used to say that? With my luck it was probably someone annoying that I don’t want anything to do with)? If I knew that there were so many superheroes in my neighborhood I would have felt much safer. With the exception of the four foot tall banana (who I believe was a 3-1/2’ tall hot dog last year, really freaked my dog out), it was almost like the Justice League and the institute from the X-men had exploded and it was raining superhearos…

So what did I do?

What else, played with power tools and fire… FIRE GOOD! (creepy laugh…)

It all started with a rather crappy day at work, which should have been over much sooner than it was. All I have to say about that is there are some people that being able to pass out a few of these products would save me a hell of a lot of time and not result an much less getting accomplished by them:


Anyway, the end result was that instead of the couple or more hours that I thought I’d have to carve my pumpkin, I was left with something more on the order of minutes.

Time to improvise… I grabbed the pumpkin, headed down to the basement, grabbed the sawzall and the cheap jigsaw that I didn’t like and went at it.

Let me tell you, it was magic, I’ve never carved a pumpkin so fast. I’m not joking, I had the top off in less then 5 seconds, and the whole thing was done, washed out and 2 candles in it in about 20 minutes, including some minor fine tuning using a large carving knife.

What do you think? Here are the results (this was shot with the lights out and a long exposure on the camera):


The amazing thing was that it wasn’t even that messy… I just took the air hose and blew all the pumpkin guts out of the saw and scooped all the seeds and stuff into a big bowl for cleaning and roasting later.

Speaking of roasting, I couldn’t help myself… I waited an hour or more after the last Trick-Or-Treater passed… I had the idea planted in my head and it was going to happen. My wife saw it coming, and was thinking either nothing will happen (I have no idea where she got that idea, something _always_ happens, it’s just a question of how big the mess is to clean up), and had the good sense to move her innocent, unmolested pumkin out of the way, and even put the dog on the leash in case she got curious (Oh, I forgot to tell you guys about trying to rewire the heating element in my wife’s towel warmer. Well, you can guess how that went, bare wires and electricity. I was surprised that she barked at it…)

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. My jack-o-lantern was going to suffer a tragic accident… I mean come on, if you’re going to stick a candle in some pore sucker’s head and set him on fire you need to do it right, immolate the sucker, make black smoke shoot from his eyes, flames shoot 4’ into the sky, make the flames so bright that the lid of the pumpkin is glowing! (these were shot with all the lights on, after a few shots I sped up the exposure trying to catch the shapes in the flames making everything look artificially dark)












Ah, a flaming tribute to the great pumpkin! He was a good pumpkin...

I’ve got tons more pictures, a few really showing the shapes of the flames well (I've been looking for some good pictures for painting/drawing), but no, I’m not going to tell you how I did it, I don’t want to hear that someone was a dumbass and tried it and set their shorts or their house on fire (well, really, I do, and I’d probably laugh, but I’m not going to be the one that someone is going to say said it was a good idea…).

OTOH, I’m already hatching plans for next year… I think I can make it shoot green flames… huh, how about fireballs….
;-)