Halloween highlights
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
By Jessica Hunt
There’s no small number of Halloween-related events this year. Here are some of our favorites:
• All Purpose Party at the Masquerade (Fri. Oct. 30)
• Darkside Tours at Underground Atlanta
• Fuggin Monster Jam at 2043 Cheshire Bridge Road
• Halloweenus Wangdoodle at Dad’s Garage Theatre
• Hand of Doom at 529
• Moonshiner’s Ball at Twain’s Billiards and Tap
• Netherworld Haunted House at the Georgia Antique Design Center
• The Phantom of the Opera at Atlanta Symphony Hall
• Scream on the Green at Centennial Olympic Park Georgia World Congress Center
• Seven Deadly Showgirls at 7 Stages
• The Silver Scream Spook Show at the Plaza Theatre
• Stalking in a Winter Horror Land at CW Midtown Music Complex
• Zombie Bash Block Party at Biltmore Ballroom, Cypress P&P and Halo Lounge
• Zombieland Halloween Party at 10 Krog Street
See the whole shebang after the jump.
(Photo courtesy Dad’s Garage Theatre)
I’ve noticed a lot of my neighbors have built elevated gardening beds in their yards using wood that’s marked as treated with arsenic. Will the arsenic get into the vegetables and fruits these people are growing? If so, is that a health concern?
I’ve seen pictures of Pangaea, the giant land mass that eventually separated into the continents we know today. But why were the continents smushed together like that in the first place? What made the land higher on that one side of the earth? Were there other continents we can no longer account for? Is it related to the asteroid that may or may not have smashed into Earth and helped form the moon?
Superman is able to use his super strength to squeeze coal into diamonds. Theoretically, if someone had unlimited strength in real life, would it be possible to do this?
What’s the final word about Y2K? We were told this was a serious problem, and that huge dollars and man-hours were needed to head off trouble. Why didn’t the sky fall, as predicted? Were the dollars spent before January 1, 2000, well spent or not? The date change seemed seamless to a layman. Was this because we headed off most of the trouble before it happened, or because it wasn’t as serious as predicted?
There’s an old saw about God protecting drunks and fools. I’m particularly interested in the drunks part. Almost nightly, it seems, we hear on the news that a drunk driver killed one or more people in another car but the drunk survived, sometimes without injury. A family member suggested drunks are saved because they’ve passed out and are more relaxed, but I’m skeptical. Is it just the crashes where the drunk walks away after killing another that make the news? 
I recently read a speech by Noam Chomsky in which he says that during the Vietnam War, “soldiers were fragging officers.” I, a man too young to have served in that conflict, have heard this before but thought it was just a rumor. Can you shed some light on this dark matter?
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond claims, “When NASA wanted to find some place on Earth resembling the surface of the Moon, so that our astronauts preparing for the first moon landing could practice in an environment similar to what they would encounter, NASA picked a formerly green area of Iceland that is now utterly barren.” This struck me as wrong. Growing up, I heard the slag fields around Sudbury, Ontario, helped get the lunar astronauts accustomed to the moon’s desolation. I’ve heard similar things about islands in the Canadian arctic and deserts in the American southwest. I can’t see NASA hauling astronauts around the world just to look at places without trees. I wonder if the real explanation is that the astronauts had to take geology lessons. True?
