Hootin' Owl Pie?

I know everyone is familiar with the standard caramel apples, cutout cookies, pumpkin pie and whatnot when it comes to Halloween snack fare, but I came across a peculiar recipe in the Evening Edition of the October 26th, 1949 Winona Republican Herald. It's called Hootin' Owl Pie, and it appears to be some sort of a chocolate meringue pie with an owl's face made from marshmallows and cloves. 

Apparently it was the invention of some Republican-Herald reader, or it's a culinary treat long lost to time, because even a cursory search on the internet for Hootin' Owl Pie garners nothing of relevance. Anyone ever heard of this thing? It seems like one of those charming colloquial adaptations of something else with a tweaked recipe, since most chocolate meringue pies I've seen have a layer of white meringue on top of it.

A Halloween Throwback

 

Halloween! It's definitely one of my favorite holidays. I generally get the decorating itch around mid-August, and damn if it doesn't turn into full blown hives come the second week of September.

Tastes and the idea of what is scary, not to mention what is deemed presentable, sure has changed over the decades. It's understandable that while my grandparents found Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff terrifying,  it was difficult to be driven to shivers by a leering Vincent Price in my parents' heyday, when there was footage from Vietnam on the nightly news and factors like Kent State and the swell of sensationalized serial killers, the rise in crime and social disillusionment eroding away at the squeaky clean and safe image of 1950s society. In a way, the world that was generally marginalized to pooh-poohe'd, trashy, hyper-sensationalized True Crime magazines at the newsstand, was now shown to be closer to the state of things than the Lawrence Welk broadcast illusion that many had tried to paper their lives in, regardless how many holes and tears it bore. At that point, The Mummy ceased to be terrifying.  Hence George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. New terror for a new era, where the chills on the screen had to match and exceed the ones the curtain had been drawn back from in the real world. 

Take a walk through any department store Halloween section these days, and you'll see a plethora of brutal set pieces: bloody handprint window decals, cake toppers cast in the shape of butcher knives with bloody blades, polystyrene decapitated heads. Me, I'm a traditionalist. To me, that isn't Halloween. Halloween for me is a celebration; it's a charade; and, damned if it isn't supposed to me fun. Human butchery isn't fun, it's horrible, which is why while I understand the evolution of horror as a genre from William Hope Hodgson and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man to Poppy Z. Brite and Saw, I'm strictly in the former camp when it comes to decoration.

Most of my decorations come from Beistle, the company that made all those nostalgic paper window decorations popular when your parents and grandparents were children. Due to popular demand they've been reprinting their classic designs over the last few years, even modernizing their game by upgrading some of their cardstock decor to window clings.

If you're interested in these throwback decorations as well, check them out here. For some great goods (including shirts, pins, etcetera) utilizing some of those amazing Beistle designs, check out Creepy Co here. And everyone have a great Halloween!

Consider Worms

Sketchbook Therapy

Sometimes, when life's little downturns and inconveniences have me irritated, I find the best therapy is to whip out the old sketchbook and pencil and start to doodle the stress away. Conversely, when I'm sitting there staring at a blank sketchbook page, pencil impotently clutched in hand, that aforementioned irritation compounds like guinea pig poop.

Last night my television stopped working. Boo-hoo! you might chide. First world problems! you may sarcastically sneer. Yeah, I get it. It ain't exactly the end of the world. But I generally watch one  television program on one station, and I don't have cable. So when 7pm Central Standard Time rolls around this Saturday, and I flick the idiot box on to immerse my troubles in MeTV's Svengoolie, and see that my digital antennae has suddenly stopped functioning, I get a little chafed. Yes, I checked to see if it was plugged in, before you ask.

Well it turns out the channels needed to be rescanned or some nonsense, but for the night my television was out of order. After a good fifteen minutes of glaring at the thing like I might be able to magically fix it or cause it to explode with childish vengeance simply by glowering at it, I decide that that's maybe not the healthiest or most productive way to spend a Saturday night. So's I whip out the little pocket sketchbook and the mechanical pencil and I start to doodle; as a result I come up with this scribble about how the world might change if cats had pyrokinesis.

Halloween 2019 Creepy Consumption Day 4: Svengoolie

Day Four of Creepy Consumption continues with a quick sketch of the Patron Saint of my Saturday evenings: Svengoolie. While not a horror movie or a television show per se, Sven is the cool ghoul who hosts the Universal Monsters classics, along with The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and a plethora of other Hammer Horrors, Universal and Warner Bros. monster mayhem from the golden age of monster movies, all wrapped in a heady helping of Vaudeville-esque humor (aka jokes your grandfather would tell).

If you don't know what Svengoolie is all about, go here, or check out MeTV on Saturday night, 7pm Central Standard Time!

The Experiment

The lighting is abysmal, I know, but here's another acrylic piece. This one is on cardboard.

Another Night In Prick City

Acrylic on canvas. I’m still learning how to use acrylics; after the easy blending and quick drying nature of gouache, they make me feel a bit clunky, which is why it kind of looks like a six year old made this. I'm finding precision and clean lines difficult with them.