"Eric Millikin, Artist, Creates The Sweetest Halloween Art You'll See All Year"

GOT CANDY?

Every single one of these images was created using individual bags of candy. Click on the headline link above to see more art from Milliken and read this interesting article from the Huffington Post.

Here's something creepy about today... 

Mt. Rushmore is "completed" without the bodies, which is kind of spooky if you think about it.



Jack-o-lanterns aren't the only thing famous for being carved on Halloween, Mt. Rushmore was finished on October 31st, of 1941. Originally, more than just the faces of the presidents were intended to be included -- as pictured in the model above -- but due to a lack of funds, the final product came without the bodies.

BOO!

New Contemporary Paperback Fiction...

HOT NEW TITLES!   Hot New Authors!

     


Chum, Jeff Somers -Mary and Bickerman are the center of their circle of friends--but these friends are strangers as well as family to them. In the course of year, under the influence of a stressful wedding and a whole lot of alcohol, relationships and nerves are twisted and broken as the dynamics of the cozy-seeming group shift. Secrets are kept, emotions withheld, and it doesn't look like it's going to end well for anyone. Told always in first person, but not the same person, and unfolding in double-helix chronology that provides a Rashomon-like narration, Chum is the story of love, liquor, and death. 

Sleepless Nights, Mark H. Williamson -It's not easy being the man behind the myth.Sir Lucas is butler to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - the person who managed every quest from behind the scenes. What's more, 1,500 years after that golden age, he's still doing it - here in the modern world, right under our noses.When King Arthur and six of his knights are exposed as living among us, Merlin is unleashed and a grim apocalypse unfolds, uncovering secrets from the past that King Arthur would rather stay buried. A tale of high adventure and warm humor, with a spring in its step, a twinkle in its eye and, at its heart, the ultimate butler.

Brothers in Blood, David Stuart Davies - A brutal game devised by three intelligent but bored teenagers escalates into murder. Led by the charismatic and cunning Laurence, the trio of 'brothers' meets once a year to carry out untraceable, motiveless murders - for fun. Until, years later, they must murder in order to protect one of their own, leaving themselves vulnerable to discovery. This killing is investigated by Detective Inspector Paul Snow, a complex man with a secret of his own which links him to the murder. As Snow grows closer to unmasking the killers, his professional life begins to unravel in a terrifying fashion. Brothers in Blood is a dark and chilling thriller which surprises and excites all the way to the shocking climax.

Charisma, Barbara Hall - Haunted by visions and voices for most of her life, Sarah Lange manages to shut them out, until a violent incident and near death experience shatter her earthly existence. She is plagued by heavenly voices and dogged by a desire to return "home". Frightened by her desire to terminate her existence on earth, she checks into a trauma center in Malibu, California and meets Dr. David Sutton, whose world is as divorced from mystery and magic as Sarah’s is alive and animated by it. The sessions between the two evolve into an exploration of what it takes to exist in the world, the courage required to confront life on its own terms, and the even greater courage it takes to deny the constrictions of life. In a desperate effort to define herself, Sarah "escapes", putting her own life as well as the life of a fellow trauma patient at risk and David must decide how far he is willing to go to save a patient and ultimately himself.

The Secret Lives of Married Women, Elissa Wald - Two identical twin sisters - one a sexually repressed defense attorney, the other a former libertine now living a respectable life in suburbia - are about to have their darkest secrets revealed, to the men in their lives and to themselves. As one sister prepares for the thorniest trial of her career and the other fends off ominous advances from a construction worker laboring on the house next door, both find themselves pushed to the edge, and confronted by discoveries about themselves and their lovers that shock and disturb them.

WAR OF THE WORLDS! ON PBS TONIGHT at 9pm...

Tune in Tonight!

October 29 at 9 p.m.

New York's Channel 13 will mark the 75th anniversary of a moment in history when a significant part of the United States believed it was being overrun by alien invaders. 

The PBS station 

will air 

the documentary 

"War of the Worlds" 

as part of its "American Experience" series.

                   

Major discussions in the theater world during the late 1930s centered around the Mercury Theater troupe and its twentyish wunderkind leader Orson Welles. They achieved notoriety for such Shakespearean fare as adapting "Macbeth" to a Caribbean voodoo setting and presenting "Julius Caesar" in modern dress hinting at the war tensions then prevalent in Europe. In the summer of 1938 the CBS network gave the Mercury Theatre an hour of radio time during which they presented adaptations of such classic literature as "Dracula," "Treasure Island" and "The Count of Monte Cristo." The summer fare was so well received that Mercury was allowed to continue on radio through the end of the year. The problem was that the program was moved to Sundays opposite NBC's monster hit "The Chase and Sanborn Hour" starring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his wisecracking dummy Charlie McCarthy.

And so it was on the night of October 30, 1938  that "Chase and Sanborn" fans switched dials when Bergen/McCarthy left and a singer came on to find that something otherworldly had landed on a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University. What would happen next would be in the words of an announcer "the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars." Those convinced by these and other statements set off a panic in many parts of the United States.

In truth, what they were hearing was a Mercury Theater adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel "The War of the Worlds" set in Thirties America instead of turn of the century England. Many threatened to sue Orson Welles and Mercury for "scaring" a major sector of the nation. But syndicated newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson came to the defense of Welles saying that the "War of the Worlds" broadcast pointed out how sensitized the listening public had become to "war" bulletins on radio.

Welles and his Mercury players rode the "War of the Worlds" publicity to Hollywood. Howard Koch, the young writer who penned the script for that program, would compose the screenplays for such gems as "Sergeant York" and "Casablanca" (both in Merrick Library's DVD collection). Koch would also write the 1970 book "The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of An Event" (in Merrick's Non-Fiction collection) recounting events before, during and after that historic hour. John Dunning's "On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio" (also at Merrick Library) contains an entry on "Mercury Theater" with more facts about this still fascinating story about the arts and mass media. 

TUNE IN TONIGHT! 
(special thanks to Bob Ludemann for providing the text for this Blog piece)