Happy Halloween! or, I Hope This Isn't Too Offensive

No time for matters intellectual, as I'm off to celebrate Halloween in the most offensive costume I could muster at a moment's notice.  When your options are your wife's clothes and a bicycle helmet, well, they're limited.  (Pictures available upon request.  This post will certainly be deleted before I hit the market.)

I should add that I've a reputation for wearing and/or suggesting the most offensive Halloween costumes imaginable.  If you don't believe me ... then you don't believe me, since there's a 00.000% I subject my brilliantly offensive costumes on the general public.  All apologies in advance, but the odds of this appearing on my permanent record are less than nill.  (But they really are brilliant.  This year's "costume" represents the bottom of my costumery barrel.  Terrible, really.  Offensive by sartorial necessity.  But what can you do when you prefer the great indoors to the world of human interaction and thus don't consider costumes 'til the day's upon you.)

Comments

[Stephen]

Dressing up as the Little Medievalist with a bicycle helmet? Offensive? I don't get it.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Of course you don't. You always give me the benefit of the doubt (not that I now why). I went to the party dressed like this. The Little Womedievalist, on the other hand, looked like this. I think you can see the offensiveness of my costume. I mean, it lacks the national unappeal of my post-9/11 ideas, but still...that was not cool.

Fortunately for all right-thinking folk, God punished me for my sins with a mauling. And a cold. I dound dike I dalk dike dis.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

And watch them pictures quick-like, since they ain't going to survive the week.

[Adam Roberts]

Man, what great pictures.

Now, my position is as follows: my wife is (in my of course biased but nonetheless forceful opinion) a beautiful woman. I am a considerably less-than-beautiful man. It sometimes nags at me a little, the aesthetic imbalance of this, tho' obviously it would be crazy of me to complain about it. [There's a line in Ice Age, my daughter's favourite film of last year: 'when a man finds a mate he should be loyal. And in your case grateful.'] Of course it's some consolation that my circumstance is not wholly unique in the world. Not that this has any particular relevance to the pictures you've posted of course; it's just a thought that floats through my brain.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

None of us are worthy of the women who deigned to marry us. The Little Womedievalist is not just beautiful, she's also extremely talented. She's one of those people who pick up languages (she's up to sixteen now and is learning Latin as we speak) in a day and play fourteen musical instruments. I, on the other hand, played high school baseball and soccer and now blog.

The comparison looks worse if it's direct: I took four years of Latin (which I have largely forgotten) as an undergraduate, only speak English fluently and once "played" the bass guitar for a year before realizing that rhythm sections are best peopled by people with rhythm. You don't know the depths of my unworthiness.

[Adam Roberts]

Scott, let me offer you an insight into the brain of the average English male. I read your entry above, and I recognised it as containing all manner of interesting observation, an uxuriousness with which I can empathise, a small window into you life; and all this is good. And yet my brain lighted upon one word in all those words, and that word snagged in my consciousness like a thorn. Soccer.

That's Foot. Ball.

All the crimes America has committed in the world, all the Guantanamo Bays and Vietnams, pale into insignificance beside the US appropriation of the name of the world's most beautiful sport in order to describe a game in which you are not only encouraged but required to pick the ball up with your hands.

Hands. Yes.

A couple of years ago Sky broadcast an ad to big-up the fact that they had recently purchased the rights to screen all the Premiership football matches live (this was when my team were still in the Premiership. Ach, ubi sunt...) They followed some microphone-wielding Brit aruond the streets of New York as he asked random folk 'excuse me, do you like football?' One after another the courteous people of NY responded 'yeah, sure' 'I like football, course I do' and so on; until he came across one slightly more alert individual. This person, twigging the questioner's accent, replied 'uh, hey, do you mean soccer?' At that point in the ad a huge booming voice, like the voice of God, echoed across the screen; 'No -- we mean FOOTBALL!' And that's really how I feel about it.

Apart from that, great post.

[Laura]

No, Adam, it's soccer all right. Proper football is something else entirely.

[Adam Roberts]

Australian rules football? A fine game. But ... one word: hands!

Football. The game in which you get to move the ball around with your foot and not your hands.

The prosecution rests, m'lud.