My Band Name For Today

Good evening buoys and gulls!

Stop listening to ABBA and Costello (Elvis Costello, that is. --See how hep we are?). It's time for this year's Howl-o-Scream Spec-tac-ghoul-lar.

It doesn't matter whether your reading this in Buffalo Springfield or Chicago. It's the Time Of The Season on this blog when bad taste is encouraged--unlike the rest of the year.

So each Halloween we trot out a different kind of spooky Queen -- retired (unemployable) children's magazine "humor" editor Al Hunt (nee Hyram Weisman), who also produced a couple "Spooky Sounds" records back in the 1960's.

Each year at Halloween we are contractually bound to present his puntastic list of fun-filled spookeriffic band names.

It's pretty dire, really, but his contract is iron clad.

Or is that Iron Maiden clad?

See what I did there? I guess there's a little Al Hunt in all of us. And with his frequent multiple-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus infections, that's not a good thing.

Listen up all you little Zombies and Goblins, or you'll be in Dire Straits. So pay attention. You wouldn't want to get an Aerosmith through the Heart would you?

This year's horrific band names are:

• Electric Fright Or-ghoul-stra!
• Threat-tallica
• Van Howlen'
• New Kids on the Chopping Block
• MEANS of the BONE Age!
• Dead Rot Killing Peppers
• The Boo Fighters!
• Tom Deady & The Heart-Stakers
• Can't Blink-182 (because I've got those Clockwork Orange Ludovico wires keeping your eyelids open)!

Bless his heart. You can't say Al Hunt isn't out there plugging away.

On another seasonal topic, I understand schoolchildren are required to carve pumpkins in the form of great women from US history. Here is my proposed entry, a pumpkin in the beguiling form of our greatest first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt:

Happy Halloween, everybody.