Yes, friends, I’m one of “those people.” I don’t answer the door for trick-or-treaters.

In this post: Still Halloween, a birthday wish-list.

In Texas, “above average” is a five-star sushi review.

In this post: Happy Halloween, goodies from Costco, the drought goes on.

First, happy Halloween. Second, Sam is on his way to Costco as I write this post. Today’s list includes practically all of our regular favorites, such as: 1) an industrial-size package of surprisingly excellent lox; 2) sushi; 3) two kinds of sliced cheese; 4) breakfast burritos; and 5) two extra-large sacks of chocolate chip Brownie Brittle so Sam can bring one to work today for Halloween. Incidentally, Costco’s sushi is definitely above average, but please remember that I live in Texas and “above average” is a five-star sushi review here.

Seriously, nobody else sells wasabi lip balm.

In this post: Sweets for Sam, great gifts from Archie McFee.

As a quick update to my last post, Sam finally got home this morning at 8:15 after 18 consecutive hours at the office. He was in surprisingly good spirits — the project apparently went well — but holy crap, nobody gets paid enough to work hours like that! Sam slept on and off until 2:30 this afternoon, ate some leftover pizza, showered and went back to work around 3:30. As a bonus the big Halloween surprise I ordered for him on Amazon showed up via FedEx about half an hour before he left ... TWO BAGS OF BRACH’S FALL FLAVORS CARAMEL CANDY CORN. Sugar solves everything.

Go suck tumbleweeds, Governor Perry.

In this post: Victory for women, a Halloween surprise, hating my clients.

I’ve got some damn exciting news to share with y’all. A Federal judge has struck down Texas’ draconian new abortion law that would have closed nearly every abortion clinic in the state. It was supposed to take effect tomorrow but U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel ultimately decided that Texas could not place unreasonable new restrictions on doctors performing abortions or throw additional obstacles in the path of women seeking abortion services. I have only one comment for Governor Perry: YEE-HAW AND GO SUCK TUMBLEWEEDS, YOU MISERABLE MISOGYNIST!

Thursday is my 61st birthday and there’s still plenty of time to shop.

It’s Halloween night and I’m hiding in the study. I can hear car doors slamming and clusters of kids running past the house, but nobody’s ringing my bell because the lights are off and it looks like nobody’s home. This, quite honestly, is absolutely swell! When I finish writing this post I plan to clean out a couple of desk drawers, fill my pill sorter for the week ahead and enjoy my favorite late-night snack: a low-carb vanilla milkshake and a bowl of Vlasic sugar-free bread & butter pickles.

Stop laughing. I have a rich and rewarding life.

From our Puzzling Hobbies and Pastimes department, if you’re a regular Howdygrammer you’ve undoubtedly noticed by now that I redesigned the banner graphic today! I do this frequently. I don’t know why. Some of you may postulate that I have way too much time on my hands, and I think I have to agree with you.

Tomorrow (Thursday) is my 61st birthday and you will be pleased to know there’s still plenty of time to shop. Toward that end, I wouldn’t mind receiving any or all of the following suggested presents. A photo montage appears below in case you need visual aids.

• Cash in any denomination; foreign currency accepted.
• Greeting cards, emails, telephone calls and a big sack of miscellaneous groceries.
• An eye exam with dilation ($90) and new progressive trifocals ($425). 
• A case of Loma Linda Swiss Stake fake meat in a can. Amazon has this.
• Nice stretchy socks for diabetics from FootSmart.com, size women’s 11.5–13. I’d like two pair of white and two pair of black for $23.97. Thank you.
• Lowrey’s hot & spicy microwave Bacon Curls, 18 individual bags for $18.99 from Amazon. (They’re addicting.)
• A box of 100 insulin syringes, size 1ml/cc, 29 gauge, ½-inch length. Try Wal-Mart.

It’s 10:15 p.m. and the Halloween hoo-hah has subsided outside, which means I can finally stop hiding in the study and turn on a few lights. I might even live dangerously and take a shower. Thank you for reading this.

Boo, y’all.

A quick word of warning in case you’re in the neighborhood today with a zombie mask and an empty grocery bag: Howdygram headquarters no longer celebrates Halloween because I’m way too crabby to waste my time throwing handfuls of bubble gum at screechy little strangers. However I do want to share the following vintage Marks family Halloween portrait featuring adorable Sam at age four (lower left) and three of his favorite relations.

Just for the record, Steve is Sam’s older brother, Ben is Sam’s (late) father, and Uncle Frank currently haunts an assisted living facility in North Hollywood.

Boo, y’all, and thank you for reading this.

Halloween and other pointless pursuits.

Just in case you haven’t read enough stories this year about sickening excess, you might be interested to know that America’s Queen of Greed — reality TV star KIM KARDASHIAN — filed for divorce today after only two months of marriage. (My skin started to itch just thinking about this.)

At the end of August Kardashian’s $10 million over-the-top “fairytale” wedding to Kris Humphries was taped for broadcast on E! Entertainment Television with an estimated $15 million payout to the bride. She also sold exclusive rights to her wedding photos to “People” magazine for $2.5 million, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she refuses to return her 20-carat engagement ring and wedding gifts because I don’t think this third-rate bimbo has ever demonstrated a shred of decency in her entire life. (I sincerely hope that E! and “People” consider suing her for fraud.)

Kardashian is mostly famous for gigantic fake breasts, a face that looks like wax, her former friendship with Paris Hilton and a widely-circulated sex tape with an ex-boyfriend … all of which she parlayed successfully into THREE concurrent Kardashian-based reality series. And if that’s not obnoxious enough for you, she’s got two sisters and a mother all cut from the same creepy, overpriced cloth.

One final thought. According to TMZ Kardashian filed divorce papers after the couple had an argument — obviously the last straw! — about where to spend Halloween, and as mature, serious adults we all know that a meaningful holiday like Halloween would be a deal-breaker for ANY marriage.

And while I’m on the subject of Halloween …

Anybody who plans to come trick-or-treating here tonight please skip my house because I’m not opening the door, and I didn’t open the door LAST year, either. If your kids really can’t live without stale bubble gum and teeny boxes of Raisinets, please go to Wal-Mart and buy your own.

Tonight I plan to curl up in the family room with lemonade, a couple of Schwan’s tamales and my brand new 630-page Steve Jobs biography — with LOTS OF PICTURES! — that came a few days ago. I can’t wait to get started, so thank you for not annoying me.

Trick or treat: the worst Halloween candy ever.

With the American Dental Association’s favorite fall holiday less than 48 hours away I think it’s high time for a Howdygram exposé of the worst-ever Halloween candy … the useless, tasteless crap you refused to eat as a kid and nobody — not even your little sister — would trade for. The images below appear in no particular order.

Jawbreakers. Because everybody wants a ball of rock-hard sugar bigger than your actual mouth that takes three hours to eat. They have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Necco Wafers. They’re brittle disks of chalk that taste like cologne, deodorant, feminine hygiene spray and shoe polish, but health-conscious children everywhere should be happy to know Neccos are FAT FREE. At last count there are maybe four people in Indiana who actually eat these things.

Candy Corn. I definitely run a risk if I insult candy corn because Sam actually LOVES this stuff. Candy corn has the texture of candle wax and tastes like Glade vanilla air freshener and Easter Peeps made a flavor baby. This is very, very bad.

Good & Plenty. I never understood trying to disguise stale licorice bullets with pink and white sugar. My mother is only person I ever knew who ate these. She’s currently confined to a wheelchair and lives in a nursing home, so draw your own conclusions.

Circus Peanuts. I think these inedible monstrosities are already 35 years old when they come off the assembly line. They squeak like styrofoam when you squish them, look like misshapen suppositories and taste like crusty old marshmallows from a bag that somebody forgot to seal in the mid-1960s.

Dum Dums. The wrappers on these irritating little lollipops almost never come off so you usually get stuck eating most of the paper. This is actually more appealing than the candy itself, as Dum Dums come in a dozen flavors and they all taste equally lousy. Incidentally, I don’t think it’s a great idea to ever give these to children because if you fall down with a sucker in your mouth you’ll wind up sounding like Andy DeVine (see video below). My mother told me this when I was six and I still believe her. Seriously.

Spearmints. These belong in a jar at the register when you pay your bill at Denny’s, NOT in a Trick-or-Treat bag. Spearmints taste like toothpaste and most kids would rather eat cat poop.

Pastel Tootsie Rolls. Why would anybody think that non-chocolate, artificially-flavored Tootsie Rolls in Crayola colors would be a great idea for candy. The flavors are like Starbursts for sissies, only infinitely worse. The cherry ones remind me of cough syrup.

Mary Janes. They’re hard little slabs of linoleum with a flavor profile reminiscent of peanut butter spray-painted on a Tonka truck. By the time I was 10 years old Mary Janes had successfully pulled every filling out of my mouth and broken my braces twice. These work better as jawbreakers than actual jawbreakers. I hold the same high regard for Bit-o-Honeys.

Dots. Dots are basically little mounds of industrial-grade mucilage manufactured in attractive colors. Think of them as Jujubes on steroids.

It wasn’t my intention to include Jujubes in this review of Halloween candy, but these little indigestible acrylic nipples are so useless and obnoxious I think they deserve an honorable mention. My sister, a certifiable screwball whose “food issues” started in infancy, lived on Jujubes, white bread and canned shoestring potatoes for at least two decades. I know this for a fact because when she got married in 1974 and moved out of the house my mother discovered two dresser drawers filled with hundreds of empty Jujube boxes. I have no idea what this means. If Dr. Phil is reading this post maybe he could leave a comment.

Happy Halloween from the Howdygram, y’all.

Sssh. We're skipping Halloween.

Halloween has been canceled in north Texas this year. Don’t ring my doorbell and stay off my front lawn. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a World Series underway and all of us in Dallas are watching the Rangers on TV. Tell your kids to go buy their own Milk Duds and Dots, okay?

However, as long as I’m talking about the World Series, I’d be a little happier right now if the Giants were a crappy team and we could beat them. Whenever the camera zooms in on Nolan Ryan sitting behind the dugout he looks like Mister Grumpy Face. Last time I checked the score it was Giants 3, Rangers 0 at the bottom of the 8th.

Before I forget, I tried another product from Schwan’s last week, and this one’s definitely a winner. I didn’t expect frozen tamales to be this good. You just wrap two in a wet paper towel, nuke them for three minutes and poof, you’ve got a pair of decent beef tamales. And they’re cute, too. I can’t wait to introduce a few of them to Sam.

I also should mention that my birthday begins in 90 minutes and I’m not feeling very well tonight. At this point my only symptoms are tiredness and no appetite, but nevertheless I think presents, get-well emails and lemon jello might do the trick. Thank you in advance for your concern and generosity.