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It will save us from a Very Special Thanksgiving edition of “Two and a Half Men.”

If you want to read two excellent articles about the reasons behind the writers strike, check out Chris Kelly at HuffPo, and Marshall Herskovitz (producer of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life) in the LA Times.

The Edmonton Swastikas, 1919. I’m betting sales of logo wear peaked some time ago.

Halloween is over now. Time to clean up the fake spiderwebs, put away the costumes and wigs, and prepare for the long slow slide to the end of the year.

The kids and I only managed to watch one movie in preparation, “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.” I don’t think it really counts, but we haven’t had many nights at home, and there haven’t been enough good movies on Turner Classics to put on the Tivo. “Bride of the Monster” is sitting on the machine now, but I don’t think I’ll subject anybody to that.

The Halloween entertainment I’m going to miss most, surprisingly, is a song anthology that I snatched off the internet last year. “Spook Party” mixed a lot of old rockabilly and novelty songs with radio ads for “It Conquered the World” and “The 4-D Man”. Every afternoon after school, the kids put it on the CD player and drove their mom crazy. But so many of them have stuck in my head that I’ll be hearing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins “Feast of the Mau-Maus” when we cut into the Thanksgiving turkey. You should all get the zip files for “Spook Party” and “Ghoul-Arama” for next year to fill your heart with creepy goodness. Go here for the files. And poke around the rest of the pages on the “Scar Stuff” blog, as you’ll find lots of strange gems.

Here’s my jack o’lantern for the year. I was pretty proud of the design, but I think next year I’ll have to let the head rot out a little more so the strings sewing the mouth shut really stand out. The problem in this neighborhood is that, no matter how much tasty garbage is overflowing in the dumpsters, the rabid squirrels feel obliged to rip apart pumpkins like wolverines going after mice. Put your pumpkin out three days before Halloween, and it will look like the Tasmanian Devil has gotten hold of it by the time the trick-or-treaters come out.

And to all the folks who decorate their houses with store-bought skeletons and blow-up ghosts, I gotta tell ya, a little ingenuity can go a long way. (Some chumbalone on my street bought little white baggies, preprinted with ghost faces, and stuffed them with a napkin or two and hung them in his tree. Store-bought, pre-printed ghost baggies? Now that’s lame.) This year I wrapped three bushes in my front yard with black nylon mesh and stuck some blinking glowing eyes inside. I wanted to make them look like large menacing blobs, kind of like that old Looney Tunes red-headed monster. The effect was okay, not great. But as a last minute inspiration, I grabbed our dog’s travel cage and some rubber monster claws from the costume bin, and made the decoration below.

People stopped and laughed at it, little kids looked at it very askance as they walked by (I can watch their expressions all day from my office on the **ahem** mezzanine level of the house). One man even took a picture of it, saying he was looking for ideas for next year. Just goes to show, a little creativity can go a long way. And it keeps the kids busy to boot.

If you want to see what our costumes were this year, visit my MySpace page.

Now, on with November. Sigh.

One that documents superhero shots to the groin. Kickings, fistings, stabbings, even explosions. I just dare you to resist the temptation to check out a site called “Nad-Shots.”

Seems to be a recurrent theme in “Planetary”, for some reason.

The weather has finally turned cold in Chicago, and the leaves on the trees outside my window are giving up the ghost and cascading to the sidewalk. They flutter down endlessly, like the confetti from a big party thrown for Summer, now that it’s finally gotten on the cruise liner and headed south. I hope we have a decently cold winter this year, so we can actually enjoy the snow and ice for long uninterrupted periods, and not have to endure these wet, filthy, warmish winters we’ve had lately. Maybe the past few tepid winters are what it’s like to have winter in Louisville or Cincinnati, where the season isn’t something to enjoy, but something to just muddle through. A tedious holding pattern.

Just enjoyed a few days with my mother visiting town. She came in to see the kids in their church choir musical and see some old friends, though there are becoming fewer in number than ever. That’s true both in Chicago where she grew up and in Detroit. Loneliness must be the worst thing about getting old.

These visits usually entail a few stories or facts that surprise me. First off, I should say that my family (save for my mother) is not one for small talk. It would be generous to say about my father, as she did, that he “kept his own counsel.” He basically kept his mouth shut to the point where a lot of people took offense, including my grandmother. At one point in my childhood, he famously objected to all the talking at the dinner table by asking in frustration, “What do you all think this is, a social event?”

So a visit with Mom always results in a few strange items coming to light, such as:

* My father had season tickets to see the Lions all through my childhood. I was the only son who was a sports fan, but I don’t remember him ever mentioning this, and I know for a fact I never went to a Lions game. Thanks, Dad.

* The neighbor kid, who was maybe two years older than me, would get very upset that I spoke gibberish as a toddler. My mother told him, “That’s not gibberish–he’s speaking Chinese.” The kid then grew very concerned for me, trying to make it in America and knowing only Chinese. Mom regrets pulling the kid’s chain, but he was such a dick, I’m glad she did it.

* Before my father was courted by and took a job with Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, he got a job offer in Indianapolis, doing finance for some company there. They were brought down there and dined with the bosses of the company, but at 10:00 that night, they decided to get out of their hotel room and grab a drink somewhere downtown. In all of Downtown Naptown, they couldn’t find a single tavern or bar & grill open. Thank heavens for that. If he had taken a job down there, I might have grown up with an even more nasal accent than I have now.

At some point in the weekend, the subject of my brother the actor came up, as it always does. An actor’s life is a string of disappointments and near-misses, leavened occasionally with fun and fulfilling work. Of course, a mother doesn’t want to see her son have to go through so much rejection in his life, and she doesn’t like to hear stories about the strivers, backstabbers, egoists and connivers that compete with him for roles and attention.

“He’s not ‘on’ all the time, like most of them,” she said. “I don’t know if that would help, but he’s not like that. We don’t know what it’s like to be that passionate about something, that it commands your whole life. It’s just not in our nature.”

“Our” nature meaning the Garner family makeup. Mom of course projects her insecurities (of which there are many) onto the rest of the world, and her family is the closest target, but her statement got me thinking: Does everybody out there have a “family nature”? Does every family have an indelible, immutable, defining trait? Apparently the Garner family trait is reticence and a lack of passion, in her eyes. There were three sons in the family, and we all looked very similar. People often referred to us as “the Garner boys” and “definitely Bill’s sons,” and assumed we were all like Dad: studious, smart, reserved, hard-working.

Whenever anyone asks me where my sense of humor comes from, or the source of the hamminess of my kids, my nieces and nephews, and my brother and myself, I never have an answer. I just know it didn’t come from my parents, and that our household wasn’t one of those loud, crazy Irish households where everyone was vying for attention. We were the British model that kept everything buttoned down until the seams burst. Still, that may be a formula for producing people like yours truly. If they’d sent me away to boarding school, I might have turned into a truly twisted genius.

The last of the original Rat Pack passed away yesterday, at the age of 89. Hammer another nail into the coffin of pre-hippie sixties cool, now only remembered in tribute acts and strained journalistic references to current flashes in the entertainment pan. And “Mad Men”, I guess, though I haven’t watched it yet.

What a year it’s been. Is there anyone left alive who sat on Johnny Carson’s couch when “The Tonight Show” was still based in NYC?

UPDATE: For an interesting historical perspective on the Rat Pack, and a clip from The Joey Bishop Show, check out this link to Crooks & Liars.

I’d like to thank my niece for pointing out that I am a man ahead of my time. Among my many far-sighted obsessions (the mayonnaise glue stick applicator, for one), I have been chronicling the controversies surrounding the state of the beanbag in recent weeks. You can read the posts here and here if you have so little to do today.

Well, my niece points out that Newsweek is reporting a new controversy over nomenclature among tailgating afficianadoes. Ever alert for the latest trend that affects our lives, the magazine states that there now exists a fight brewing about the proper name for this new generation of steroidal beanbag toss games. The contenders? Cornhole and Baggo.

Remember when George Carlin catalogued the “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television”? While that list is not completely taboo anymore, I’m betting that the words “cornhole” and “baggo” can’t be used in the same paragraph on TV without getting the FCC worked up. Let me rephrase that: I’m HOPING those two words can’t be used together. Of course, I’m probably wrong. There’s probably a cop show in development for FX named “Cornhole and Baggo.”

And did you know that there was something called the American Cornhole Association? Aren’t you glad now that you do?