Late-Season South Shore Foliage

We did a few Foliage trips around the South Shore last week.

"South Shore" is sort of an indiscriminate term, as places like Middleboro and Wareham really shouldn't count, but we didn't get Fall Riverish enough to call it a South Coast/South Shore crossover.

That fact doesn't really matter much- especially in an article about leafs on a tree- but it matters a lot to the people who it matters to.

We try to keep moving when we work...

Sometimes we shoot out the window. Worry not, the driver isn't shooting. He drives, the passenger spots and shoots. The driver determines the general direction that we go, while the spotter is in charge of when we stop. 

Maybe you work differently... or maybe I'm too lazy to crop the dashboard out of this pic, and decided to joke around it. 

We let our daily business dictate our photo work a lot, so we sort of ran a Wareham-Carver-Plymouth-Kingston-Duxbury back down to Bourne route.

We've been meaning to do Cape Cod, as we veteran leaf peepers feel that Cape Cod doesn't peak before November. Unfortunately, the Cranberry Chevy has been running poorly recently, it's an expensive fix, and we may have to be Innovative. We may even have a contest.

I'll worry about that later, as it is very late at night and I have pictures to share with you.

I like writing in the middle of the night. The night helps me focus. 

I'm pretty sure that I waltzed out of Duxbury High School in the 1980s just a few years before stuff like Asperger Syndrome and ADHD became the go-to diagnosis model for American school psychologists. If I was a 1970s birth, I'd be full of Ritalin and asleep right now.

I tend to be distracted during the day. Even in the relative isolation that I managed to carve out for myself, stuff- people walking around, approaching vehicles, the discharge of a rife now and then- happens on my street that I have to pay attention to.

That's not the case during the Witching Hour. The darkness obscures all visual distractions, reducing me to Tyrannosaurus Rex-style motion detector status. Anything moving around in my yard at this hour is most likely something that I might have to kill, probably with my hands (I support America's gun rights 101%, but I'm a bit too clutzy/nutty to responsibly own a firearm myself). That sort of tension adds a nice edge to my work.

Hey, you try writing about leaves... 

I've said it before, but Southeastern Massachusetts is tough for shooting Foliage. We lack the elevated spots that you get in places like New Hampshire, where you get those sweeping mountain valley views that you see in the calendars. We sometimes have to leave some dude's truck in the picture.

I'd shoot off of the Bourne or Sagamore Bridge, but that area is cursed with scrub pine. You get a greenish/orangey/semi-brown mix shooting from up there, sort of a bronzed Aquaman.

I have plans for that region, which we will get to in a future article.

Our responsibility runs out at the Rhode Island border. We love Rhodey. We're just a Massachusetts thing.

Even then, we stick to the Eastern part of the state. It simplifies things. 

Shoot, we could give you Colorado pictures if you want, but I don't think that they grow cranberries out there.

It's best if we stay in Massachusetts.

We do have good foliage down here. It's more of a rural driving expedition thing than a hiking thing, although you can see some nice Leaf if you go deep in the forest. You even get Early Peak in the areas of the forest where the sun doesn't shine that brightly.

We'd also recommend using an online map service to plan your trip. You can work a few lakes into your route (we didn't do so on this trip, but you can), and be sure to keep it Rural.

Orange was the hardest color for us to find. Various shades of red are everywhere, with a slow fade to brown taking over as the Fall part of autumn starts to assert herself. Yellow is second easiest, and orange is the hardest.

I see Blue in some Vermont photos, but I'm not a savvy enough Leafpeeper to know what trees do that or why we don't have them here.

We'll try to expand our reach into the northern states next year.  We got to Maine in September, but it was pre-peak. After that, we were lucky to get out of Plymouth County. Busy month,,,

We do perform an important service here. We get it out on the Internet that southeastern Massachusetts, and especially Cape Cod, still has peak foliage.

If you live in or are visiting New England, it is quite simply Too Damn Late for you to see peak foliage unless you get your bad self down to southeastern Massachusetts. You could go to Vermont, but it's brown and desolate up there... and everyone smells like syrup.

We don't want you to have to go through all that, when you can dip an hour or two south of Boston and see perfect late-season fall foliage.

Even with our best efforts, we tend to be more Suburban than Rural. This is why we have to zoom in on tress so closely,when panning back or whatever they call that may be more what the shot calls for.

It also gives us the Flood o' Color that we love so much. It is very colorful down here. I didn't have to edit these shots at all, which wasn't the case with our previous foliage work. 

This is good, because my mouse has no Right Click button now. Not being able to scoot down to Radio Shack is one of the downsides of working the Werewolf Shift, but it is a condition that I tolerate.

I swear that, when I went to the other side of the tree to shoot it without the guy/s house in the background, the color wasn't as satisfying. Therefore, he suffers so that you can zone out on some Reds.

If homeboy objects we'll remove the picture or crop his house out of it or something.

We like our readers to be happy. Sure, we'll fight with them on Facebook now and then, but it's all in good fun.

I tried and failed to frame the Myles Standish Monument between two trees with my cheapo Wal-Mart camera that was last seen being hit directly by a wave during our nor'easter coverage a few weeks ago.

I could have zoomed in more, but it might have made the picture blurry.

I am very much a photographer of the Take Fifty To Use Ten variety.

We have two or three more articles on Foliage coming up

1) A piece where we discuss lining the Cape Cod Canal with foliage-friendly trees in a crazed attempt to make it a 2075 AD tourist attraction.

2) A contest where we troll Facebook for people to take Cape Cod foliage pics which we will publish. A cheapo prize will go to the winner.

3) The article with the results of the contest.

We loved this month, because the nor'easter didn't kill the foliage. It did damage, but it didn't bring about a premature end of the season.

Check this tree below, which lost her leaves directly under her. Raking the yard under this tree is a breeze...

... unless, of course, there's a breeze!

Peep ya later!

Halloween Displays IV, and A Rich Man/Poor Man Comparative Analysis

(EDITOR'S NOTE: We lifted this article from a site we used to write for, and it dates back to 2012. "2012" explains why we planned to egg Taylor Swift's house, as she had then been smitten with Konnor Kennedy and had bought a house adjoining the Kennedy Compound. She has since divested herself from both entities. 

Also, my kid was Wolverine that year, he's a stormtrooper this year. 

The pictures in the article, aside from being Halloween-themed, have nothing to do with the story.

This article is the fourth installment in our Halloween Displays series, and the pictures come from Whitman, Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver, Wareham and Plymouth.)

One way to make a childish activity fun for Mom and Dad is to use your child as the bait in a half-assed sociological experiment. This Halloween, we did just that.

He didn't care. He got to dress like Wolverine, and he hauled in enough candy to bring a dentist to climax.

The experiment was thus: Take a kid trick or treating in two neighborhoods of varying wealth, and try to take note of any differences that might make themselves apparent.

We had to choose two neighborhoods. Mommy had the Whammy, an absolute veto.... which eliminated Brockton, Roxbury, etc... and some pre-Halloween recon eliminated the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port when we found that no one but the staff was around there after Labor Day. 

Let the record show that I would have had No Problem At All with egging Taylor Swift's house if she didn't show my people some proper confectionary love. Fortunately, it never came down to that.

The Kennedy logic also eliminated many of the marquee Cape Cod neighborhoods. We have nothing but love for Summer People, but they aren't of much use when you need candy in late October. Demographics are everything. We needed more of a bedroom community, and a wealthy one at that.

We narrowed it down to Jersusalem Road in Cohasset, and Washington Street in Duxbury. Even though Cohasset's main drag has more of a Gatsby feel, Duxbury had the advantage of centralized parking (we used what most locals still call "Sweetser's") and more occupied houses per square mile. The average house goes about a milly or so, and you can bang out a bunch of them without walking a costumed 10K.

As for our seedy site, we chose Wareham. We wanted to use Shangri-La, but the sidewalk/streetlight ratios didn't work out in favor of those with a wandering five year old Wolverine. We decided instead on a trailer park between Mazzilli's Farm Stand and Barnacle Bill's Seafood Shack. The double-wides are too tightly packed to get a car moving through at any kill-a-child speed, and we could do 50 units without any great hardship.

Your average home on Washington Street is owned by someone in the finance industry. Your average person in the trailer park works at Benny's or the Lobster Pound. The average salary on Washington Street is probably equal to the salary of 20 people in the trailer park. The average salary in the trailer park is probably half or a third of what the kid's car costs on Washington Street.

Does it matter? Does it translate into generous candy giving?

Due to us having to pick Mommy up in Sagamore at a certain time, Wolverine and I decided to start in the Wareham trailer park. We got out a little before dark, and we set right to our task. Wolverine (the Michigan yellow/blue Wolverine from the comics, not the leather jacket one from the movies) is five, cute, and fully invested in the candy acquisition process.

In case you think that this article is going to make fun of the poor... don't. Wareham came correct. I'm proud to say that every trailer we knocked on answered, and nobody came cheap with the goodies. Wolverine didn't have to disembowel anyone with his kid-sized adamantium claws due to Grinchy candy withholding.

The only standout facet was that some of the candy was of the cheap variety, a la individual Starbursts, Dum Dum lollipops, and the small solo generic Reese's cups with the gold foil. This was offset by the fact that they gave it out in great amounts. Besides, in this economy, and in that neighborhood, we should have been (and were) happy to get anything.

Some of the trailers were decorated, and some weren't. I may have seen 5 pumpkins... not bad, until you remember that the park is next to a farm stand. Hay bales, corn stalks, scarecrows and various gourds were easily available 20 feet away. I suppose that if a poor neighborhood has to skimp somewhere, they should skimp on decor rather than candy.

Finally, and this is important.... Wareham residents are cool enough to hook up the Elders with a beer now and then. One must be properly fortified when taking the kids about. I even was offered a bong hit, but that doesn't really count because I knew the guy. Either way, my bibulous handouts are important to me, I'm the judge/author, and they factor into the analysis.

I wasn't 100% shocked by the results. I had no concrete reason to think that Wareham would fail to be rewarding. Nothing really jumped out about the candy to cancel the theory one of my friends put forth that "Everyone shops at Wal-Mart."

We were working against the clock, so Wolverine and I hopped into the Benz a bit after sunset, picked up Mommy, and hauled our candy asses up Route 3 into Duxbury.

Now, the wealthy don't have all the advantages when being stalked by a trick or treat posse with a purpose. For instance, wealthy people's houses are farther apart than trailer park homes are. We probably covered 10 trailers in the time it took us to walk up the driveway of the first house we hit on Washington Street. For Duxbury to shame Wareham, the candy-per-step ratio would have to be amazing.

Also, Duxbury residents may or may not have been aware that they were a part of an experiment. They also most likely don't share my view of their role as Giver in the Redistribution Of Wealth theory I was aiming for, as they were more likely to assume that whoever was knocking on the door in costume was just another wealthy person from a nearby neighborhood.

I use the ambiguity because Washington Street has a go-to rep among local trick or treaters, and the residents there may feel an urge towards overkill. We were among 200 or so people trick or treating Washington Street during the hours that we were operating... not too shabby for a town with 15000 people at about 45% elderly.

Here's Duxbury, in a few bullet points.

- There were probably 50-100 yards between houses, if you count the walkways and so forth.

- Every door was opened by a grandparent or a trophy wife. There was one Yummy Mommy at the end of Fort Hill Road who actually could have not handed out candy and just used "You got to look at me up close" as an egging deterrent argument.

- I didn't think that people still put bags of candy unguarded outside of their door with a "Take One Per Person, Please" sign on it. People in 4400 sq. ft bayfront houses do, however.

- People hand out the full size candy bars in Duxbury. Those rich folk gave it up smooth.

- Not only do you get the name brand goods, but you also get the more rare stuff... Caramellos, Hilliards, Pop Rocks, Fun Dip, Flake Bars and so forth. You know... the good sh*t.

- No one handed out money, but it happened a few times during my youth in that area.

- Many residents had the same variety bowl of candy that the Wareham folks did, probably most.

-  One house- and I swear I'm not making this up- had a video screen set up in front of the doorway. The homeowner was able to hide in the house and speak to us through the video screen, which showed a Grim Reaper sort of visage. The Reaper spoke whatever the homeowner said. He also had music going through a loudspeaker, which made his house sound like a nightclub from 100 yards away.

But wait...there's more.

He also set something up where horror film images were holographed onto the house itself, so you'd turn around and be facing a 15 foot Wicked Witch. To offset this, he had his daughter and MILF wife outside, distributing the actual candy.

I'd say he spent about $3500 or so on the electronics, and that may be a conservative estimate.

- Beers were not offered in Duxbury. This was not through rudeness. Every cop in Duxbury was on Washington Street, to the point where I would have been able to discharge firearms on other streets with total impunity had I chosen to do so. Public drinking was out of the question.

- People in Duxbury hand out toys, coloring books, Pez dispensers, crayons, toothbrushes, McDonald's coupons, cheap sunglasses and so forth.

Overall, I'd score them about equally candy-wise, with Duxbury enjoying a huge edge in decorations. Duxbury had enough people handing out full-sized candy bars to offset the greater distances between houses. Wareham people are giving enough by nature to offset the median household income differences.

Wolverine did ridiculously well. That bag of candy you see at the top of the article is what was left today, about five days after Halloween, after several sessions where the adults had at it, and after a children's birthday party. The goody bag was full enough that Wolverine was having trouble carrying it at the end of the session.

We'd have had more, but Wolverine likes lollipops. When offered a bowl full of large Snickers bars and lollipops, he'd grab 2 tiny lollipops instead. I actually had to intervene when he chose a Dum Dum pop over a full Milky Way bar... "He wants one of these, too."

I'm just happy that Trick or Treating hasn't faded away to oblivion like Christmas Carols or whatever. That day is probably coming, and the world will be less exciting when it happens.

Halloween Decorations, Part I 

Halloween Decorations Part II 

Halloween Decorations Part III

Halloween Displays, Part III

Yeah, that isn't a good start....

I told you that we had a lot of material, and here comes a pile of it.

We surveyed Facebook, got some leads, followed up on them, and here's what we came up with. We'll have a few more issues before Halloween plays itself out this Saturday night.

Be sure to check out Part One and Part Two, if you wish.

We ran from Rochester to Whitman and then back South through Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver and Plymouth.

We still have Duxbury and Cape Cod to go through. The weather cost us today and maybe tomorrow, and we may do Duxbury while we're trick-or-treating there.

Duxbury gets their own day, because we know a guy there who might be spending $5K on decorations, and we get full-size Snickers and so forth all up and down Washington Street.

The winds of today's storm may cost us our foliage hunting, which we will take up in earnest on November 1st. The South Coast and Cape Cod turn around then, anyhow.

Halloween is a pagan ritual, adopted by the Romans, modified to fit Christianity, imported from Europe and perfected by America.

Halloween celebrations were banned in colonial New England, as the Puritan forefathers weren't fans of pagan, superstitious celebrations. Halloween was the night before a solemn Holy day. Remember, these were people who frowned on Christmas, because it was too Church-like.

An influx of Irish immigrants helped popularize the Halloween traditions in America, and the traditions have held on to our present day.

It soon became primarily a children's holiday, although it is more of a children-of-all-ages thing.

No irony intended, I just had to shoot over a car.

America spent 6 billion dollars celebrating Halloween in 2010, and that was at the height of the Great Recession.  That ranks it 7th among money spent on American holidays, just behind Father's Day at #6 and way behind #1 Christmas at $130 billion.

There are more kids than fathers in America, but you can't handle Dad with two mini Kit Kat bars. You have to at least buy him a tie or something. That adds up.

Kids make it up at Christmas. It's a kid's world, we're just running it for them.

Most Popular Halloween Costumes, according to Google Trends and CNN:

#1, Harley Quinn

#2 Star Wars

#3 Superhero (Non Superman, Non Avenger...generic, Villain or Other, see #5,9,10)

#4 Pirate

#5 Batman

#6 Minnie Mouse

#7 Witch

#8 Minion

#9 Joker

#10 Wonder Woman

My Own Top 5 Halloween Shows/Movies/Stories

- It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

My personal favorite, also the source of the worst overdub video of all time.

- Halloween

I prefer the Carpenter one to the White Zombie one, but I am just one lonesome columnist.

- The Nightmare Before Christmas

I've never seen it, and I'm not sure this is even a  Halloween movie, but it seems to be everywhere, so we'll throw it up in the mix.

- The Fat Albert Halloween Special

The Cosby mansion is now the Worst Place To Trick Or Treat in Hollywood.

- The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

You can't deny the Headless Horseman his spot, he's sort of like Halloween's Santa Claus.

Films That Involve Halloween But Aren't Halloween Films

- To Kill A Mockingbird climaxes on Halloween, which is a sinister sentence to say about pre-teen Scout Finch.

- Arsenic And Old Lace has a Halloween wedding

- Regina steals Cady's BF at a Halloween party in Mean Girls

- The Exorcist, while not a Halloween film, was set in Halloween season.

- You know that Ernest Scared Stupid isn't set on Arbor Day, payer.

Worst Halloween Specials

- The Lou Grant Halloween Episode

- The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

- The Fall Guy "October The 32d" episode

- The Dukes Of Hazzard, "The Hazzardville Horror" episode

- The Smurfs, "The Legend Of Smurfy Hollow"

- Fraggle Rock, "The Terrible Tunnel."

We'll get a few more articles in before Halloween, thanks for checking us out!

Halloween Displays, Part II

Ain't no stoppin' us now! Cranberry County Magazine is driving through your town, photographing your yard... all in search of cool Halloween Displays! We don't ask, we take!

We posted Part One yesterday, and we'll be laying down the law all week, probably on the daily.

We questioned Facebook, and let the people dictate our travels. We covered a lot of ground, and here's some of what we found.

We caught this family in the act! Busted!

This family, in Plymouth, is unique in that we spoke to them before shooting. I generally avoid doing so. I'm a very large man, and I dress shabbily enough that generous people tell me that I look like a basketball coach... while others say that I look homeless. I'm not the guy you want to see walking into your yard, and I'd fully understand if someone shot me.

"That's the life, that I lead..."

Cranberry County Magazine will always be up in your spot. Jessica's very first article with me ended up with us being spoken to by a Detective, although that was pretty much 105% my fault. Hey, I thought Edaville Railroad was abandoned, like Rocky Point or Pripyat.... honest mistake, the detective understood fully.

I should never get out of the car, but sometimes I do.

No, we don't decorate our own yard. We have a pumpkin, and we may even carve it, but that's about it.

I have a pretty isolated house, not many people see it. No one in my neighborhood has had a trick-or-treater in the ten years I've lived here. I enjoy Halloween vicariously through creative people, just like you are doing right now.

I don't even take my own kid around the neighborhood, nor do any of the parents I see at the bus stop. I take my kid to a high-end neighborhood in Duxbury, where we aim for full-size candy bars. It works better than you'd think it would.

They may be on to me on Washington Street, however. We might have to try Shore Road in Chatham or Jerusalem Road in Cohasset this year.

Jessica, who is considerably smaller than I am, has already refused in advance and (forgive my Latin legalese) ad infinitum to wear a kid's costume and a mask to disguise her adult appearance and double our candy haul. I was kind of hoping for Sexy Nurse.

Also, if I am trick-or-treating with two kids, people will give me beer. Most suburban homeowners keep beer handy, and drop one on an adult herding around a sizable group of kids. A parent needs fortification on cold autumn nights.

Again, this strategy works better than you'd think it would.

Maybe things are different than when I was a kid. Maybe I got too big, and the decorations that scared me as a child now are like the 30" faux Stonehenge from Spinal Tap. Maybe I should blame shoddy Asian manufacturing.

It seemed like every house in Quincy in the 1970s was done up for Halloween. My 1980s hood in Duxbury was a bit less decorated, but that was also a highly isolated village that had maybe 20 people living in it after Labor Day.

It's the hyper-suburban forest/tree question... if you put a pumpkin or your steps and no one sees it, did you really decorate?

That's not a problem the people in the pictures you see today have, because Cranberry County Magazine cares enough to go out and document the fun.

Other things that I never encountered in the 1970s includes our aborted mission to the Pine Hills of Plymouth.

The Pine Hills looked tremendous on paper. Nice houses, rich people, and the sheer size of the place means that there must be a ton of kids. Of course it was going to be decorated.

We paused outside the entrance. We only had a little sunlight left to work with. The question that was stopping us... would a place like that have restrictions on decorations?

Time is money, daylight was wastin', and we didn't have any leads in that neighborhood. We headed inland, to the house with the spooky statues in the yard.

We weren't at Versailles, either.

Don't get me wrong, it was a sweet house, just maybe not statue-sweet. I'm pretty sure that this was Middleboro.

Middle Bro has some cool 1800s houses, and is spooky in her own right, but this yard was trippin' balls. I'd hate to go there at night, and would probably refuse to enter the yard unless they were handing out Kit-Kats or something yummy.

I'm lucky that I don't take LSD anymore, because this house would have broken me if I had been Walking With The King.

This is the most ostentatious flowerpot that I have ever seen. I think that may be Atlas.

The ladder implies that this house isn't finished yet, always a plus mark in the Hardcore category.

We sort of ran three trips so far. We did a Weymouth-Hingham-Norwell-Hanover run that started too late and was interrupted by a nice dinner at Wahlburgers.

The next day, we worked Plymouth, Kingston, Plympton and Halifax.

Yesterday, we finished Halifax after going through Rochester, Carver, Bridgewater and both parts of Whitman/Hanson.

Our two big remaining trips- and this is both weather and auto permitting- are Duxbury and Cape Cod. I may run a Bourne-Wareham trip today if I can sneak away from the Ol' Ball & Chain.

Stay Spooky!

South Shore Foliage, 10/21/15

We rolled out with monster truck force all over the South Shore's interior as we tracked down the places that have already turned over. This is East Monponsett Lake, in Halifax.

This part of Massachusetts (Plympton, Route 106) gets some cool foliage. It just tends to be worked into the proverbial Sea Of Green. No, I have no idea why one tree is orange and every other one is green, that's between you and Mother Nature. I just click the camera and write the captions, friend.

You don't get those Vermont calendar pictures in Duxbury. I have no mountains to look down from, and too many pine trees. At times, I'm reduced to shooting at branches on a single tree.

We were gonna shoot video, but..well, trees don't really do that much. We were ready to turn the video on if a Sasquatch walked out of a South Halifax forest.

Kingston got some licks in, especially in the Jones River Reservoir area off Route 80. We started in Duxbury, then went into Kingston. We essentially flipped a coin as to left or right onto Rout 80, we went right and found this about 100 yards later.

If you take your glasses off, it looks like a tree fire. I should have rolled a smoke bomb under that, or maybe even exhaled a fat hit into the picture just before I clicked.

We got a cloudy day for Rural Exploration, but there was no wind, so we got some sweet lake-reflection shots.

We have mobile photography capabilities, they even come out sometimes.

With Monponsett Lake(s), we're in there like swimwear.

We're just warming up, so we have plenty of more work to do. We may still expand our reach up into the Athol/Ashburnham corridor, they're peaking right now.

We will also be all over the South Coast, South Shore, and Cape Cod. You know were good like that.