it's not just grumpy old fartness, i swear

So i'm seeing more and more links on LJ which include Snap Shots. These serve no discernible purpose other than bling. It's not like the preview you get of the page in question is readable, or is going to make any difference in whether or not you click the link. In fact, i find they slow me down, because they make me pause before clicking a link i was going to use.

[Poll #1081038]

halloween classism

We didn't get any trick-or-treaters. Which is kind of odd, because i saw several going to the landlord's door right next to ours. There's a couple of things possibly going on there: either the people in the neighborhood already don't like us (not that we've done anything to them good or bad, but we're just weird - and a woman-woman couple to boot - and we're kind of used to being shunned for no reason), or people are only going to houses of the people they know.

Oh, there's a third reason - most of the trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood may have already been done by the time we got home yesterday. There was a big discussion in b0st0n about this, about trick-or-treaters who make the rounds before dark. It's a break from the way it used to be done, and i have some suspicion about why: bogeyman hysteria.

I read a news piece yesterday about a town somewhere that rounded up all their registered sex offenders and forced them to sit under lockdown from 5 to 10 PM. All well and good (i'm not terribly sympathetic) but it bears repeating that the bogeyman hysteria overlooks the real problem of child abuse: that the great majority of it is done by family members, friends, or authority figures the child already knows.

But this trick-or-treating before dark thing shuts out every family who doesn't have a stay-at-home parent. Because who can leave work early for something so frivolous? I saw many kids already out in costume during my commute home. My fondness for Watertown (where the average household income is almost double ours) is starting to crumble because of the classist elitism we encounter all the time, in our neighborhood and at the child's school.