No doubt you're gearing up for the series of fall harvest festivals, fairs, and carnivals that roll around annually as summer exeunts.

Some of my favorite activities and possibilities present themselves during these times.

How about a new idea: bobbing for pumpkins!

This concept comes from an incident when I was a youngster and my jaws locked around a giant apple during a bobbing competition at an elementary school Halloween party. There I was: cute as a button, dressed as a pirate in one of those cheesecloth Ben Cooper costumes, my plastic mask shoved back atop my head, and I took such a huge bite into the fruit - that I couldn't expand the radius of my jaw even one millimeter more to release the apple! I was stuck!

This is one of my earliest and most horrific memories because the school custodian had to use a four-foot compost fork to knock my front teeth out before I could be saved.

Not really, of course.

He just delicately sawed a wedge out of the center of the apple and then the whole substructure of the fruit collapsed and I was free. Or something like that. The incident was so traumatizing that I don't actually remember anything that happened - for the next two years.

I think I learned from it, though, which is why pumpkin bobbing might be a good thing for small children. Just get some of those softball-sized pumpkins and let the little folk get their jaws stuck and Lord, won't we laugh as the terrified toddlers race around the yard in a panic, nostrils flaring like bulls as they struggle to breathe behind the shiny orange gourds! Ha Ha! Tender autumn fun!

Another cool thing is to go see has-been country artists at county fairs. Nothing quite says despair like the posture of a one-time platinum singer like, oh, Red Snapper, as he warbles cobwebbed hits from yesteryear while extra-large fair-going couples, each mindlessly sucking on a Marlboro and gnawing on a sausage on a stick, stand in front of the rickety stage and try to remember who Red is - or was.

The final insult is when Red finishes his “encore” and heads at top speed for the stocked beer cooler on his rusty tour bus - only to discover the damned thing was accidentally towed off as part of a tractor pull competition.

Oh, and one more thing I like: Shopping for the seasonal candles and landscaping décor. Nothing says the season quite like having a large wax candle appropriately scented: “Trick or Treat” smells like caramel, “Autumn Leaves” smells oddly like pumpkin and then there's “Harvest,” which smells like pumpkin. Plus, you buy corn stalks and hay bales and pumpkins and several multi-colored cobs of Indian corn and place them around your yard and porch.

Then, based on these pagan arrangements, you wait for Gov. Palin supporters to identify your house as obvious headquarters for a witch's coven and burn it to its God-less foundation.

This Is The Opinion Of Rick Koster.

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