“Fright night just got a little bit spookier. Pregnant women have their own little trick on Halloween – they seem able to time the delivery of their baby to avoid giving birth on this day.

Rebecca Levy at Yale School of Public Health and colleagues examined 1.8 million US birth records from 1996 to 2006, and found that birth rates dropped by 11.3 per cent on 31 October, when compared with the two-week window surrounding the date. The significant declines in deliveries on Halloween applied to natural births as well as scheduled caesarean and induced births….

Levy suggests that Halloween’s associations with death and evil are in direct contrast with the idea of creating life and may subconsciously affect a woman’s desire to give birth.” (via New Scientist).

Related:

• Are pregnant women refusing to give birth on Halloween? [Pregnancy] (io9.com)
• Do women avoid giving birth on Halloween? (hotair.com)
• Well Blog: Really? The Claim: Holidays Can Affect When Expectant Mothers Deliver (well.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Women Defy Biology to Not Give Birth on Halloween (neatorama.com)
• Move Halloween From October 31st To Last Saturday Of Month? “Today’s Stupid News, In Brief.” [10/26/11] (wirk.radio.com)

Mind Hacks pointed me to this fascinating article from the current issue of The Psychologist, which explores the psychology of horror, why we like to be scared, and whether a greater psychological understanding could even guide horror writers and directors into even scarier territory. I would welcome that, as long as my cardiovascular health can tolerate being frightened out of my wits. I have always been a fan of horror films and relished the feeling of the eerie, but it has been a long time since I have been truly, disquietingly, scared by a movie-viewing experience.

Related:

• Can’t Look Away: The Lure of Horror Film Exhibit Opens October 2nd in Seattle (dreadcentral.com)
• What Makes A Good Horror Movie? (somethinsomethin.wordpress.com)
• Why I Write Horror (hoomahmoos.wordpress.com)
• Horror Flicks Done Right – The Asian Way (seesuestitch.wordpress.com)
• This Your Brain On Horror (pinkbananaworld.com)
• The best horror seldom pounces (gregoryhamel.net)

This is from a Padre Island sand-castle sculpting contest. The artist, Carl Jara writes, “Calavera del Toro… depicts Occupy Wall Street in a Day of the Dead satire. Created last weekend at Sand Castle Days in South Padre Island, Texas. A banker and a politician sit comfortably toasting their overflowing champagne flutes to the skull of their recently slain Wall Street bull, draped in a Golden Parachute.” (via Flickr, with thanks to Boing Boing)

“This 2009 video shows off a curiously effective Hallowe’en prank: the pranksters dressed a child-sized mannequin in a skeleton costume, then posed it, holding a candy-bag, in front of houses, rang the bell and ran off. The homeowners opened their door to find a silent, staring, motionless, costumed “child” — creepily clever. ” (via Boing Boing).

When Maryland educator and artist  Hasan Elahi was erroneously flagged as a would-be terrorist and investigated by the FBI, he decided to cooperate and given them all the information they needed to clear himself… and more, much much more. He found that overwhelming them with irrelevant meticulous edtail about your life protects your privacy as well as trying to hide. It sort of reminds me of what some people did to resist the draft in the ’70’s, trying to paralyze and overwhelm the system by sending tons of data, or even bricks, for inclusion in their Selective Service files. Elahi conceived of it as an art project, and more:

 

“What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.” 

(via NYTimes)

Related:

• Helping the FBI Track You (yro.slashdot.org)
• Color Me Unprivileged – Color Me Patriot Acted (thevigilantlens.com)
• Flipping the Script on the FBI With 45,000+ Pieces of Digital Art (mashable.com)

Hilarious Straight Dope column from Cecil Adams.Read to the bottom for one manufacturer’s application instructions. Has any of my readers run across a merkin before? (I had not.) Perhaps you would care to share your experience in the comments? :-P

Related:

Famous merkins on screen