Speaking of ... PingRay's Issue 2

THE NET HEARTS HALLOWEEN

In America, holidays have their essential foods…and their essential media.

New Year’s Eve, for example. Essential food: champagne. Essential media: television. It’s hard to even imagine this holiday prior to the time when you could watch the ball drop from Times Square, live...as…it…happened. (Of course, the experience must seem multidimensional for those living outside the Eastern U.S. time zone.)

Christmas, of course, has many essential foods, but at least one essential media: movies. (Sorry, but we’re at a loss for similar media for either Channukah or Kwanzaa…plenty of foods, though.) Can you anymore imagine Christmas without “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Miracle on 34^th Street,” than you could imagine it without eggnog? We can’t.

For Thanksgiving…duh…the turkey is king. And the media is, well, cookbooks. This holiday requires printed recipes as much as drumsticks.

And a July 4^th without a radio blaring at a cookout is as unthinkable as one without hot dogs or hamburgers.

Which brings us to the holiday at hand, Halloween.  (See PingRay’s Issue 2.)

Halloween food: so many to choose from, but let’s start with candied apples…plus, of course, every kind of candy the world has ever known.

The most essential Halloween media? Ok, let’s look at the essentials of Halloween:

Participants don masks of characters they’ve always wanted to try out for fun … often going from portal to portal looking for free goodies… and escaping, for a while, from what can only be called “the real world.”

Sound like any media you know?

The Net is already teeming with Halloween things…masks and stories and special “haunted” sites…but, arguably… the same is true for other holidays.

The difference, we suggest, is that all those broadband avatars and video blogs and serial podcasts and interface skins and massively multiplayer online role-playing games and morphing programs and transmitting video phones are making Halloween-like behavior…looking for treats, creating live stories in alternate worlds, “dressing-up” as someone you’d like to be…more and more abundant on the Net.

Broadband, and the need to dress up, are enabling parts of the Net to become a fulltime Halloween party.

Or, to paraphrase the best Internet cartoon ever:

On Halloween…as on the Net… nobody knows you’re a dog.

Comments

[Cindy]

Has anyone figured out the music room in the scavenger hunt? I have most of the rest of it solved, but can't figure out that room.

[carletta]

Hi.
In the music room you click on the piano.The instruments will go in a pattern.Click on the instruments to repeat the pattern. Keep doing that until you've won that music game and you will get a surprise....