Happy November, folks, and here's hoping that everyone had a safe and happy Halloween. Ours was just dandy, what with the carving of gourdlike things (no tracing, no pencils-- freehand with a Ginsu), the festive masquerading as other gourdlike things, the baking of cookies shaped and colored like still more gourdlike things, the distribution of foodstuffs of dubious nutritional value to costumed munchkins going door-to-door with vague threats of vandalism, the unbridled joy of hitting up the neighbors for sugar with the exact same threats, the traditional chainsaw-to-the-car at the house of that guy down the block who had the nerve to be handing out apples and trial-size packs of dental floss, etc. Ah, it's truly a magical time of year.

AtAT production and this annoying little thing called Real Life conspire to suck up our time at a frankly ridiculous pace, so our costume preparation tends to be strictly of the "will that be cash or charge?" variety, but luckily, there are plenty of people out there with waaaaaay too much free time on their hands making Halloween far more interesting for the rest of us. Case in point: faithful viewer Howard Martin tipped us off to the iPod costume of a college student named Jared Winick. Jared, you see, evidently decided that simply building an oversized iPod and wearing it would be the act of a quitter; obviously any halfway-decent iPod costume would have to function like its tune-blasting inspiration, at least to some degree. In other words, that puppy's gotta play some music, or it's no better than a bedsheet with eye-holes cut out of it.

So here's what Jared did: he used a Tablet PC (shudder) as the giant iPod's screen and wrote some Java software that plays MP3s and mimics the actual screen readout of an iPod while it does so. He then ripped a USB mouse into shreds and soldered the innards back into the costume under the Click Wheel to enable the previous track, next track, and play/pause buttons. Then he just added a pair of battery-powered speakers, and voilà: an iPod costume fit for a king. Well, okay, maybe not an actual king, since the scroll wheel itself doesn't work and the costume lacks giant earbuds made out of jumbo corn muffins spray-painted white, but it's definitely at least good enough for some sort of baron or something. It was also good enough for Jared to win first place in a costume contest he entered, in which his creation beat out a very passable Mr. T (well, except that he isn't black) and a St. Pauli Girl whose cleavage alone might otherwise have clinched the top spot.

So there you have it, the best on-topic Halloween costume we've seen in this or any other year. Perhaps the most surprising piece of news to come out of this whole inspirational tale of boredom-meets-geekdom, though, is this: Jared actually found a real, honest-to-goodness use for a Tablet PC. No doubt Microsoft has been alerted, and is already madly scrambling to launch an all-new marketing campaign touting Tablet PC technology as "Perfect for Making Partially-Functional iPod Costumes." Analysts predict that, as a direct result of the campaign, unit sales will increase by approximately two. But not until next Halloween.