In Germany, police detain a man with a python in his pants. Meanwhile, 400 miles south in the Austrian Alps…

By opting for two burgers rather than one with a side of fries, “you’re nearly doubling your protein intake while reducing the amount of fat and carbs you’re eating,” a trick that “could help steady your blood sugar levels.” So…eating two burgers in one sitting is…good for you? Yes. Yes, it is. #science

“The fact is,” write Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson, “contemporary architecture gives most regular humans the heebie-jeebies.”

Taking a gander at Chopin’s pickled heart: “With a feeling of mystery hanging in the air, they worked in total concentration, mostly whispering, as they removed the heart from its resting place and carried out the inspection—taking more than 1,000 photos and adding hot wax to the jar’s seal to prevent evaporation.”

This must be why I excel at Trivial Pursuit.

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“What you take away from standing in front of the dark, musty expanse is what you bring to it.” And what, pray tell, is this dark, musty expanse? Just “an otherwise empty, white, second-floor thirty-six-hundred-square-foot loft filled with 140 tons of dirt.”

It’s Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room. It was meant to last three months. It turns forty this year.

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If you’re looking to watch a scary movie on Halloween but are unsure where to start, there’s no shortage of advice on the Internet. The thing is, though, it’s mostly nonsense. My advice, on the other hand, is not only trustworthy but also correct. Which is why you should pay very close attention to Aaron’s Top 10 Scary Movies of All Time™.

Note that I didn’t say scariest movies of all time. That would be something entirely different. No, these are, for various and sundry reasons, the best movies that could—somewhat arguably, in some cases—be placed within the horror genre.

So here it is: the only list you need. (I’ve organized them by release date because, quite honestly, which is best depends on my mood at the time.)

The Wicker Man (1973)
Don’t Look Now (1973)
The Exorcist (1973)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Halloween (1978)
Alien (1979)
The Changeling (1980)
The Shining (1980)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

What did I miss? (Nothing, obviously. But feel free to add your own in the comments.)

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Entering the 17th and final race of the 1997 FIA Formula One World Championship, held October 26 at Jerez, Spain, Jacques Villeneuve, in only his second year in F1, was trailing Ferrari driver and two-time world champion Michael Schumacher by one point. Schumacher, of course, went on to become the greatest the sport has ever known, but this day—and the season—belonged to Villeneuve. Watch him as he recounts his dramatic, title-winning performance.

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Everything about Rachel Toor’s column in Saturday’s Spokesman-Review is absolutely spot-on.

Well…almost everything.

Toward the end she writes, “As a professor, I’ve learned no longer to be shocked…”

Anything seem off about that? What if it were “As a professor, I’ve learned to no longer be shocked…”?

I’m not sure whether Toor chose the former construction so as to avoid splitting the infinitive—doubtful—or whether it just sounds better to her ear. Or heck, maybe it’s legit and I’m just not smart enough to know it. (FYI: You’ll never lose money betting on the Aaron-is-an-idiot side.)

Doesn’t really matter, though, because two sentences later she gives us “Writing well is hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.” Forget everything else in the column. If just one person I know reads that line and remembers it, Ms. Toor deserves to be canonized.

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Based on this interactive map from the good folks at candystore.com, Utah is a terrible place to spend your childhood. (Though, to be honest, I’m not sure we should trust anyone whose ranking of Halloween candies is as fundamentally flawed as theirs.)

“Look, anybody can write a book,” says Jason Raish. “That’s not the same as saying it’s easy, only that writing is the one truly democratic medium because the use of a language as craft is available to all who speak it.” It’s also not the same as saying that anybody should write a book. Consider the unholy mess that is Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks…

If anyone out there reading this would like to compensate yours truly for the hard work I do, day in and day out, to provide you not only with what you need to know but also what to think about it, this would be a good place to start. Pretty sure it’s tax-deductible.

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Back in 2001 when I was writing music criticism for the Local Planet, my editor gave me a copy of Spiritualized’s Let It Come Down. He didn’t necessarily want me to review it; he just wanted to know what I thought. If I remember right, I ended up including the album in my year-end best-of list. (Trying to be clever, I wrote something about how it sounded like a cross between 1970s-era Pink Floyd and the Hezekiah Walker Love Fellowship Choir. It really doesn’t.)

I still have that CD—and a whole lot more from Spiritualized that I’ve picked up in the years since. And while I wholeheartedly recommend Let It Come Down, I’d rather you started with the band’s 1997 masterpiece: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. Pitchfork does a nice job explaining why:

Bolder than the term Britpop might suggest, more focused than the term psychedelic might imply, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the great triumphs of the 70-plus-minute CD era. Alternately chaotic and meticulous, thundering and quivering, Ladies and Gentlemen finds power in conflict—between restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, and ultimately, love and hate.

For some reason I dusted the album off yesterday (figuratively, of course, since it’s in my iTunes) and gave it a listen. Then I listened to it again. And then a third time after that. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it’s this crazy mixed-up world in which we live, maybe it was just the mood I was in. Who knows? Either way, damn. It really is that good.

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“Fears are growing in Sweden over packs of radioactive wild boar moving north, ravaging forests and farmland.”

We should probably just go ahead and ban pumpkin spice.

The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press is “something like a top-of-the-line Canon camera: it’s wonderful, but most people will still just use their phone.”

“People in their 20s and 30s…are ‘constantly striving for individualism’, which is reflected in what they spend their money on.” Naturally, then, we now have “hackable furniture.”

Here are the 70 best horror movies on Netflix right now, according to Paste. Since number 68 is Zombeavers—which is about “toxic waste-spawned zombie beavers”—I have no doubt whatsoever that the list is totally legit.

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