Money can be an intense motivator, and in the film Catch Me if You Can (directed by Steven Spielberg) Frank Abagnale Jr. learns some very illegal ways to make an amazing living. The story is set in the early sixties and begins with the usual happy family scenario. Frank Abagnale Sr. has a good job and at a banquet he makes a speech about two small mice falling into a bucket of cream. He describes how one of the mice drown, but the other one struggled so hard that he eventually churned the cream in the bucket to butter and walked out. Frank Sr. was a hardworking man who got to where he was as a direct result of his efforts. Unfortunately, he also wasn’t the most honest man either and the bank takes their home due to tax fraud.

The real Frank at age 16, posing with a stewardess.

Frank Jr. then begins to see his family fall apart. His mother us unhappy with the new situation and takes one of his father’s friends as a lover. Eventually his parents get divorced, and they sit him down at a table with a lawyer and ask him to choose which parent he wants to live with. Unable to make the decision, he runs away from home. After he runs out of money he begins writing bad checks that always bounce. He stumbles into a situation where he is given a good idea; that he could easily make a lot of money by impersonating an airline pilot. He had impersonated a substitute French teacher in school and taught the class (making lesson plans, and even scheduling a field trip) for a full week before anyone caught on, so why not be a pilot?

Frank goes through with his plan and becomes a guy in a airline pilot uniform, though he never actually flies a plane. Throughout the movie he manages to also impersonate a doctor and legitimately pass the bar exam to become a lawyer, all while being chased by the FBI. The most interesting bit of information about this movie is that heavily based on the real life accomplishments of a man by the same name; and he did it all before his eighteenth birthday.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow

Surfer

So you live in a place with a coast, and you love the beach, the ocean, the waves and all of the activities that go with. Why not channel that love into your Halloween costume this year and be a beach babe/stud in a beach costume? This costume will be the cheapest you’ve ever done, but conversely might be the most work. Generally, everyone already owns a bathing suit, so the actual costume part will be pretty simple; just get it out of your drawer or closet and put it on. However, if you’re not exactly sure that you have the confidence to go to a Halloween party in just your bathing suit, then a trip to the gym might be in order (that’s where the work would come in). You could always go buy a wetsuit, and bring a boogie board or surfboard with you, and that eliminates the trouble of toning up those few troublesome zones on your body in time for the holiday, and gives you the added edge of being a surfer, instead of just a ‘beach go-er’. But you could be a surfer in swim trunks or a bikini as well. It’s all up to you and what you’re comfortable with.

If you’re like me, and you live in a place where the beaches get a lot of tourism, your friends might get a kick out of seeing you dressed as a “tourist beach go-er”. It would be a great funny costume to do, especially since so many of us that live here originally moved from other states when they were kids, technically we were all tourists once. You could get white face paint to simulate sunscreen that never soaked in, and smear it on your nose and on your cheeks under your eyes. Big baggy shorts are a must, as well as a novelty baseball cap for the state/city that you live in, a brightly colored fanny pack around your hips would be a big indicator of what you were trying to achieve. As for a top, wife beaters for the men and camisole-type bathing suit tops for the women. You could even have a little fun with red makeup to simulate a really bad sunburn.

Sasquatch, Bigfoot, yeti, skunk ape, and the abominable snowman are all similar creatures. They appear to be much larger than an average man, covered in hair (whether it be varying shades or brown or pure snow white), bi-pedal, and are incredibly elusive. These creatures of course, area all cryptids. Meaning that according to cryptozoologists they have yet to be recorded by the scientific community as a species, and to the scientific community they are ‘the stuff of fairy tales’. The Lochness monster, chupacabra, and other beasts fall into this community as well.

bigfoot

The skunk ape is native to the Florida everglades and was named as such by the claim that when one is near, it smells to the witness like a skunk; and skunks simply do not live in those swampy areas. The yeti mainly ‘exists’ in the cold mountain regions of Nepal, Tibet, China, and India. While bigfoot and sasquatch sightings tend to occur in the pacific northwest region of north America. Various people have sighted these creatures hundreds of times while hunting, camping, or just going through a stroll in the woods. Some claim to have seen them crossing roads, while others have only found tracks and what they claim to be hair from the creatures themselves. One woman claims that she befriended a group of them, and that they could speak English and showed her once how they hunt for meals. She was apparently very disturbed by the way they gutted the animal with their hands before eating it.

Information about these creatures is recorded in folklore around the globe, and in the united states missionaries were told of giants that lived in the mountains by the native Americans as early as 1840. But the sighting that caused the most stir happened in 1967 when a group of men filmed a sasquatch walking through a clearing in the woods. (watch it here.) Years later one of the men came forward and claimed that it had been himself, wearing a suit. But many cryptozoologists have spent hundreds of hours reviewing the tape and are not ready to believe that explanation.

Whether they are real or not, if you choose to go camping in that area for whatever the reason, be sure to keep on guard. You never know what you might run into.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow