Most years, friends of mine have pumpkin carving parties. This year, the economy sucks so hard that spending a bunch of dough on squash abuse seems profligate. So I’ve been getting my jack o’lantern fix from the internet and photos of Halloweens past.

The Pumpkin Lady posts, in addition to her premium templates, free pumpkin carving templates. I admit that watching her pumpkin carving videos is not the same as the real thing, but it is still fun.

One of the supermarkets near me hasn’t been selling their pumpkins at all this year. I so deeply want to buy like a zillion of them, when they are marked down on November 1, and have Halloween late this year. And I just might get me and my unsavory pals some pumpkin carving template designs from Pumpkin Lady and do just that. If every day is Halloween anyway, that is really just taking it one step farther. Whoo-hoo! Pushing the envelope!

If you live on the West Coast like me, it is not too late to get free ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s today. Southern California has been having a crazy heatwave. I confess to worshiping at the alter of frosty central air conditioning, but I had to leave the house yesterday to get espresso beans for iced lattes and was stunned at how fast it has gone from chilly to insanely hot this year.

I guess this is the part where I should probably deconstruct the ways in which all strata of counterculture are marketed to disingenuously most of the time. I could talk about how people think there are these two hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield who built an ice cream empire subsisting on a shoe-string budget, making strongly flavored ice cream according to their own personal quirky stoner tastes, and serving it in an old gas station. I could talk about the ferocious rivalry between Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs and how Häagen-Dazs attempted to keep Ben and Jerry’s out of their distribution channels and Ben and Jerry’s repeatedly sued Häagen-Dazs and started a whole PR campaign with the slogan, “What’s the Doughboy afraid of?” If you are wondering where that slogan came from, the answer is that Häagen-Dazs is owned by Pillsbury, or at least was at the time, and Ben and Jerry’s was this indie force fighting The Man. Of course, Ben and Jerry’s sold to Unilever in 2000. The multi-billion dollar Unilever is the largest ice cream manufacturer in the world and owns, not only Ben and Jerry’s, but also Breyers, Popsicle, Slim Fast, Klondike, and dozens of European subs of Heartbrand. Hippie Ben and Jerry’s now are to corporate ice cream what marketing tool female mascots are to corporate so-called “altporn”, in that they make public appearances and do the occasional press junket, but it’s just for show and they don’t actually have any, ya know, business role in the company. Oops, I digress. I mean, FREE ICE CREAM!

The original founder’s of Ben and Jerry’s purportedly marked their first anniversary of struggling to stay in business by giving away free ice cream cones for a day. Today the company turns thirty-one years old and almost all Ben and Jerry’s locations are giving away free cones. I’m guessing they really have celebrated their important anniversaries by giving away free ice cream cones.

So, really, the point here is just a public service announcement: free ice cream, free ice cream, free ice cream!

Okay, I’d like to take this opportunity to make a public service announcement. Trent Reznor announced that he was giving away free downloads of his new Strobelight album, produced by Timbaland, on April first. This seemed both hilarious and topical as Blue Blood has covered goth-industrial music since 1992 and even the Blue Blood precursor BLT ::: Black Leather Times had press coverage in that vein.

Although the email collection form on the Nine Inch Nails site did not request any financial information, NIN.com did bear the statement, “Your credit card will be charged $18.98 plus a $10 digital delivery convenience fee.” Apparently there are a lot of savvy consumers out there because, after we posted the feature and told Blue Blood’s sixty thousand close personal MySpace friends about the NIN article and opportunity for the download, we were deluged with messages and emails from angry consumers.

It seems that a lot of you are able to figure out from the fine print that you may not be getting a free lunch. You are apparently not capable, however, of reading a calendar. Allow me to repeat my previous statement with needed emphasis: Trent Reznor announced that he was giving away free downloads of his new Strobelight album, produced by Timbaland, on April first. The Strobelight album download announcement was an April Fool’s joke and I thought it was an awfully witty one, particularly when you read through the track listing.

You know how you are clever enough not to be sold on a refreshing and tasty beverage by some slick television commercial with hot chicks in it? And you know how this means that the beverage industry has sent a fleet of hot chicks out to bars to pretend they like you while telling you they totally love Bacardi or Red Bull or whatever? Or did you think you suddenly turned into more of a chick magnet, like it used to be that gothic and punk girls loved you, but now trim blondes seem like they crave your dick and it is awesome. Although you have yet to close with one.

Basically, my comment on this is that sometimes, when you try to hard to be a savvy consumer, you miss the actual joke. Please stop sending me hate mail over your inaccurately perceived concerns about Trent Reznor’s fictional album release. It’s a joke, an April Fool’s prank. Trent Reznor’s comment on this is, “I may have to actually write “pussygrinder”! Anybody have Sheryl Crow’s #?”

Trent Reznor announced today that his whole new album Strobelight is available for download on the Nine Inch Nails web site. The following song list contains a who’s who of people who guest on other people’s tracks.

track list:

1. intro skit
2. everybody’s doing it (featuring chris martin, jay-z AND bono)
3. black t-shirt
4. pussygrinder (featuring sheryl crow)
5. coffin on the dancefloor
6. this rhythm is infected
7. slide to the dark side
8. even closer (featuring justin timberlake and maynard james keenan)
9. on the list (she’s not)
10. clap trap crack slap
11. laid, paid and played (featuring fergie of the black eyed peas and al jourgensen)
12. feel like being dead again
13. still hurts (featuring alicia keys)
14. outro skit

Here are the instructions from the NIN site to get your absolutely free free free goth-industrial album via download, before it is available anywhere else:

“To download NIN’s new full-length album Strobe Light, PRODUCED BY TIMBALAND, enter a valid email address . . . A download link will be sent to you immediately. Your credit card will be charged $18.98 plus a $10 digital delivery convenience fee. Your files will arrive as windows media files playable on quite a few players with your name embedded all over them just in case you lose them. You will also receive an exclusive photo and a free email account with our partner Google’s Gmail service.

Your email will be kept confidential and will not be used for spam, unless we can make some money selling it.”

So, per Trent Reznor, those are the sweet sweet terms you can get today for your very own free download of the new NIN Strobelight. After initially checking it out, I think “on the list (she’s not)” is my favorite little ditty, but let me know which you all enjoy most.

The $1 BlueBlood.com sale is going to be coming to a close in just a few days.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama and the new administration, the world expects the economy to pick up. He could do nothing different and people’s expectations would help the economy. So much of how paper and digital money works has to do with trust and faith.

So we have faith that, pretty soon, everyone is going to be able to afford more than $1 for a BlueBlood VIP membership. There has never been a Blue Blood sale this discounted before, and there very likely never will be again, and this one is almost over.

The site currently featuring tens of thousands of photographs of 387 hotties and counting. From punks who like to smash things to ethereal gothic beauties to fetish deities, Blue Blood features the most stunningly and uniquely beautiful. A battalion of coffee table book and nightclub photographers have contributed to BlueBlood.com. Not to mention erotic fiction from some of the top names in genre writing and just a dab of video. The BlueBlood.com megasite offers excellent value with all the content from the multigirl gothic, punk, and rubber subsidiary sites produced by Blue Blood, as well as the world famous signature couples content, and the erotic fandom science fiction and fantasy content. And your BlueBlood VIP memberships pay to keep BlueBlood.net free.

And right now, you can check all that out for one dollar. Channel your inner Bixby Snyder and say, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” (Robocop references optional.)

So I just got back from voting. I went to the polling place where I voted in the primaries and I wasn’t on the roster. They gave me a provisional ballot, but I find those things alarming. They also gave me a slip of paper with a list of phone numbers to call to find out what was up with my voter registration. I thought that perhaps my polling place had been changed to my work address from my home address or something like that. Basically, I did not want to submit a provisional ballot, if I could drive across town to another polling place and do a normal one.

The poll workers told me that I did not need to call because my vote would absolutely, definitely, no-question be counted. I called the registrar election day number anyway. A nice woman named Karen went over everything and told me that actually she couldn’t find me in the voter rolls. She gave me a more official State of California Registrar of Voters number to call and told me I should definitely call next week to get it all straight, but that it was doubtful I’d get through calling today.

I was literally shaking at the idea that my vote might not count, so I was going to be sitting in front of the polling place, with one eye on my ballot inside and the other on my finger hitting redial on my Blackberry, until I got through. There was no cell phone reception inside the polling place and it is illegal to remove the ballot from the polling location. Happily, the voice prompts and wait time for the California number were user-friendly and pretty prompt, given that it is election day.

Another nice woman named Whitney helped me this time and she told me that actually I was not currently active in the voter rolls because my registration was flagged for lack of birth location. I had changed something minor on my registration before the primaries, so there was a recent registration form, even though I’ve been voting in the same district for approximately eight years. I actually voted at the same polling place in the primary, but, at that time, they had not processed the new info on my new registration. Of course, I did fill out my birthplace when I registered again, but I was born overseas to American parents, so it is probably that whoever was doing the data entry just did not feel like looking up how to enter a European birth. At any rate, Whitney updated my information and activated my voter registration.

The significant thing here is that, because my registration had been flagged, my vote would not have been counted, if I had not gotten through to the registrar. So, for those of you with the polls still open, please call your local voting registrar, if there is anything off about the way you are or are not listed in the voter rolls. The poll workers will assure you that your vote will be counted, but it may take a little extra effort on your part for that to be true. Please make it.

As a bonus, lots of American businesses are offering presents for those who vote. Here are a few links to free stuff for Americans who perform their civic responsibility:

Ben & Jerry’s will give voters a free scoop of ice cream today between 5pm and 8pm. Krispy Kreme will give those with I Voted stickers a free star-shaped doughnut today. And from now until November 11, Babeland will give those with proof of having voted a free sex toy. Starbucks is giving away a free brewed coffee to anyone who tells them they voted. I don’t think they are requiring proof, like the other vendors, so I guess you can just claim to have voted there, but you really should vote and they do have a kind of inspirational commercial.

I’m going to be honest and say I love coffee, but I love an iced latte with organic non-dairy milk and artisan-roasted gourmet beans. The ice cream site has a nifty store locator feature right on the election promo page, but the nearest location is in the Valley and I’m in Hollywood. Also, I remember when everyone was excited that they opened one of those ice cream shoppes near my college and I found their ice cream overly sweet. One of my neighbors owns a doughnut shop across the street from where I live, so, if I feel like eating high carb and high glycemic index, I think I’ll just give him the few cents a doughnut costs. A sex toy seems like a better gift, but I get tons of cool sex toys free for product placements and reviews as is. So none of the free stuff is really jumping out at me.

I voted because it matters to me as a patriotic American to vote, because it is my responsibility as a citizen. And I did the follow-up necessary to make sure my vote would be counted for the same reason. I voted.