I think of Halloween as more a time for kids to put on masks and play “trick or treat” but many adults also get into the spirit quite seriously. It’s the one night of the year that anything goes when it comes to “putting on a mask” or sometimes actually taking off a mask.

I’m reminded of a former coworker who looked forward to Halloween so he and his friends could spend hours getting themselves ready to venture into the outside world as the beautiful women they wished they were. He showed me photos of himself, dressed in a long gown, his make-up applied by a friend’s mother. He was a gorgeous female! Sadly, there were so few people within his world who understood the woman living inside him. In the early ’60s, ”coming out” wasn’t an option if he wanted to keep his job. There was no “monster” behind his mask.

I recently reviewed Both Sides Now by Dhillon Khosla. Dhillon spent the first 28 years of life as a female and then went through the very complex and painful procedure to match his physical body with the man inside. I don’t know if my former coworker would have had the courage to do the same. Maybe she did and no longer needs Halloween to let the beautiful woman inside, out.

Our everyday world is full of monsters wearing masks. They take on the personna of the mask they wear. They do good, they’re well-liked, they’re kind, they’re beyond reproach. Then they go home, the mask comes off, and the monster comes out. It’s appropriate that October is also Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Read more here.

Oxymoron: a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (as cruel kindness); broadly: something (as a concept) that is made up of contradictory or incongruous elements. — Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

…adult children; a little pregnant; amicable divorce; bad luck; exact estimate; fatally injured; jumbo shrimp; liquid gas; living dead; loud whisper; meatless meat; melted ice; paid volunteer; plastic silverware; pretty ugly; scheduled spontaneity; silent alarm; true fiction; virtual reality…

And this one, after Christopher Soghoian, a 24-year-old Indiana University doctoral student, set up a Web site where anyone can print a fake airline boarding pass: Airport Security.

So, did you remember to set your clock back one hour when you went to bed last night? If so, you gained an hour of sleep before the alarm went off. If not, you got up an hour earlier than necessary and you’re probably feeling a little annoyed right now.

I’m glad for the update; some of my electronics will be displaying the right time again. I don’t change the time in each and every appliance and gadget so some things are correct half the year and behind time the other half.

Want to know why we keep messing with the clocks instead of leaving the time alone? Here’s why.

And, no, you don’t also set the alarm back an hour.

A professor at the University of Central Florida says it’s mathematically impossible for vampires to walk among us. Physicist Costas Efthimiou (almost sounds like the creepy evil lead in a vampire movie, doesn’t he?) used a start date of January 1, 1600, 537,000,000 humans, and one vampire, for his calculations.

Assuming a feeding schedule of one victim per month, with each victim becoming a vampire, Efthimiou’s mathematics show the human population would have been totally depleted by July 1602.

As far as ghosts are concerned, Efthimiou says ghosts can either walk through walls or walk on floors but not both. If a ghost is vapor that can go through a wall, that same vaporous ghost, taking a step, would also go straight through the floor and beyond. Makes one wonder just where he (or she) would end up.

Sandra Joyner, 45, thought a little cosmetic surgery was just the thing to help refresh her looks. What she didn’t know was that her plastic surgeon’s nurse anesthetist was a former high school classmate looking for revenge.

Joyner died five years ago when she went into respiratory arrest in the recovery room at her plastic surgeon’s office. She was taken to a hospital where, several days later, she was removed from life support.

In 2003, after an investigation, the medical board called Sally Jordan Hill “grossly negligent” for injecting Joyner with a powerful painkiller without doctor’s orders and waiting too long before alerting anyone that Joyner was having problems. It was a medical error.

Last month, that error was amended to murder when Hill, 50, was charged with first-degree murder for poisoning Joyner with fentanyl and turning off the alarm that would have alerted other personnel to Joyner’s condition. Hill believed Joyner had stolen her high school boyfriend when they both attended the same school in the early 1970s.

At 6:13 p.m., EST, yesterday, convicted serial killer Danny Harold Rolling was pronounced dead after being executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. His death comes sixteen years after he killed five Florida college students in one of the most vicious and grisly crime sprees since serial killer Ted Bundy. His victims were University of Florida students Sonja Larson, 18, Christina Powell, 17, Tracy Paules, 23, Manny Taboada, 23, and Santa Fe Community College student Christa Hoyt, 18. Rolling was under investigation for three murders in Louisiana when authorities there suggested that Florida authorities check him out. DNA matched Rolling to the Florida crime scenes.

It’s official, at least it will be assuming that new parents Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes follow through with their announced wedding plans. The date: November 18, 2006. The place: Italy. The bride’s dress designed by: Giorgio Armani. I wonder if it’s worth putting up a countdown clock. Nah.

U.S. lawmakers hoped to put a serious crimp in online gambling when they pushed through a bill that makes it a criminal offense for U.S. financial institutions to fund Internet gamblers. With an annual pot of $6 billion coming from U.S. gamblers, the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act” won’t prevent online gambling, it will just serve as an opportunity for overseas funding of American gamblers. Good going, guys. No doubt U.S. banks and other payment processors are ecstatic that they no longer have to be bothered with handling that much money.

Finally the truth is out! Those perfect faces, those super thin bodies, those flawless skin tones… they’re as real as any Photoshop enhanced image can get! A popular Viral Video shows a model being made up, having her photo taken, and the photo being retouched into what finally appears on a billboard. Now we all can be perfect!

Take a look through any of the top fashion magazines and some of the “enhanced” photos will be more obvious than others. You know the ones, where the model’s flawless legs stretch for three-quarters of her body. They’re so super slim that she’d never be able to actually walk on them, particularly not on those 7-inch designer heels.

I wonder when we’ll get back to what really counts, what can’t be enhanced artifically, the person inside. A perfect body can only hide the ugly person residing inside for so long.

Tigger is a 5-year-old Cairn Terrier who could have ended up a tasty shark snack when he fell off his owners’ boat. Instead, the drowning dog was rescued from the waters off Key Largo by Ray Truche, Jr., and Lisa Largrassa, whose boat accidentally hit the dog as it struggled to remain afloat. The couple rescued the exhausted dog and attempted to contact the owners with information on Tigger’s dog tag. Owners Diane and Richard Beckman searched frantically for hours before assuming Tigger hadn’t survived his fall into the Atlantic Ocean and weren’t home for the call. It was a happy reunion at the Upper Keys Animal Shelter once the Beckmans returned home and listened to their messages.