J00sterJournal: What the Blazes?

Apparently Bill de Blasio is the new mayor of New York. Which according to Lhota's attack ads means one has only a few precious hours to get out of Manhattan before the crack addicts, pimps, and dreaded squeegee gangs retake the city like it's the bad old days of the '80s. But since most New Yorkers consider the current state of Times Square - infested as it is with tourists clutching unlimited Olive Garden bread sticks and festooned with Red Lobster disposable bibs - a debatable improvement on the old version, let's try a scare tactic that actually works: tax the rich!

And if that's still not a good enough reason to head upstate to your Catskills holiday mansion, how about the legendary Hudson Valley Jack O'Lantern Blaze?

5,000 hand-carved pumpkins (as opposed to what, 3D printed ones?) flicker gleefully on the lawns of the historic Van Cortland Manor, luring those brave enough to venture forth into a fantastical world of ghosts and graveyards entirely crafted out of pumpkins.

Nothing sends chills down the spine like Haunted Einstein. You know you're in the twilight zone when a cubed term mysteriously sneaks into E=mc2.

An entire garden made of Jack O'Lanterns. Someone is eating a lot of pumpkin pie right now.

Each section of the Blaze has it's own theme and atmospheric sound track. This one is used by NASA to study the physiology of alien life forms now that they can't afford to actually send rockets to space.

Mei doesn't quite get the appeal of braving a wintry evening to see something you can get in a latte at Starbucks around this time of year.

Long-time West Village resident Count Dracula thought the worst thing to happen to New York was having those citibike stands ruin the elitist aesthetic of his townhouse-lined street, but that was before de Blasio's millionaires tax. At least he's not the only bloodsucker in town now.

That's the grave of the data-driven, pragmatic, mayor-as-a-CEO Bloomberg era. Time to run out to buy a Big Gulp and light up a smoke in Central Park.

In 2005 the Blaze started as a simple row of Jack O'Lanterns on a couple hay bales in a field. Now, in typical New York fashion, it's blown out into an extravaganza that's booked out faster than Tao Downtown and features such installations as a giant spider web made entirely of pumpkins.

Hope you have health insurance, because an x-ray like that is going to set you back at least the price of a car. What do you mean the website crashed?

Here kitty kitty.

Ok, this is getting a bit ridiculous now. A grandfather clock made of pumpkins that actually works! What next, dinosaurs? Well, yes.

A tunnel of this length would take the MTA a decade to drill. Here they carve it up every year and still have time to bake the insides into pumpkin pie. Maybe de Blasio isn't so bad after all, when you consider the alternative was the dude who actually ran the MTA.