The contrast between the relative banality of an average office worker and the extraordinary genius of a great scientist is a myth. But it can be fun to imagine it, and if we pretend that we are ordinary people stuck in a boring job, it takes the edge off our day to day misery.
Our ideas for a perfect costume are:
A) Weirdo working at his desk as usual.
B) Scientist in lab coat, holding a test tube or other laboratory equipment.
C) An elderly horror movie character, with white hair and wrinkles.
D) A witch.
E) Bo Peep.
You may think you know what makes for a fun or cute Halloween costume, but in fact what makes for a fun or cute Halloween costume is often much more complex than you think.
For example, it takes an expert to know whether the “bo peep” costume that’s currently popular will be even more popular next year. And it takes someone with a decent understanding of the tastes and purchasing power of young people to predict which costumes will become cooler by next year.
In any case, this blog doesn’t aim to help you pick the perfect costume this year. It aims to help you get the best costumes ideas possible: ideas that are fun and cute and will still be cool in ten years.
If you want to get your child into a costume without going broke, here’s what you can do. Look for a store that sells patterns-online or in the store-for kids’ costumes. Make a copy of the pattern and take it with you to any fabric store. Ask them if they will cut out a few yards of fabric for free-this should be enough to make one costume. Save the pattern, because it might come in handy later. For Halloween, your kid will not need many extras, so you can use the extra fabric to make one or two more costumes.
For example, if you want him to be a bo peep, take the white parts of the pattern and cut them into strips that are two inches wide by two feet long; then use those strips to make a white skirt that goes to his knees. Cut some black felt for the cap, and glue that on with Mod Podge. Cute!
Every year on Halloween we see millions of girls dressed up as bunnies and princesses. Why are they always bunnies and princesses? Why can’t they be something else, like pirates or ninjas or astronauts?
My favorite costumes in recent years have been Superman (I did it for three years in a row) and Princess Leia. But every year people are disappointed when I say I’m not really Princess Leia, just my best friend who dresses up in her clothes.
Princess Leia is a perfect costume. She’s brave, strong, and smart. And she’s a woman; that makes her even more special. Because women are usually less valued by society than men, the fact that she is also a princess is especially important. Women don’t have equal rights in this country, and one of the ways we still treat them differently from men is by giving them fake titles like “princess.”
The idea of dressing up as an ordinary person was invented by women to protest the double standard that gives men some privileges and makes women pay for them with real disadvantages such as being treated badly and having to work harder than men to get the same things.
So my recommendation to girls: If you want to dress up in something comfortable like a bunny
The costume suggestion is for a zombie bo peep, which is a kind of bird. A bo peep drum sounds like the voice of a zombified bird, and it’s a cute idea. But there is something wrong with the costume. The zombie bird has feathers and looks like a bird but it lacks one fundamental feature of a bird: wings.
This raises an interesting question. Is the lack of wings on this zombie bird an accident or is it deliberate? If it is deliberate, why would you do that? If you wanted to make a zombie bird without wings, why didn’t you just make another zombified bo peep? Why not make a zombified Adeladid? Why not make a zombified parrot? Why not make a zombified gazelle?
If it was accidental, why did you pick this kind of Zombie Bird rather than another kind, and why did you pick that particular kind of Zombie Bird rather than one of the other kinds? Why didn’t you just pick any old kind of Zombie Bird (which wouldn’t be able to fly anyway)?
The “bo peep costume” is one of the weirder ideas I’ve heard.
You dress up like a sleeping sheep, with a comb sticking out of your head and a little bell around your neck. You’re on a leash, like you’re some kind of pet. My guess is that it’s supposed to be funny. But why would anyone think this was a good idea?
A lot of people seem to think that if they dress up in costumes that are different from the ones you see all around you, they will stand out. But if everyone in the world wore a bo peep costume, no one would notice.
Democracy is an idea. It is also a theory. And it is a theory that has been tested in practice, and with that testing we have learned something about it.
That something is this: human beings like to have choices. We would rather have one thing that has many different parts than one thing with many different parts and nothing that does what we want. We do not like to be bored. We would rather have one good book than ten mediocre books. You can probably see why the biggest risk of democracy is that given the choice between having lots of things we don’t like or having just a few things we do, most people will choose the latter.
Democracy means letting people make decisions for themselves, by themselves, whether they are right or wrong, and whether they are smart or dumb. It means you can’t just tell people what to do; you also have to give them some kind of choice about how much they will listen to you if they listen at all.