Last month, we announced the Great Annual Change Bowl Guessing Game. Well, as you can see above, yesterday we all finally went to our friendly local TD Bank for their big, no-charge change counting machine. We clogged it up a little! Also we annoyed the hell out of the staff. Also we took free lollipops. Yay TD Bank. And so we have a winner for the guessing game, though y'all were nowhere near close. Don't you all have big change bowls? READ MORE

I had no idea so many people despise baseball announcer (and "ODIOUS DICKBAG") Joe Buck, but apparently that is the case. Also, if the commenters on the page are to be believed, Buck evinces an enormous craving for cock, or, in the case of Derek Jeter, balls. Look how much you learn every day!

The latest installment of Der Spiegel's continuing look back at the fall of the Iron Curtain focuses on Poland and Hungary.

David Cho: what are you going to be for halloween
BALK: Slutty H1N1 vaccine
David Cho: you can do better than that
David Cho: (as far as jokes go)
David Cho: let's try this again
David Cho: what are you going to be for halloween?
BALK: Slutty "Federal Pay Czar" Kenneth Feinberg
David Cho: Eh
BALK: Slutty Andre Agassi meth dealer?
BALK: Slutty NBC affiliate concerned by poor ratings for new 10 P.M. Leno show?
BALK: Slutty death row kitty?
David Cho is offline (3:14:22)
BALK: Everyone's a critic.

Speaking of running out the clock (see: every post in the last three hours), your friends at The Awl would like to take a moment to remind you that Sunday marks the end of Daylight Savings Time. Set your clocks back an hour. Or forward an hour? I can never remember which is which. Spring... awakening? Spring forward? Lemme go hit up Google and get back to you.

UPDATE: Yeah, it's definitely back. Mmm, more cold and dark for everyone!

I don't know what's going on here, and I don't really care: There is something intrinsically hysterical about inebriated Ewoks fighting, cavorting, and doing the Moonwalk. Well, to me, at least. Enjoy. [Via]

As Rap Radar points out, the reliably amazing Ghostface Killah was reliably amazing on TV last night. Jimmy Kimmel had the Wu-Tang MC on to tell a Halloween "Ghostface" story. While the story doesn't have much to do with ghosts, or Halloween-it wasn't even that scary, come to think of it, it takes place in Vermont-it is definitely something see.

Oh, and tomorrow (thanks for the reminder, Ghost!) everyone should listen, at least once, to the greatest Halloween song ever recorded ("Monster Mash," pshaw...), which is the Geto Boys "Mind Playing Tricks On Me." (Also not, in the end, strictly about Halloween. But all the scarier for it...)

You know what's like even the 24th or 25th worst thing of the maybe 12,000 horrible things about 9/11? The insane inability of any New York state and city agency to reach and then keep to a decision about anything related to lower Manhattan. IT IS 2009! And they are squabbling about sites for the planned performing arts center now, and Jesus, what a mess. This is actually one of the ways in which Bloomberg is most vulnerable in next week's election, if only anyone was running against him.

You know what you could be doing? Spending three or four months floating down the Chattahoochee river, which goes from the top of Georgia down to Lake Seminole, at the top of Florida. Think about it. I mean, you're stupid not to, really.

Just in time for Halloween: Chinese scientists investigating the mating habits of short-nosed fruit bats observed that the female bats frequently perform fellatio on the males during intercourse, and that mating sessions were shown to last longer when fellatio was performed. Which is a valuable lesson that everyone out there should take to heart, am I right, fellas? (There is actual bat blowjob video at the link, if you are so inclined.)

The Oasis of the Seas, the largest cruise liner ever built, has left port for Miami, from where it will begin taking more than 6,000 passengers at time (!!!) on Royal Caribbean tours in December. It cost $1.5 billion to build and is 1,200 feet long-one-and-a-half times the size of the Queen Mary II. Man, just think of all the despair and communicable disease that thing's going to pack in.

The Wall Street Journal turns up its nose at the forthcoming auction of the art collection of Lehman Brothers, which is going up for sale on Sunday. "Many of the works are by unknowns, meant primarily to decorate wall space," says the WSJ. Sure, it's not exactly a world-class collection by any stretch-but also it's not at all a bad group of artists, or "unknowns." And most of the works seem to be prints, so of course this is by no means a big bucks auction. But a Julie Mehretu print for five grand? A recent Ed Ruscha for a grand? A 1975 Calder print for $1200??? This is like fun bargain basement shopping-with actual investment potential. You snobs!

Shep Smith once again bites my bear beat with this largely pedestrian video of one of our ursine friends stuck in a tree, but I'm a little more understanding than I was last time: This is obviously part of Fox News' plan to develop a clip reel full of non-ideological reportage it can point to the next time it is attacked by the Obama administration. More importantly, why the hell don't we have a BEAR ALERT graphic? I want a big-ass animated gif that says "Balk's Bears" with a howling Kodiak attacking a horse. Or perhaps something more tasteful and elegant. Like, the bear is wearing a tuxedo and eating caviar. Someone from the Art Department wanna get on this now? Thanks.

Researchers at Britain's Southampton University examined more than 40,000 death certificates in an attempt to find a correlation between cause of death and occupation. The results are pretty much what you'd expect (coal miners run an above-average risk of succumbing to pneumoconiosis, people who work in bars are more likely to expire due to alcohol, etc.) But the Independent offers a helpful caution against minsiterpretation, noting that statistical association does not necessarily mean causation:

For example, it is a fact that male hairdressers are much more likely than almost anyone else to die from Aids. But this does not in any case suggest that cutting hair causes Aids, because the statistics also show that women hairdressers are less likely than most people to die from the disease.

Every year, a bunch of dumbasses at The Morning News complete a story, teeing off from the beginning of a trite Halloween urban legend. This year: the babysitter gets a scary phone call. This is my favorite part.

The phone rang.

"What do you want, douche?" Shelly said.

The voice was whispering now and Shelly could hear a mobile playing in the background. "OK, I'm in the baby's room right now. I'm looking at the baby. Checking it, as it were, which is something you should do once in awhile. There is undeniably a baby in the house."