Halloween-26

This Halloween, my wife and I stayed in: we had plans for the next day, which happened to be one of our rare days off together. And since, as luck would have it, Yello's new album came out the day before the holiday, we settled onto the couches in the living room and put it on in Dolby Atmos — the gear allows it, after all.

I'll share my thoughts on the album separately; for now, a word about the little bit of fun we treated ourselves to while listening. Since my audio source (vinyl aside) is an Apple TV 4K, the TV in the living room was naturally on as well. And since we'd decided to sit out the holiday festivities like "Trick or treat!", we simply set a small table on the front porch with a special bowl full of candy and let the kids help themselves.

And of course, the doorbell camera put every kid who came up for candy right on our TV screen. The imagination of these kids and their parents is truly enviable, by the way: the costumes were amazing. We got a huge kick out of this improvised video feed on our TV, set to the Swiss duo's inventive music.

That's when an interesting observation came to me: not a single child took more than a couple of candies, mindful that they weren't the only ones making the rounds of the neighbourhood that evening. No parent had to rein anyone in; nobody scolded anybody. The kids understood on their own that there had to be enough for everyone — and that it wasn't really about the candy, but about the fun of the whole thing.

I try to imagine how long a bowl of candy like that would last left outside in Ukraine — specifically, in my hometown of Odesa — and I come to the conclusion that 30 seconds would be a record. Most likely, the very first group of kids would make off not only with all the candy, but with the bowl itself. And I'm not talking about children growing up under constant enemy shelling, but about pre-war Ukraine — well-fed, yet, sadly, appallingly ill-mannered.

No conclusions here. As I said above, it's just an observation.