For the last few weeks there has been only one topic of discussion. ... So Chicken Corner thanked her lucky feathers for Halloween, which provided a distraction, as well as the idea of fun, not to mention fun itself. And a few memories, as well as signs.

In Echo Park, Sunday morning. A brunette wig on the ground on Sunset Boulevard, next to a silver compact car's driver's door. Candy wrappers in the street. A pumpkin cracked on the cement, innards turning black. The burnt remains of several incendiary devices, the fireworks we'd watched on Halloween night.

Saturday, walking south to Delilah. Still on display, a three-foot doll laying face up, eyes open on a postage-sized front lawn, dressed in a full-sized woman's dress that has been decorated with red stains. Among the many disturbing aspects of this murder display is the fact that a girl of about nine or ten years lives in the house. My daughter does not notice the installation, and I decide to walk on the opposite side of the street on the way back from Delilah's Bakery.

Delilah's Bakery: bluegrass players are just getting started in front of the cinder block bakery. If Ralph Stanley has written a song (or more) for Obama, they probably haven't had time to learn it. They're serious about bluegrass, though (on of the guys plays at the Audubon Center bluegrass jam once a month -- I recognize him), and the repertoire is fine.

Friday, the fright night: Halloween highlights. One of the high points of the holiday was trick or treating at our council president Eric Garcetti's house. Last year he cheerfully handed out candy at the base of his driveway. This year he was answering the door, in glasses, contacts removed. When we arrived in a group of about eight or nine children and their parents, Eric was running out of candy, so he gave away gum, presumably his own. Lotte, one of my daughter's friends, informed him that she did not like peppermint, to which Eric replied earnestly that he appreciated the honesty. A couple of doors down from the council president's house some neighbors got into the spirit of halloween by lighting their Christmas lights to signal they were home and loaded with candy. Then, as it got later, other neighbors celebrated with high flying fireworks. We'd had too much fun to get crabby and witchy about the fireworks -- it was lower fire conditions, after all, and they were pretty. Everyone had something to give.

Of course, the famous displays are over on the other side of the neighborhood in Angeleno Heights, which is a Halloween destination location because of the well-tended Victorian homes and their elaborate displays. But it was lively to the north in Elysian Heights where some of the displays have been used and refined over many years. Lower key but spooky nonetheless.

Meanwhile, we're rich with candy, enough to toss like confetti on election night, in celebration, we hope.