Halloween Madness

Kim and I had a fun Halloween, though a lot of it came together at the last minute. We started the festivities with a trip to "Halloweekends" at the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio along with some friends from Alma. Some of the haunted houses there were pretty neat (Club Blood was well done with good atmosphere, and the Toy Factory was alternately creepy and uncomfortably funny). The outdoor "scare zones" weren't so much creepy as they were startling or, um, insulting. (I was followed through part of the "Fright Faire" by a medieval-looking zombie who said that with longer hair I could be one of the Monkees, since I was the whitest thing he'd seen since the moon went behind the clouds.) I'm told Cedar Point has some good roller coasters, too.

The downside of that trip was that we got back mid-afternoon Saturday, and we weren't entirely ready for Halloween yet. We'd done the essentials: Kim had already bought candy, and we carved pumpkins Thursday night:

( Halloween pictures and details behind the cut... )

We were completely taken off guard by the number of trick-or-treaters. Our house is apparently in the very middle of the most popular trick-or-treating spot in the county: kids from the whole region come to our street. We'd been told to expect something like 300-400 kids during the city's official 5:30-7:30 trick-or-treating hours, so Kim bought about 575 pieces of candy to make sure we were safe. We gave them out one at a time, and Kim ran out at 6:38. Seeing the situation, I'd run out to the store a few minutes earlier to resupply; we opened back up at about 6:45, and I'd say we ended up giving candy to about 700 kids by the end of the evening. (We actually gave out more like 775 pieces of candy, but I started doubling up for the last 20-30 minutes when it was clear that the rate of kids was dwindling.)

Orchestra Hero

A month or two ago, Kim and I started playing Rock Band; it's a lot of fun. I've mostly been playing drums, in part because I've always been a little interested and in part on the theory that the skills there could transfer reasonably well to the real instrument. Better than the guitar, anyway!

I began to wonder if someone would eventually create "Orchestra Hero" so I could indulge my love of classical music, too. Kim and I spotted some significant difficulties, like:

• Shorter songs are good for game play, so rock works well but classical less so. Playing through a single piece (or even a single movement) could take up a whole game session. And how obnoxious would it be when the clarinetist "fails out" ten bars before the end of Beethoven's 9th?
• Rock band requires just three or four controllers for a standard rock setup, while to field an orchestra you'd need at least a dozen. Sure, not everyone would need to buy every controller, but it still fragments the market for those items. (And if you did get a dozen friends together to play, how would you show all the parts on the TV screen?)
• While a lot of people might end up enjoying Orchestra Hero, many fewer would think they'd enjoy it: the market just isn't there. (Related is the point that one fun thing about Rock Band/Guitar Hero is getting to play songs you already know. Fewer people know a wide range of orchestral music.)

By the end of that conversation, I felt disappointed to realize that Orchestra Hero probably wouldn't ever happen, but I moved on.

So it was a bit of a surprise to see an article on the NY Times website today entitled "Orchestra Hero". The article isn't actually all that great (the author spends half his time talking about his composing, which has pretty much zilch to do with the topic), and it doesn't really touch on any of those difficulties or suggest ways to overcome them, but it's still neat to see other people considering the idea.

It's made me start wondering if something like this could actually work. There are lots of classical CDs with titles like "20 Romantic Classics" or "Bach's Greatest Hits" that pick out short, well-known pieces, so maybe length isn't such a big concern if you're willing to give up playing full symphonies. You could reduce the number of controllers by combining similar instruments (e.g. one controller design might work as a clarinet, oboe, and even flute). Maybe someone will eventually create Orchestra Hero after all.