CHAT: Halloween (was Re: verbal nouns)

In a message dated 2000:10:04 10:42:36 AM, romilly@EGL.NET writes:

>Ah me.  In more innocent times (19th, early 20th cent.) when the US was
>still mainly a rural society, we are told that it was the habit of young
>men to do naughty things on Halloween like putting a cow in the local church,
>or on the roof (how???); or, dis-assembling a wagon or Model-T Ford and
>re-assembling it on top of City Hall.  Nowadays, at least around here,
>they just set fire to vacant buildings.
    The most unusual Halloween stunt I know of was a band of evidently
ex-military types going around knocking over crack-houses in a major urban
city in the US (I am not at liberty to say exactly where). This 6-man team
destroyed something like 7 houses in one night... Trick or Treat, indeed...
    ... they wore Halloween masks and bullet-proof vests and they used tear
gas and stun-grenades (all materials were traced to a theft of National Guard
equipment). No one in these crack-houses was seriously hurt. All drugs were
burned in the front lawns of these houses... any guns found in the
crackhouses were later found in pawnshops or "in private hands". Any cash and
jewelry in these houses disappeared.
    The local police SWAT teams were to have hit those very same houses that
week. (Evidently the police department has an embarassing leak...)

    czHANg