The Preds take on the Vancouver Canucks on the road tonight. As the Vancouver Sun reports, the Preds are pretty hot right now, but they generally don’t play well in British Columbia. Nashville is 3-10-1 all-time (with the 1 being a tie prior to the arrival of the shootout) at Vancouver, but a lot of those losses were absorbed by less talented Preds teams. It should be another good test for a young and promising Preds squad. Here’s hoping the Preds get out to a steady lead and, for once this season, hold onto it. Go Preds!!

This news from the Tennessean is a sad addition to an already sad story. I hope that there will be justice eventually for the Doster family, and I also hope that the suspect in question is deserving of having charges dropped. I honestly don’t know.

These pumpkins aren’t extreme, but I did witness the carving of all of them Sunday night. Ours is the Macaulay Culkin version in the middle of the top photo. (Yes, ours is from a template. We’re not ashamed.)

Halloween 2.0 has arrived, courtesy of Pith in the Wind.

I early (and electronic) voted today. Even at 9:15 a.m. at the Green Hills Library, all the voting machines were occupied. There was not a line, but there appeared to be a steady stream of voters coming in. I have some concerns about a “paper trail” documenting electronic results, but otherwise my experience was positive. It was easy to vote, and I was in and out quickly.

I tried to capture a shot of the machine in action on my Treo, but I accidentally obscured the image with my thumb. Oops. The stock photo above will have to suffice.

For 364 days each year, I consider these two people my friends. Today, I consider them rock stars. Happy Halloween, everyone!

…but what is Coke? Sorry, it’s a secret. Is it all just a marketing ploy? Could someone really make a pretty decent facsimile of Coke without knowing the exact formula? Let me know if you figure out how to make homemade Coke Zero. That would reduce our grocery bills considerably.

This page explaining how to build a computer inside a pumpkin (yes, really) had me recalling one of my favorite quotes, this one from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park: “You were so busy trying to see if you could do it that you didn’t stop to think about whether you should.” Be sure to check out all three pages of the fun because the comments at the bottom of page 3 are worth it.

How do you reduce the sting of a rejection letter? By posting it anonymously online, of course. Ah, the power of the internet … but it does make for an interesting site to scroll through. Many of the letters originate from the Knoxville area, so thank our neighbors to the east for this innovation.

I thought this post was a good point about the latest safest/most dangerous cities list. New Orleans didn’t submit statistics. I’m not trying to pile on a city that’s been through a terrible ordeal, but certainly New Orleans would rank high on the dangerous list. I get why the city probably hasn’t kept good statistics yet, but I think the study should have addressed that somewhere in its public announcements.

Here’s the full list, by the way.