THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE:

...STREAMING FROM THE CASTLE EAST! This fan-made 1973 video for "The Monster Mash" is today's must-see clip (natch), though you can also see Bobby "Boris" Pickett perform it live at Little Steven's Halloween a Go-Go 2005. The covers by The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and The Misfits are pretty good also -- the latter uses clips from the Rankin-Bass animated classic, Mad Monster Party.

THE SHAGGS: It's Halloween!

JOHN ZACHERLE has a Halloween album streaming via Spinner.

JIM CARROLL (deceased) sings about "People Who Died."

KISS got their first television exposure in 1976 on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.

THE TEN BEST HALLOWEEN SONGS, with embedded audio, according to the AOL Radio Blog.  (There's also a click-through to AOL's Halloween radio channel.)

SCREAMING FEMALES get a feature plus tracks from NPR's The Record blog. They also did two or three free songs for Daytrotter.

AQUARIUM DRUNKARD has a Halloween mixtape compiled by Mondo Boys.

HALLOWEEN A/V: PopMatters' streaming Halloween videos and audio, from Bauhaus to to Stevie Wonder to Cream to The Cramps... has taken numerous hits from the lawyers since 2008, including the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer,"  Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising," Santana's "Black Magic Woman", The Ramones' "Pet Sematary"  and Tegan & Sara's "Walking With a Ghost." But there are still some gems there; including Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

WARREN ZEVON is on that PopMatters list, but I prefer a live trifecta of "Werewolves of London," "Excitable Boy" and "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner."

HALLOWEEN ROCK COSTUMES: Artist Direct has a Top 13 list, while the Village Voice goes more obscure.

HENRI MANCINI: "Experiment in Terror." A sentimental favorite to those who grew up watching "Creature Features" on WGN before it went superstation.

"DO THEY KNOW IT'S HALLOWEEN?" is the all-star charity send-up of Band-Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" featuring Roky Erikson, Elvira, plus members from Arcade Fire, Sonic Youth, Smoosh, Rilo Kiley, Sparks and many more.

TRICK OR TREAT BIN:  From the obligatory Bobby "Boris" Pickett to the Beatles, from the Count 5 to the Postmarks, from Roky Erickson to She & Him, plus Jellyfish, Ash, the Sonics, Robyn Hitchcock, Ozzy Osbourne and more -- this Friday's fortuitous finds are streaming from the Pate page at the ol' HM.

THE TIME WARP:  Let's do it again.

NOW SHOWING: This weekend's wide release is Saw 3-D, which shockingly was not screened for critics.  Conviction goes to 500+ screens scoring 65 percent on the ol Tomatometer.

"THRILLER": The original 13-minute Jacko classic, plus the filipino prisoners.

BRUCE CAMPBELL will be officiating a zombie wedding in Seattle on Halloween.

IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, in its entirety, Charlie Brown.  Every year, the bootleg video rises from the Internet patch.

15 FACTS ABOUT HALLOWEEN: I counted more than that.

FIVE THINGS you may not know about Halloween.

THE HORRIBLY SLOW MURDERER With the Extremely Inefficient Weapon. Ten minutes of unimaginable terror.

WAR of the WORLDS:  Seventy-one years later, you can stream the infamous Orson Welles broadcast from the Internet Archive.

THE WILHELM SCREAM: The repeatedly used film and television stock sound effect first used in 1951 for the film Distant Drums, now appearing as an in-joke in many films, is the subject of a Masters of Horror segment.

31 CLASSIC HALLOWEEN TV EPISODES AND SPECIALS, according to Zap2It.

MY PARENTS LOVED HALLOWEEN: A Tumblr from the younguns.

THE TOP 10 HORROR MOVIES YOU HAVEN'T SEEN, according to the UAB Kaleidescope.

23 UNUSUAL VAMPIRE VARIATIONS, courtesy of The A.V. Club.

END CAT: Jake receives transmissions from the future.

CHUPACABRA: Mystery solved.

RUSSIAN BEARS have grown so desperate after a scorching summer they have started digging up and eating corpses in municipal cemetries.

LONGEST SNAKE in captivity dies in Ohio.

LOCAL NATIVES drop a video for "Who Knows Who Cares."

SUZANNE VEGA stopped by the World Cafe for a chat and mini-set, including two of her better-known songs.

THE SECRET SISTERS svisited Morning Becomes Eclectic for a session.

WARPAINT is advance streaming The Fool via the ol' HM.

WEEZER is streaming their rarities collection Death to False Metal.

PHANTOGRAM stopped by The Current for a chat and mini-set. (A bit electronic for me, but you might like it.)

ALL SONGS CONSIDERED features Titus Andronicus, Suuns, First Aid Kit and more bands from CMJ 2010.

SONGS FOR FALL, selected by the NPR staff.

MARTI JONES & TIM LEE (The Windbreakers) cover The dB's classic, "Neverland." With Beatle Bob cameo.

ELVIS COSTELLO talks to Stuff (NZ) about being compared to himself and more...

THERMALS: Hutch Harris talked to Austinist about the new LP, vinyl, indies vs. majors and more... (Thx, LHB.)

GENESIS P-ORRIDGE's Top Ten Favorite Psychedelic Folk Songs.

ELTON JOHN gets a lengthy profile at The Telegraph.

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER is running for Mayor of Chicago.

CHARLIE SHEEN says his crazed coke and booze binge with a prostitute (reportedly Capri Anderson, a 22-year-old adult film actress who denies being an escort) that left him in a New York hospital has been overblown and overplayed. Which explains why he's headed back to rehab. TMZ has pics of the hotel room. Ex-wife Denise Richards reportedly saw the early of this binge.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA has allegedly moved into a hotel after soon to be ex-husband Jordan Bratman refused to move out of their family home.

JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE cheated on Jessica Biel with actress Olivia Munn during a three-day fling this past September, reports the new Us Weekly.

DAVID ARQUETTE told Howard Stern that he got weepy after having sex for the first time following his separation from Courtney Cox.

BATMAN 3 will be titled The Dark Knight Rises and will not include The Riddler, according to director Christopher Nolan.

JAMES CAMERON will shoot Avatars 2 and 3 back to back, tying him up until 2015.

CONAN O'BRIEN, the new cover of the Rolling Stone, talks about his off-air exile.

BLAKE LIVELY & PENN BADGLEY: The Gossip Girl costars have ended their three-year romance.

MICHAEL CAINE surveys his career and explains Inception in one sentence.

SACHA BARON COHEN is accused of participating in an alleged attack on a gay cameraman at a gay marriage demonstration in Los Angeles back in 2008.

ERNIE & BERT: Straight? NTTAWWT.

TERROR in the USA: Federal law enforcement authorities are investigating a nascent plot to carry out a series of terrorist bombings at stations in the Washington Metro system.  Separately, the FBI arrested Abdel Hameed Shehadeh and a federal court has charged him for attempting to join al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, Jordan, and Somalia.

IRAN has begun loading nuclear fuel into the core of the Bushehr reactor. The Bushehr plant will be connected to Iran's electrical grid by February, officials said. The Obama administration is pushing to revive a failed deal for Iran to send some of its nuclear stockpile overseas in exchange for assistance with peaceful nuclear technology.

AFGHANISTAN: An intense military campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban has so far failed to inflict more than fleeting setbacks on the insurgency or put meaningful pressure on its leaders to seek peace, according to US military and intelligence officials citing the latest assessments of the war.

KITTEH from McDonald's. I'm Lovin' It (assuming it's not the Happy Meal).

DOLPHINS in the wild are teaching themselves to "walk" with their tails along the surface of water, biologists have claimed.

STOWAWAY HAMSTER grounds a Brunei-Brisbane flight.

NEWLY-DISCOVERED SNUB-NOSED MONKEY sneezes in the rain.

WET DOG SHAKE: Let's go to the physics.

ROBOTIC CAT PLAYROOM, courtesy of the Oregon Humane Society.

DAFT PUNK drops "Derezzed" as a mini-promo for TRON: Legacy.

ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN stopped by The Current for a chat and mini-set.

DR. DOG also stopped by The Current for a chat and mini-set.

THE HELIGOATS stopped by Oregon Public Broadcasting for a chat and mini-set in audio and video.

TAPES 'N' TAPES drop "Freak Out" as an advance track to their third LP.

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS got a feature on All Things Considered.

CHAIRMEN OF THE BOARD: "(You've Got Me) Danglin' On a String."

TV on the RADIO's Dave Sitek does the 5-10-15-20 thing at Pitchfork and talks to PopMatters about side project Maximum Balloon, West Coast life, and the joys of landscaping.

BAND OF HORSES: Bill Reynolds gets some hometown love from the Asheville Citizen-Times.

KRISTIN HERSH talks to the Boston Globe about her memoirs and book tour.

LONG WINTERS frontman John Roderick lists Seattle's four most conspicuous rock crowds for Seattle Weekly.

CHARLIE SHEEN was found drunk and naked in a trashed New York hotel room, early Tuesday morning, in the company of a female, of some sort, unharmed.  He was hospitalized. Sheen's rep blamed an allergic reaction to some medication.  Sheen's hooker blamed cocaine.

MAD MEL UPDATE: getting bounced from a cameo in The Hangover sequel, Gibson may be about to do a mea culpa.

KATY PERRY & RUSSELL BRAND, contra a prior report from the ever-reliable Sun, were not menaced by a tiger.

MARIAH CAREY, again rumored to be pregnant with a boy.

TONI COLLETTE is expecting a second child.

SEAN PENN's quasi-galpal, Sports Illustrated supermodel Jessica White, was arrested Saturday morning after she allegedly hit a woman repeatedly in the face in a vicious catfight over a taxi outside a downtown club.  She was reportedly celebrating her breakup with Penn.

CAREY MULLIGAN & SHIA LaBEOUF are officially dunzo.

NATALIE PORTMAN has reportedly fallen out with her father over explicit sex scenes in her latest movie, according to the ever-reliable Daily Mail.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA has begun quietly directing Twixt Now And Sunrise, a thriller with overtones of horror, and that his star is Val Kilmer.

AL QAEDA is poised to overrun five states in North Africa and the Middle East, creating terrorist safe havens from which the network can launch attack on the West, Europe and the US have been warned.

IRAN will not be defanged by sanctions (includes a good overview of the current sanctions regime).

AFGHANISTAN: The massive military operation launched in April in the southern province of Kandahar will be wrapped up by the end of the year, the US commander in charge of the operation said on Monday.

IRAQ: Tariq Aziz, formerly Iraq's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, is to be executed for his part in the persecution of Shiite Muslim dissidents.

DIFFUSED KITTEHS: Now we have video. It's like The Hurt Locker, with cats: The Cat Locker.

ESCAPED SNAKES take over the town of Xianling, in south west China.

BEEMER, the boozing kangaroo. Aw.

PAUL THE OCTOPUS, an unlikely star of the 2010 World Cup who 'predicted' the outcome of eight matches, has died at an aquarium in Germany.

AN ALLIGATOR is still on the loose in Sarasota, FL, after eating a family's 50 lb. pet dog.

FRIGHTENED RABBIT dropped a video for "The Loneliness & The Scream."

NEW RELEASES include Bryan Ferry, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, Prefab Sprout, Crowded House, the Octopus Project, a slew of Bad Religion reissues, and more at Spinner.

ELVIS COSTELLO is advance streaming National Ransom at the end of his Vanity Fair interview about it.

WEEKEND is advance streaming Sports, "a tug-of-war between the forces of punk and shoegaze, tight rhythms and messy effects."

BRIAN ENO is advance streaming Small Craft On A Milk Sea.

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD (minus the late Dewey Marin) reunited at Young's annual Bridge School Benefit this weekend. Watch 'em do one of my faves, "Mr. Soul," plus three more, at Stereogum.  Like Twofer Tuesday times two.

JOE CARDUCCI, author of the fab Pop and the Rock Narcotic, posts Bring Me the Head of Lee Abrams.

THE REPLACEMENTS' ex-manager Peter Jesperson talks to the Limewire blog about the Mpls scene of the 80s. (Thx, LHB.)

BEST COAST's Bethany Cosentino talks to the San Francisco Chronicle about touring and her cat.

SQUEEZE: Glenn Tilbrook explains to The Guardian why the band is re-recording its back catalog.

LINDSAY LOHAN reportedly can't afford to pay for treatment and now needs to find a sponsor to help cover her bill at the Betty Ford Center.

TIGER WOODS: The first tell-all from one of his many bedroom conquests claims the "largely endowed" golfer liked three-way sex with women, fantasized about men and was stuck in a marriage to an uncaring gold digger.

TAYLOR SWIFT & JAKE GYLLENHAAL spent the weekend laughing, eating and strolling together in New York City.

KATY PERRY & RUSSELL BRAND had a man-eating tiger as a wedding crasher.

MAD MEL UPDATE: Gibson baby mama Oksana Grigorieva has rejected the obligatory offer from Playboy.

BRITNEY SPEARS: A new track from her upcoming album has been leaked months before its planned release, according to RadarOnline (but they aren't streaming it).

MADONNA is opening a chain of fitness centers. Yes, really.

BILL & TED, together again.

TERROR in the USA: A Texas court sentenced Adan Mirza, a Pakistani national, to 15 years in jail for aiding and supporting the Taliban and the illegal possession of weapons.

IRAN imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings.

AFGHANISTAN: Pres. Karzai admitted to receiving "bags of money" from Iran and other countries but insisted the payments were legitimate aid. Recent widely-reported contacts between senior Taliban and the Kabul government have little to do with a peace settlement and involve scarcely more than exchanges of cash and prisoners, diplomats and observers have told the Guardian.  The 'Birthplace of the Taliban' improves after latest the US offensive.

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM: A north Georgia swimming pool. Link thru for two videos.

CRABS transmitted by vending machine.

BOMB SQUAD diffuses a box of kittehs.

HALOWEEN DOG PARADE: Pictures explain why dogs will ultimately turn on mankind.

WARPAINT drops "Undertow" as fthe irst video from The Fool. Directed by Shannyn Sossamon.

GUSTER played the World Cafe Live on Friday; you can stream the gig on demand.

ROBERT PLANT stopped by the World Cafe for a chat and mini-set.

ELIZABETH MITCHELL: The "kindie rock" star gets a feature plus tracks from All Things Considered.

THE BEATLES, Live in Australia.

BILLY PRESTON: "Nothing From Nothing."

KEITH RICHARDS, Lord of the Undead, talks to the New York Times about his book on the Rolling Stones' nearly half-century-long adventure.

SLEIGH BELLS: Derek Miller talks to the Chicago Tribune about the band's new material.

SHE & HIM: M Ward talks to the Vancouver Sun about Vol.2... and Vol. 3.

DIVINYLS frontwoman Chrissy Amphlett discusses her breast cancer diagnosis. Could bring back "I Touch Myself" as a public service announcement.

WEEKEND BOX OFFICE: Paranormal Activity 2 dominated the chart with 41.5 million against a 3 million budget. Ka-ching. Jackass 3-D plunged 57 percent, but still held the second slot with 21.6 million, for a total of 87.1 million against a 20 million budget. Red held okay in the third slot, given the competiton, taking in 15 million, for a 43.5 million total against 58 million budget; it will likely profit even before the DVD bin.  Hereafter's wide debut shot up to the fourth slot with 12 million, a little over tracking expectations, but another middling opening for Matt Damon.  The Social Network held alright to round out the Top Five with 7.3 million, having taken in about 73 million domestic against a 50 million budget.  Below the fold, Secretariat held well at No. 6, but its breakeven receipts to date do not include a reported 50 million marketing budget.  Overall, the weekend improved year-over-year, and should do so again easily next weekend, with Halloween falling on Sunday instead of Saturday.

KATY PERRY & RUSSELL BRAND got married Saturday in a traditional Hindu ceremony.

LINDSAY LOHAN: The judge sent her back to the Betty Ford Center instead of jail, but Li-Lo may have trouble affording the stay.

MATT DAMON wife Luciana have welcomed another baby girl.

CELINE DION gave birth to fraternal twin boys on Saturday.

RANDY & EVI QUAID are seeking refugee status in Canada.

THE TOP 7 SURLY MOVIE GHOSTS, according to the Scorecard Review. (Thx, LHB.)

THE TOP 25 SCARY MOVIES, according to the Chicago Tribune.

IRAN's First Vice President said UN sanctions are dead. That must be why Iran is secretly trying to set up banks in Muslim countries around the world, including Iraq and Malaysia, using dummy names and opaque ownership structures to skirt sanctions.

AFGHANISTAN: A Taliban suicide assault team attacked the United Nations compound in the western Afghan city of Herat. Several members of the four-man suicide team were able to enter the compound before being gunned down by security guards and Afghan police.  October has been a calamitous month for the Taliban in the North West of the country, but a large gap remains between killing commanders and dismantling an insurgency. Former Taliban officials see peace as being a long way off.

IRAQ: The latest cache of WikiLeaks documents show that: most Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis; Iraqi police and soldiers were involved in torture; and Iran was -- and is -- playing an active role in supporting Iraqi Shiite militia groups-supplying them with rockets and particularly lethal IEDs, training their snipers, and helping to plot assassinations of Iraqi officials. Also, US troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

CATS PLAYING PATTY-CAKE: Let's go to the video.

KNUT, the world-famous polar bear, is being bullied by the female bears in his enclosure.

PENGUNS are not gay; despite new evidence of homosexual behavior in the wild, they are just "same sex flirting" until they find a mate, according to a new study.

A MYNAH BIRD who vocally demands to be taken out for a walk twice a day is filling the void for a dog owner missing his old pet.

KITTEH survives being flushed down a toilet.