Gone are the days when just carving three holes in a hollowed-out pumpkin and having a candle project its flickering light from inside would scare the bejeezus out of all the neighbourhood kids. That must have been somewhere around 1891, when those pumpkins were the most advanced piece of entertainment technology available.

Technology has moved on since then, and several revolutions (electronic, digital and virtual) later, the still ubiquitous Halloween pumpkin now struggles to be seen and feared amidst our modern gadgetry. A few of the more extravagant attempts are: pumpkins exposing themselves and puking, or pumpkins posing as octopi, oysters, hamburgers, the Death Star from Star Wars and even Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ (all and more to be found here).

I thank Ben Krall for finding among all those scary incarnations this pumpkin map of the USA. I’m not quite sure whom this is supposed to scare, though: anti-Americans? People with extreme map-phobia? Miss South Carolina?

Considering the convexity of pumpkins and the concomitant difficulty of carving out all those borders so neatly, a lot of work (and several pumpkins) must have gone into creating this rather good rendition of the United States.

Oklahoma seems to have been the top op the pumpkin, and Florida, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire seem to have been carved out of a different pumpkin.