I love the fall. September's okay and October rocks (and not just because I was born smack dab in the middle of it).

I love theme parks. They're a lot of fun, good family stuff, and a lot of fun (I'm easily amused).

I just don't like them together. In the fall, theme park billboards - which are normally quite creative - give way to the most vile of graphics.

When I was a kid, the Johnsons at the IGA store mounted what was to my child's eye a humongous Frankenstein Monster on the end of aisle 4. It flat out terrified me. I knew it wasn't real, I knew it was harmless, but I hated it. It was just a big, green stereotypical monster.

Not so the theme park billboards. Universal Monsters were great. Far removed from real life in fantasy and time, the were the ultimate escapism. But serial killers, bloody hands holding bloody cellphones, psychotic vagabonds with grotesque expressions, demented grandmas bearing knives... these are neither fantasty, nor removed from our time. Why glorify these things?

If they want them inside their theme parks, no problem; but on billboards that we drive our kids by? Along the highways I drive to work on?

No thanks. No thanks, at all.