Articles about the increasing popularity of Halloween among adults have been making the rounds. Apparently, Americans will drop somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 billion on the holiday this year alone. To keep up with the demand, there's all sorts of crazy Halloween stuff out there. In addition to a Devo radiation costume now available at Target, the Fred Meyer in Burlingame has a four-foot tall, blow-up Scooby-Doo dressed as a pirate and a bizarre, inflatable Grim Reaper tent up for grabs.

And then there's the pumpkins. They're in friggin' everything. In addition to pie, there's now pumpkin coffee, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin beer, pumpkin waffles, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin chili, pumpkin milkshakes and...pumpkin lottery tickets:

What did I win? Nuthin'.

Perhaps weirdest of all, check out these things I found last week:

Yeah, freaky pumpkin flowers and they come in two varieties.

There's "pumpkin trees" (pictured above) and these, uh, "Chinese lanterns":

So far the lanterns are holding up pretty well. The pumpkins on the "tree" started out green, turned orange and now they're red. Maybe a bad sign? They could explode at any second for all I know.

That does it. I don't want these in my living room. I'm sticking them in the yard. Or possibly in a neighbor's mailbox.