What better night to try something like a "scotch egg" for the first time than on Halloween?

Or maybe Thanksgiving or Guy Fawkes Day would be more appropriate?

If you're not already familiar, they're hard boiled eggs wrapped in sausage and deep-fried like a doughnut. The final product is roughly the size of a baseball and you can find them on the menu at the Horse Brass Pub on SE Belmont.

I was stuck at work until fairly late night and wound up celebrating Halloween with a sibling over a dinner consisting of the egg, bangers and mash, chocolate beer, a Green King ale and a pastie. Apparently, in Britain pasties are flattened pot pies, not the things that, well, you already know. Learn something new every day. Anyway, my sibling's thoughts on the egg: "too salty."

The few times I've been there the bar has attracted an eclectic crowd. Last night it was full of chain-smoking Irish guys, old hippies, waiters on their way home and a chain-smoking skeleton that looked like he just got off work from a haunted house and/or just got done kicking the crap out of Ralph Macchio.

Since it was a rainy, miserable Halloween, I figured we wouldn't see anything interesting during a prerequisite buzz down 2nd Avenue. Instead, we spotted;

Speed Racer being trailed by two girls in hot-pants and silver wigs.

Kid Rock walking hand-in-hand with a transvestite Pam Anderson.

A dairy cow with a plastic penis in place of an udder trying to guide patrons into Bar 71.

Three guys in white shirts, black ties and bicycle helmets. I yelled out the window to confirm the obvious. Yeah, they were dressed up as Mormons.

And then we went back to our parents' place to watch the "Fat Albert Halloween Special" on a twenty-year old videotape. I added at least a half-dozen fun-size Butterfingers to the British food in my stomach but, strangely enough, didn't wind up downing any Pepto later. Sill, it was probably the best that I hadn't ordered the steak and kidney pie.