Ah yes, October, the eighth month of the year, as signified by its prefix' octo,' is here at last. Hold on a minute; October is the tenth month! Come to think of it, the whole end of the year seems like it's numbered wrong. September, 'septi' meaning seven; November, 'novi' meaning nine; and December, 'deci' meaning ten—aren't those the ninth, eleventh, and twelfth months?

It turns out all these month names are left over from the ancient Roman calendar, in which September really was the seventh month, October was the eighth, and so forth. That calendar was a jumbled affair that attempted to have it both ways, tracking the lunar phases while sticking to the solar seasons of planting and harvest, midsummer and midwinter. But the lunar and solar cycles are very out of sync. The decimal-loving ancient Romans had ten moon-ish months, kicking off with March, named for the war god Mars, adding up to 304 days, followed by a random bunch of days at the end of the year called 'kalends' that would get them through to the next year. Julius Caesar improved on this in 46 B.C., officially adding the months of January and February before March for a 365-day calendar, with a leap year every four years. They probably should have thought up some new names for October and the rest while they were at it, but I guess no one bothered to. By the time the Gregorian calendar superseded the Julian calendar in 1582, the old names were here to stay. So: Happy October!

Let us consider some of the holidays, weeks, and months of October. As usual, these may include ancient observances, cultural traditions, religious feasts, dates of historical significance, educational initiatives, blatant commercial campaigns, and good old-fashioned silliness by proclamation.

October is:

National Chili Month. The perfect hot and hearty bowl for October, just when it's starting to get a little chilly! (You see what I did there.) This classic southwestern fare is made from chili peppers, beef, tomatoes, and beans, topped with onions and cheese—although there is much debate over which ingredients are truly legitimate, what goes into various secret recipes, and so forth. Spicy capsicum peppers are native to South and Central America and have long been made into a stew of chili con carne, which, in addition to the healthful and energizing properties of the hot peppers, can be a useful recipe for covering up the taste of gamey ingredients when one is out on the range. European explorers and colonizers took note of New World chili peppers and brought them back to the Old World, part of the great exchange in which the Old World got tobacco, maize, tomatoes, and potatoes, and the New World got livestock, wheat, slaves, deadly diseases and so forth. Chili was all the rage in 19th-century San Antonio, made and sold first by 'chili queens' on street corners, followed by a proliferation of chili parlors, each touting its own special recipe. It was also sold in dehydrated polyhedral form as 'brick chili,' which was popular during the Gold Rush days for ease of rehydrating and reheating over the campfire. Texas declared chili the official state dish in 1977, and regional variants have spread across the nation since. The world's hottest chili pepper as of 2023 is Pepper X, painstakingly bred by Ed Currie, which, at 2.69 million Scoville heat units, is twice as hot as the previous champ, the Carolina Reaper, which was also bred by Ed. You could eat a Pepper X, should you be so reckless, but you would immediately be stricken with hours of debilitating cramps and heartburn. The Scoville scale is named for pharmacist Wilbur Scoville, who, in 1912, developed a method for testing sensitivity to capsaicin.

Cryptocurrency Month. This one sounds like another industry hustle. The story of cryptocurrency vis-a-vis regular or fiat currency is a complex one, which I barely understand well enough to offer the following poor summary. Since recorded history, societies have evolved from bartering, or the exchange of things with inherent value like produce and chickens, to increasingly abstract forms of money – coins made of precious metals, to paper currency backed by government holdings of precious metals, to paper currency backed by government promises, to electronic currency transactions like online banking and ATM cards. Fiat currencies, such as dollars, pesos, pounds, yuan, and so forth, are issued and backed by national governments with central banks that stabilize their value. In the 1980s, futurists and computer scientists started to envision a digital currency whose value would be decentralized rather than controlled by banks and governments, with peer-to-peer transactions guaranteed by computer encryption and timestamps. Bitcoin first appeared in 2009, created by the shadowy and pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. Transactions are recorded and verified in a distributed online ledger called a blockchain. New coins are generated or found through a herculean number-crunching process known as mining. On the upside, bitcoins can be transferred anonymously, and their value is secured through network consensus without any government snooping or reliance on banks. On the downside, this makes Bitcoin amenable to money laundering and criminal activity, as well as requiring the computing power of vast server farms to maintain the chain and do the mining, an incredibly energy-intensive process with obvious environmental impacts. Also, on the downside, because its value is not stabilized by a government, it can be extremely volatile. In the bigger picture, the value of cryptocurrency really depends on the ability to exchange it for regular currency, at least until crypto fully replaces that, if ever. You can get rich (in regular money) trading cryptocurrency if you successfully time the market's enthusiasm for it. But shady dealing between large sums of regular currency and cryptocurrency was a big part of what led to the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX exchange in 2023, followed by lengthy prison sentences. Inspired by the success of Bitcoin, optimistic developers have since hyped the possibilities of Litecoin, Namecoin, Dogecoin, Grindcoin, Monero, Etherium, Coinye, Polkadot, and SafeMoon, to name a few.

Squirrel Awareness Month. Squirrels are a notoriously powerful lobby in Washington, and clearly, they called in a few favors to make this happen. The squirrel family includes ground squirrels, such as chipmunks and prairie dogs; flying squirrels, including the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, which can grow up to four feet long; and the familiar varieties of tree squirrels, omnipresent in urban environments. They can leap up to ten times their body length and run at speeds nearing 20 miles per hour, including headfirst down tree trunks. Their double-jointed hind legs and 180-degree rotating feet add to their agility. Squirrels use their big bushy tails for balance, body heat management, as umbrellas, and to signal interest during mating season. Some famous squirrels to be aware of: Rocky, friend to Bullwinkle J. Moose, Scrat from the Ice Age movies, and Secret Squirrel, a 1960s Hanna-Barbera spoof on James Bond wearing a purple fedora and a trenchcoat full of wacky spy gadgets. Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, squirrels were popular pets, especially American gray squirrels—Benjamin Franklin owned one named Mungo, and Warren G. Harding had a pet squirrel named Pete. They were considered easy to take care of and are often depicted in portraits of the time, perched on a shoulder or leashed on a golden chain. It turns out that squirrels actually do not make great pets—they can be destructive, finicky eaters and tend to thrive in the wild rather than the home.

National Roller Skating Month. In the words of Vaughan Mason's immortal 1980 hit "Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll:"

Roller skaters celebrate the disco way
Give your feet the freedom, let's bounce today
Roller skaters, one in front and one behind
Bounce left, bounce right, it's disco time

Roller skates were used as a stunt prop in English stage performances as far back as the 1740s to simulate a gliding motion. In 1760, a brilliant Belgian inventor and clockmaker named John Joseph Merlin made a pair of roller skates with metal wheels, whose use he demonstrated while playing the violin and then crashing spectacularly. Later, tinkerers continued to improve the design, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, roller skating was wildly popular and also somewhat safer. Roller skating went through several booms in America starting in the 1880s, but its real heyday was the 1970s when it was discovered that the bounce and bass of disco make the perfect soundtrack for roller motion. In the early 80s, a pair of Minnesotan entrepreneurs started a company that made heavy-duty inline skates attached to boots, known as Rollerblade, Inc. These took off in the 1990s, especially in scenic outdoor settings like the Venice Boardwalk. During the COVID-19 shutdown, roller skating saw a new boom in popularity; skates were sold out everywhere, and roller disco tunes by Dua Lipa and Bruno Mars hit the charts. On my long-ago summer vacations from junior high, my parents insisted that I take up a sporting activity. Not being overly athletic, I chose roller skating, which I pursued avidly on Saturday afternoons at rinks like the Time Tunnel and Wheels Plus in El Paso. (In high school, I switched my official sporting activity to billiards.) Many of Los Angeles' iconic roller rinks have shuttered, but you can still groove it up at the Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale, Pigeon's in Long Beach, or the skate dance plaza on Venice Beach.

Some October weeks:

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta takes place the first week of October. It began in 1972 as a 50th birthday party for AM radio station KKOB 770. In an attempt to gather the largest-ever number of hot air balloons in one place, they assembled 13. Through the years, the Fiesta has grown to become the world's biggest and best-known ballooning event, with an all-time high of 1019 balloons launched in 2000. Nowadays, there are mass morning ascensions, glowing balloons in the evening, parades of balloons with unusual shapes, and much more. The cool morning air over central New Mexico in October makes it an ideal venue, along with a reliable weather phenomenon known as the 'Albuquerque Box.' The winds at lower elevations generally blow north, and at higher altitudes, they blow south, forming a box pattern that balloonists can use to return to their point of origin and not stray too far. This also enables competitions like the 'key grab,' in which passing balloonists try to grab the keys to a brand-new car or truck off the top of a tall pole. Accidents have thankfully been few, other than a notable one in 2004 when a Smokey the Bear-themed balloon crashed into the KKOB radio tower—the balloonists escaped unharmed.

National Metric Week. The week containing the tenth day of the tenth month is National Metric Week, as decreed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 1976 in their ongoing endeavor to get America to abandon the messy, old-fashioned English system of inches, feet, miles, and pounds. Some metric system jokes for you:

• America hasn't adopted the metric system yet—but we're inching toward it!
• Before you judge someone who's not on the metric system, you should walk 1.609344 kilometers in their shoes.
• I hear there's a girl in my neighborhood who shares my enthusiasm for the metric system—I can't wait to meter!
• Some famous jazz musicians went metric—for example, the great trumpet player Kilometers Davis.
• Why won't Americans switch to the metric system? We'll never accept a foreign ruler.

National Kraut Sandwich Week. German stuff sometimes gets labeled 'kraut,' as in sauerkraut, a Teutonic sliced pickled cabbage. The term can be used as an insult, but also proudly self-applied, as in the style of music called 'krautrock' or the National Kraut Packers Association, which designated the third week of October as Kraut Sandwich Week in 1980. Be sure to have yourself a Reuben with pastrami or corned beef, a Kottenbutter, a Wurstbrot, a Mettbrötchen, or a Fischbrötchen this week—even a hamburger would probably count.

Some days of October:

National Pumpkin Spice Day is October 1st. Pumpkin spice is a blend of spices used in pumpkin pie—cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves or allspice. The cozy Fall pumpkin spice fad started in the 90s with specialty coffeehouse drinks and really blasted off in 2003 when Starbucks launched their limited-time Pumpkin Spice Latte. Everybody had to have one! Spiceheads got hooked even harder a few years later when Starbucks added a gamifying element, where you could "unlock" the Pumpkin Spice Latte before the official sale date with a special code. Since then, a surprising array of products have jumped on the pumpkin-spice bandwagon—candles and shampoo, of course, but also deodorant, cough drops, toilet paper, kitty litter, trash bags, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Cup O'Noodles, Pringles, Spam, bath salts, oat milk, and hard seltzer to name just a few. The Pumpkin Capital of the World is Morton, Illinois, where Libby's pumpkin pie filling is processed and canned. Food historians think that the pumpkin "pie" made by Native Americans, later enshrined as the classic Thanksgiving dessert, was pretty different from the kind we make today in a pie pan with a wheat-based crust baked in an oven. Instead, a whole pumpkin was hollowed out, filled with goat milk, honey, and spices, cooked in the fire's ashes, then chilled to custard consistency, sliced, and served. Yum!

National Name Your Car Day is October 2nd. There are some famous cars with names in movies, television, and books—Herbie the Love Bug, Christine, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Lightning McQueen, the Mystery Machine, K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider (and his evil twin, K.A.R.R.). In Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert Humbert calls his car Melmoth (after Charles Maturin's 1820 gothic tale Melmoth the Wanderer). Cars are frequently branded with the name of their inventor: Ferrari, De Lorean, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Porsche, Chrysler, Buick, Ford, Honda, Toyota, and Citroën. In turn, many car brands have become popular as names for babies: Mercedes, Bentley, Kia, and Lexus for example, and Tesla is on the rise. People have thought up some pretty snappy names for their cars, as I discovered on some online car forums. Some of my favorites: Vlad the Impala, Vroomhilda, Helen Wheels, Wheels de Grasse Tyson, Mustang Sally, Adam Driver, Art Carfunkel, Elvis Carstello, Janeane Carofalo, the Brave Little Toaster, the Yellow Submarine, Morticia, Liz Lemon, Ron Burgundy, Clifford the Big Red Car, Imperator Furiosa, and Manuela with the manual transmission. Not to mention Jolene the Jetta, Trixie the Toyota, Henry the Ford, Etta the Jetta, Frankie the Focus, Eva the Captiva, Rhonda the Honda, Hugo the Yugo, Ravida Jones the RAV4, and of course Bradley the Mini Cooper.

National Chess Day is the second Saturday in October. If you have your chili, your kraut sandwich, and your pumpkin spice, and you have roller-skated and traded some cryptocurrency, you are probably ready for a nice game of chess. This ancient game, of which there have been versions throughout history and around the world, is the clash of two players marshaling armies of little kings, queens, bishops, knights, rooks, and pawns. The pieces are moved around the squares of the board in various rule-determined ways to eliminate their opponents until there is a draw, or one side puts the other's king in checkmate. There is no element of chance or hidden knowledge in chess, just pure strategy. In the 80s, this seemed like a good test case for computer programming, and as chess-playing programs were developed, fans wondered if they would ever get powerful enough to defeat the best human players. That eventually came to pass in 1997 when Deep Blue finally beat world champion Garry Kasparov; since then, computers have only gotten faster and smarter. During the 2020 pandemic, Netflix's miniseries adaptation of Walter Tevis' 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit was a hit with homebound viewers, kicking off a new interest in chess among the younger generation.

National Chicken & Waffles Day is October 20th. This day was designated in honor of the beloved L.A. soul food restaurant chain Roscoe's House of Chicken & Waffles. Originally founded in Long Beach in 1975 by Harlem expat Herb Hudson, it quickly became popular with celebrities and musicians like Redd Foxx, Natalie Cole, and Stevie Wonder. More locations were opened, and there are now six around town, including Hollywood, South L.A., Inglewood, La Brea, and Anaheim, and possibly a new one opening in San Diego soon. The pairing goes back to German settlers in Pennsylvania in the 1700s who brought over with them a creamed chicken and waffle dish. This was later elevated into a Southern staple, with the substitution of fried chicken, which African American chefs perfected. There's no wrong way to eat chicken and waffles at Roscoe's: hot sauce or syrup, on separate items, or all together? Wrap the waffle around the chicken and eat it like a gyro? Add bacon, grits, or greens? You decide. Jonathan Gold praised their hot water cornbread, made by adding cornmeal and salt to scalding water and then frying it up like a pancake. When Barack Obama visited in 2011, he ordered the No. 9 Country Boy, three fried chicken wings, and a waffle; Roscoe's renamed it the Obama Special. Roscoe's gets a mention in the movies Jackie Brown, Rush Hour, and Swingers, and in the 1988 comedy Tapeheads, John Cusack and Tim Robbins make a very enjoyable Roscoe's TV commercial with a catchy tune. Everyone from Magic Johnson to Snoop Dogg to David Beckham to Kendrick Lamar loves Roscoe's. If you haven't yet tried this L.A. classic, this could be your day.

National Back to the Future Day is October 21st. Technically this is Back to the Future Part II Day—the first Back to the Future movie takes place in early November of 1985 and 1955. In Part II, Doc Brown arrives in the 80s, from a visit to the future, to insist that Marty McFly return with him in order to prevent his future son from participating in a robbery and going to jail. The two travel ahead to October 21, 2015, in order to arrive a few days before the crime takes place. Hoverboarding and complicated timeline hijinks ensue. Screenwriter Bob Gale claims to have invented this far-off date when they were writing the second script in the 80s as a great imaginary future day when the luckless Chicago Cubs would finally win the World Series, something they had failed to do since 1908. In the movie, on October 21, 2015, the Chicago Cubs are depicted winning the Series against the fictional Miami Gators—the idea of a Florida MLB team was also considered an amusingly futuristic notion. Real-life Cubs fans and movie fans eagerly awaited this date as the year finally drew near. As it turned out, on that very day, the Cubs actually lost the pennant to the Mets, who the Royals would go on to defeat in the 2015 Series. However, in 2016 the Cubs really did win the World Series, ending their century-plus drought, so the movie's prediction was only off by a year. The official Back to the Future Twitter account tweeted their congratulations and theorized that the one-year discrepancy was likely due to a "disruption in the space-time continuum" caused by the 1994 players' strike, which canceled the World Series that year. Florida did eventually get two baseball teams, the Miami Marlins in 1993 and the Tampa Bay Rays in 1998.

National Horror Movie Day is October 23rd. Horror stories have been around as long as storytelling itself. Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft famously declared in his study of the genre, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Many critics have tried to pinpoint the essence of horror, and most conclude that it involves a stronger, more mysterious kind of threat than an ordinary one like getting punched in the face: the presence of evil, or the supernatural, or according to Noel Carroll's Philosophy of Horror, the 'impure.' Not long after Edison invented motion picture technology, an ambitious French magician and stage actor named George Méliès showed off its potential for special effects in what was most likely the first horror film in 1896: the three-minute silent Manoir du Diable or House of the Devil, featuring specters, animated skeletons, a man transforming into a bat, and Mephistopheles conjuring a woman up from a cauldron. I remember watching my first serious horror movie when I was 14. My best friend's parents were out of town, and we decided to rent a VHS tape of The Exorcist and watch it at his house. As it happened, not only was it the scariest thing we had ever seen, but his parent's house was laid out exactly like the one in the movie, and the guest bedroom where I would be staying was up very similar-looking stairs in the exact same corner as the one inhabited by Linda Blair. It was not a restful night!

National Candy Corn Day is October 30th. Candy corn is a sweet, chewy, triangular little item that is supposed to look like a kernel of corn with layers of yellow, orange, and white. It was invented by an employee of the Wunderle Candy Company in the 1880s, originally branded as "Chicken Feed" and popular year-round. Nowadays, Brach's is the biggest manufacturer, cranking out some 9 billion pieces of it annually, mostly sold around Halloween time. As a trick-or-treating commodity, candy corn often gets described with words like "polarizing" and "contentious." Some love it; many loathe it. In a 2022 Consumer Reports survey of their office staff, candy corn was ranked as the number one worst Halloween candy, followed by Good & Plenty, Airheads, Hot Tamales, Tootsie Rolls, and Twizzlers. (Oddly, these all outranked the objectively vile Circus Peanuts.) Referencing its waxy texture and old-fashioned harvest look, comedian Lewis Black once suggested that every extant piece of candy corn was manufactured in 1911. However, it is still the top-selling Halloween candy on Amazon, narrowly leading a divided field, perhaps because it is inexpensive and iconically autumnal. In an effort to break out of the Halloween niche, Brach's offers many other varieties for holidays year-round: red and green "reindeer corn" for Christmas, pink and lavender "Cupid corn" for Valentine's Day, pastel-hued "bunny corn" for Easter, and of course, red white and blue "freedom corn" for the Fourth of July.

National Doorbell Day is October 31st. Make sure yours is in working order!