Sweet news: I, like so many others, are looking for sweet stuff to hit the news channels tomorrow.

Wisconsin is nicely turning out to be leaning in a terrifically sweet direction. And that’s the kind of delicious place this is. Here’s yet another example of it: yesterday, friends invited me to sample their 24 year old bottle of red Bordeaux. [They were uncorking a 1970 vintage that they’d been saving for a long, long time; to clarify --I love the fact that others can be so patient, even if the only really old bottle of wine that I myself have managed to preserve is a $5 version of some dessert atrocity that, for one reason or another, I forgot to throw away.] Cool. Yes, of course…..oh! but it’s Halloween, how can I abandon the 300 children that come through this block? I bargained for a slight delay so that I could at least take care of the littlest devils that ring the doorbell. It’s an awfully long path for small feet to climb. But at 7 pm I finally closed the door, leaving a monsterously big sign outside with this message:

Happy Halloween!
Take ONE piece!
[I’m watching! If you take
More than your share,
The GOBLINS WILL
HAUNT YOU TONIGHT!]
Boo!

I left a big container of assorted candy bars and left. Family and friends scoffed. The first batch of kids will empty things out. Don’t even bother. Etc.

Oh, the cynics of this world, how wrong you can be! I came home after 10 p.m. and there were 6 candy bars left. (Over a hundred had been removed – which is about the number of kids that I would expect to come after 7.) Sweet.

Is it more of a challenge to find the sweet side of New York, especially around such intersections as 2nd and 2nd or 1st and 1st? The neighborhood begins to look more worn and tattered. If Giuliani (of “it’s the troops’ fault!” fame) cleaned up the streets of NY, he forgot about these blocks.

But it’s never too hard in New York to stumble upon treats such as these: