These are the people I'm not trusting this week. As always, I can only assume the fault rests with them.

Conde Nast. Several weeks ago, Conde Nast pulled the plug on a lovely and respected magazine called Gourmet, a necessary evil, some have argued, if the company is to continue to give the New Yorker’s David Remnick full autonomy to whiff on high-profile subjects like Nikki Finke. I picked up the final issue from a newsstand last week, both out of nostalgia and because I was looking for a recipe with pumpkin in it. As usual, it was a painfully well put-together magazine, from the writing to the perfect cover art, a roasted, vaguely lonely looking holiday turkey, unadorned by text. It was more than a little spooky. The message was clear: this is the end. Imagine my surprise then when five or six subscription cards came tumbling out of the middle of the book. SAVE on a two-year subscription to Gourmet! 67% off the newsstand price! I’m not really worried about the people who send away for these subscriptions—they’ll get Bon Appetit and be fine. But come on, SI Newhouse, how about a little respect for the writers, editors and art team that killed themselves putting out this magazine? If you really, truly have to send the Gourmet staff packing, that’s part of life—but don’t piggyback on their achievements, indeed the promise of future achievements, by taking one last stab at selling subscriptions for a magazine that will never come. Have some respect for the dead.

Mark Chmura. By some weird coincidence, most of my friends at college in Wisconsin hailed from Minneapolis/St. Paul. Needless to say, we got in a lot of Mark Chmura jokes over the four years. This is a subject people in Wisconsin have no sense of humor about, which of course made it about twenty times funnier. The Milwaukee suburbs are close-knit enough that naming your beer pong team “Chewie’s Hot Tub” will inevitably cause a tipsy blonde girl to come in off the balcony and explain to you how Catholic Memorial is a school for “bad girls.” (Only in Wisconsin are there still “bad girls.”) Needless to say, I wish I was there this week now Chewie’s on record saying Dorsey Levens and Edgar Bennett are just as good as Adrian Peterson and Chester Taylor. That's like saying Victor Salva is as good as Roman  Polanski. Madness!

Larry Johnson. As somebody who handcuffed Jamaal Charles several weeks ago in fantasy football, I wish Johnson the best on his Nixon-like descent into madness. Funny story: I saw Johnson in person two weeks ago when the Chiefs played the Redskins. Without a doubt the worst body language I’ve ever seen from an athlete. I was texting Michael Lombardi with updates from my seat behind the Kansas City bench, it was so bad. Refusing to stretch, staying 20 yards from his position group, and, my personal favorite, making a big show of untucking his jersey in front of Todd Haley. The best part came when he managed to string together a few nice runs, prompting his thirty or so family and friends a few rows ahead of me to break out in cries of “One more year!”  In retrospect, they were probably a bit optimistic.

Basic cable. There was a time—I’ll call it childhood—when AMC devoted the entire month of October to schlocky old horror movies. I would get the TV Guide and plan out which day was best to pretend to be sick so I could stay home and watch them. Good, bad, it didn’t matter—I was a sucker for guys in lab coats attempting to reason with mutant insects and  paranoiacs yelling “You fools!” at anyone who disagreed with them. But now, with every studio running their own cable channel, it’s getting harder and harder for impressionable minds to know where to go to be damaged by a slasher movie at 2 p.m. I haven’t even seen “Halloween” this year (to say nothing of “Halloween IV,” which has one of the creepiest title sequences in movie history). Come on—give the kids their P.J. Soles.

Girls who object to the sexualization of Halloween. A friend was complaining to me today about her inability to find a Halloween costume. This is what girls do this time of year—worry about their Halloween costumes. She pointedly refused any of my suggestions, most of which were of the sexy ___ ilk. “Ray,” she said sternly, in the way only Connecticut girls can, “I can’t abandon my feelings about objectification for the sake of one day.” Um, why not? Isn’t that the very point of Halloween, to present yourself in a way that is contrary to reality? There’s kind of an unspoken social contract where everyone agrees to assume you do not go around the other 364 days of the year dressed as Count Dracula or Skanky Joan Jett or Zombie Betty Draper (both of which this girl could totally pull off, by the way). She’ll probably split the difference and go as Tina Fey.

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