Today’s Photo of the Week (right on schedule, of course, and not at all delayed by three months or so), is of this Halloween-decorated house in – where else! – the State Fair neighborhood, subject of an in-depth study now bordering on overkill. OK, one more State Fair post to be squeezed out after this, then I’ll leave the prairie whores and mid-street drug dealers to themselves.

One could look at this house as a touching example of the holiday spirit manifesting itself even in the harshest conditions. Or one could say that the decoration money could’ve been better spent on a can of exterior paint for this collapsing trapezoid once known as a home, since the house was already scary enough without extra decorative help.

State Fair is one of those neighborhoods where Devil’s Night was a three-day extravaganza in the 1980s, a sort of grass-roots urban renewal in which empty structures were made to go away through the persistent application of fire. That was back before the city redesignated it as Angels’ Night, when thousands of people patrol the streets to make sure residents don’t burn their own neighborhoods down. On the plus side, at least we don’t have tourists coming to town just to watch parts of it burn down anymore. And that’s progress!

More soon. Well, at least sooner than usual.