The following is the front page story for The Daily Post-Athenian this weekend. This is just mind-blowing. FRONT PAGE NEWS IN ATHENS, TENNESSEE! Enjoy:

Friday, October 30, 2009
CLAXTON – You haven’t seen eerie or spooky until you’ve seen a 16-year-old jack-o’-lantern. Or, rather, the dried husk of a jack-o’-lantern with five faces carved in its surface.

Perry Riden said of the three “Riden Boys,” youngest son Eric was the pumpkin carver.

“Eric carved it when he was in eighth grade in 1993,” Riden said. “His Grandma Riden – whom they called Mammy – set it on cardboard over a floor register and dried it.”

Riden said her son got the idea to carve five faces in a large pumpkin from a character in “Transformers.” The design was patterned after the Quintessons, fictional aliens/space monsters that were both organic and robotic.

“If I understand it correctly, the Quintessons were creators of the Transformers in the 1980s cartoons,” Riden said. “This race of beings had squid-like arms and five faces on a robotic head.”

Riden has kept the dried pumpkin – complete with stem “cap” – for 16 years.

This is hilarious to me. Front page news! “Look! It’s an old pumpkin!”

The explanation of who the Quintessons are and what their role was in the original Transformers cartoons is all straight from me. I Twittered about being on the phone with my mom, explaining that to her. I spent 20 minutes giving her all of the glorious back-story details I have had crammed away in my brain since, what, 1985? That stuff is important! Everything else, forgotten. I took three Calculus classes in college. THREE! (Well, let’s be honest. I took the same Calculus class three times before I passed it. Still..) I remember NOTHING. I DO know the origin story of the Transformers inside and out. So suck on that, complete lack of marketable skills!

They referred to Grace Riden as “Mammy” – we started calling my dad’s parents “Mammy and Pappy” because they lived in Maryville, TN (read: “Muurrrrrrrrrviilllle” – not kidding, that’s how you say it) and those were the most country sounding names we could think up. They thought it was funny, too, and totally went along with it. I love how it makes us sound even more country bumpkin now. “Funky punkin’ bumpkin!”

Also, the ambiguous “Riden has kept the dried pumpkin.. for 16 years.” sounds like this is a wacky family keepsake my mom has held on to. She is a packrat, and it has to stop.. but I should clarify.. Eric Riden has kept the dried pumpkin for 16 years. Granted, it’s been sitting in his old bedroom back at the Riden Hascienda where he has not lived in the last 10 years.. but yeah it’s there. And it’s not the strangest thing there, by a long shot.. so send a photog and a reporter, news hounds, ’cause the story is much deeper than a dried gourd.

The paper, inexplicably, posted a 53-second video of the thing being rotated again and again.

Some people ask, “Hey Chad, what was high school like for you?” Imagine being in a town where the most exciting news for the weekend is a dried out pumpkin. This morning, there were a dozen elderly people sitting in a Hardees in Athens, TN drinking coffee and talking about the Quintessons.

• Awesome. RT: @alyankovic http://twitpic.com/mdmh7 – My wife and I do everything together. #
• has a $600+ speeding ticket from Turner County, GA. No f#@&ing way that’s getting paid. WTF am I supposed to do? Not pay the mortgage? #
• [ChadRiden.com] Never made this: “Pull My Finger” http://adjix.com/w4pj #
• I’ll be stomping thru GA like Sherman the first week of November, doing a run of random shows. Please tell friends: http://adjix.com/kru5 #
• is too legit to quit #
• My mom just called and asked me about Quintessons. I wish I’d recorded the conversation. http://ping.fm/6ZDxx #
• scheduling myself for a 5pm bourbonoscopy. (via @lgu) #
• Ha ha! RT @birbigs “Jeff Dunham breaks ComedyCentral ratings records” http://bit.ly/4hSowj in other news, comedy is reportedly broken. #
• Not me, man. F-that show. RT @jdsteinhauser @ChadRiden I saw that shit! I want to see the show now just to see how bad it is. #
• Jeff Dunham show is dumb, racist, homophobic, ignorant & lowest common denominator.. of course it’s a huge mf’in success. #idiocracy #
• Naturally, if he called me tomorrow with a paycheck, i’d be happy to cash it.. & he’d instantly be a legendary, visionary genius. #
• I feel like I’m piling on to someone who was tackled a long time ago by badmouthing the Jeff Dunham Show. I don’t like badmouthing comics. #
• I’ve met Dunham a few times and he couldn’t be a nicer guy, but Jesus Herbert Christmas The Third I can’t stand to watch that show. #
• It’s like when Carlos Mencia had a show. My non-comic friends all LOVED it. I wanted to rip my brain out of my skull and set it on fire. #
• Joke I used to do: “I saw a promo on Comedy Central that said, ‘What’s inside the Mind of Mencia?’ Uh, I don’t know.. other people’s jokes?” #
• Again, I feel like I’m jumping on the bandwagon by crapping on Carlos Mencia. It’s been done.. by comics way better at it than me. #
• Of course, I’ve been saying Jay Leno’s show sucked infected donkey ass for 19 years now. Everybody else just now seem to have realized that? #
• #CHADRIDEN1K started on Oct. 8 with 388 followers. I’m now at 398! Slow down, everybody.. we don’t want to blow Twitter up. #

My mom drove Grandma Mandy to the Nashville airport on Wednesday.. spent the night and then drove back to East Tennessee with Callia. Laura and I really didn’t want her to go.. we know how much babies go for on the black market and my parents are shifty folks.

Naw, they’re all right.. they were trying to give us some “time off” but we weren’t sure we wanted it. I’d been in San Francisco for five days two weeks ago, and those last few days away from Laura and Callia were really tough. Laura hasn’t been away from Callia for more than a day. Asking her to let her baby go away for a few days was like getting in between a mother Grizzly Bear and her cubs.

It felt really weird not to wake up and get my little snuggle muffin ready in the morning and talk to her on the drive in to daycare. After work I’d catch myself driving all the way up to the daycare before remembering that she wasn’t there. Laura and I did have a good time together.. but we found ourselves wishing the baby monitor could tune her in even though she was three hours away.

Friday night, I had a show at the Comedy Catch in Chattanooga, so afterwards I spent the night at the Hascienda. Saturday morning, my dad was out on sales calls. My mom drove some visiting kids (drifters, really) in to Athens. Callia and I took a walk around the property for a while. When mom came back home, one of the kids had forgotten his luggage, plus her car had a bad antifreeze leak.. so she had to go back into town for a while.

It was a pretty morning, so Callia and I jumped in the Jeep and drove around. This was the first (and only) time I didn’t use the baby seat. She rode in my lap as we rolled around the hills. It had been raining a lot.. so everything was nice and muddy. I saw where their driveway was washed out and went back to the house to get a shovel. By the time we got back to the spot that needed work, Callia was asleep. I strapped her into the baby seat and started digging a new ditch.

Within a few minutes, Grandma Perry came home and drove Callia back up to the house. I ended up spending the whole afternoon digging a ditch about 50 feet long. Grandpa David came home and helped me finish up the job before going back to the house for dinner.
Callia and I drove back to Hermitage and got back in time to play with Laura’s friend Mandy and her daughter Nova. Last time Laura & Callia had been to Dickson, Mandy took a bunch of photos of them & she had brought them with her. They turned out REALLY nice.. Mandy’s taking a photography class & has built her own darkroom, so we asked her to make more prints for us.

Laura was happy to have Callia back, and every part of my body was sore enough to swear off ever helping anybody do anything. Mom sent a thank you card: “She was such a jewel & we had so much fun together! I certainly found out how weak & out of shape my arms are!! Uff. They ached after carrying her around.. but she wanted to be a part of everything I did!!” That’ll teach her to kidnap our little Bubba.