News from Illinois and other Midwestern pumpkin farms has me worried I'll have to add more security to my front walk. My front yard, relieved this spring of its burden of grass, is a wild mess of corn stalks, bean and tomato vines, sunflowers, asparagus ferns, and pumpkins. My kids have already eaten one pie and two loaves of pumpkin bread from the gourds grown right here. Come December, we could be the only ones for blocks eating pumpkin pie; food giant Nestle says a rainy Midwestern growing season means they've lost what was left of a small harvest; and there will be no more Libby canned pumpkin shipped after Thanksgiving.

Nestle controls an incredible 85% of the U.S. pumpkin crop destined for canning, and it's located on 5,000 acres of farmland in Illinois. The crop was looking 15% to 50% smaller than normal at the end of the summer; and then came the fall rains, which destroyed what remained. Typically, Nestle cans the late bloomers from the 2009 crop in October and November to stock shelves for Christmas and the first half of the next year.

It turns out that the bad economy is great for coin-op laundromats. Because, though houses with laundry rooms will be foreclosed upon, washing machines and dryers will break and be too expensive to fix, and sometimes, we lose our homes entirely, we still need clean clothes.

Long the refuge for college students, the young creative class, jobless, homeless and others not in possession of a few Whirlpools, laundromats are now flourishing. And the middle class is showing up, too, pride and laundry baskets in hand.

By all appearances, this would be a great time to get into the business of laundry; the Wall Street Journal recently profiled one such man, Brian McChristian, laid off in early 2008 and now running the Austin, Texas Community Coin Laundry; and he's one of the lucky ones. His business is doing well, thanks in part to his efforts to keep his parking lot and facility free of anyone not doing laundry.

Dodgeball: perhaps no grade school sport is infused with more cringing memories and dark humor.

And the story of 12-year-old Shane Reese surely has both elements, along with a little "what were they thinking?" and could spell doom for the activity's future in New York schools.

The boy's been offered $20,000 by the Bronx school district thanks to an accidental ball in the teeth. A judge will decide if that's enough.

Let's take you back to Dec. 22, 2008, at Intermediate School 219 in the Bronx, N.Y. It was a rainy day and really close to Christmas -- the Bronx school district doesn't let out for winter break until Dec. 24 -- so many teachers had already taken off for the holiday. What to do with 100 students cooped up and buzzing over the upcoming holidays? A friendly game of dodgeball, of course!

Off to the school gym they went, where it was extremely crowded and none of the traditional soft rubber balls were to be found. No matter: plenty of soccer balls were rolling around the equipment room. Those will work, right? (Ouch.)

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday -- or at least the Ruby Tuesday we once knew. Gone are the knock-off Tiffany lamps and the cheesy knickknacks that once served as such great comedic fodder for the fictional restaurant Chotchkie's in the movie Office Space Gone, too, are the waitstaff clad in white shirts and ties that hark back to 1989. Instead of fusion cuisine excesses like Southwestern egg rolls and the Macho Nacho burger, the new Ruby Tuesday's menu is about bison burgers, prime rib, and lobster -- with a side of macaroni and cheese, of course.

It's not exactly four-star dining, but it's surely a long way from a casual dining restaurant where "casual" far outshone the other possible monikers. The new Ruby Tuesday's features waiters and waitresses in black tees and pants -- "hipster" style, the New York Times says -- leather banquettes, dark varnished wood, and a menu that would feel right at home in this millennium. In addition to the lobster and prime rib, there's jumbo lump crab cakes, broiled tilapia, and a crispy shrimp sampler in which sesame seeds and peanut glaze make an appearance.

The headlines for various projects and challenges to eat on a small food budget always slurp me in with their titillation, the gauntlet-throwing, and immediately I ask myself: could I do it? The answer always disappoints, because I'm either doing it already or find the challenge so impossible it's meaningless. Eating on $1 a day per person?

The term "frugalista" may be trademarked, but frugality is so hip the practice deserves a new, rights-free term. Let's call ourselves the "frugalite," as in, "frugal" and "elite." Or call it "thrift store chic."

We may be doing this because of the recession, but baby? Frugal is the new awesome.

The frugal run the gamut from the truly extreme (counting toilet paper squares, re-using plastic wrap, making your own laundry detergent) to the practical environmentalist (biking instead of driving, fixing old appliances and furniture instead of buying, re-using glass jars and plastic bags) to the hipster broke artsy (making hats out of holey sweaters and wedding gowns out of plastic newspaper bags).

Wherever you fall on the spectrum, however, it's clear that frugality has had a resurgence of the sort not seen since the Great Depression.

I was helping my second-grader with his homework; he was reluctant to read a the little copy-printed book on bartering, saying, with full eye-rolls, that he'd already read it.

So we read it together, and worked through the questions at the end. Suddenly his eyes lit up. "You and dad barter!" he said.

Exactly. Here in Portland, Ore., I am such a regular user of the barter economy that the book's historical viewpoint (first came bartering, and finally came malls) seems passé.

The grocery co-op where we are member-owners holds an annual holiday barter swap, instead of a bazaar, and we look forward to the seed and start swap in the spring. On Portland's craigslist barter page, hundreds of offerings appear every day, and if it weren't for the constant request to trade something for an iPhone, you'd think it was 1972.

"VHS copies of your favourite horror movies that you replaced on DVD this year for Tokyo Long Scarlet Radishes," reads one ad, also suggesting the trade of an old window for a 10-pound Fielderkraut cabbage.

Saul Friedman has written a column for the Long Island, N.Y. daily newspaper, Newsday, since 1996. But recently, his weekly column on aging, "Gray Matters," became restricted behind a paid subscriber wall. As a result ,Friedman, who is the winner of journalism's prestigious Nieman Fellowship and who roused enough rabble to land on a list of Nixon political opponents, quit in protest.

Friedman's reaction may well be justified. Only subscribers to Newsday, which is sold in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, and in New York City, can now read his full column online. In fact, Friedman, who lives near Washington, D.C. and isn't in the Newsday circulation area, can't even read his own columns online now. Customers of Cablevision, the company that owns Newsday, can also access Newsday online free of charge, but the rest of the world outside New York City's five buroughs and Long Island, has to pay $5 a week for the privilege.

Sweet, saucy, and from the slums, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail both went from wretched poverty to international fame after starring in the 2009 Academy Award winner for Best Picture and Best Director, Slumdog Millionaire.

But they just won't go to school, even though the movie's producer and director got the young stars placed in a Mumbai school and paid their tuition until they turn 18... and even though they've set up a trust that's dependent on the children attending school for the next seven or eight years.

Ali, 10, and Ismail, 11, have average attendance of about one in three days, and though Slumdog producer Christian Colson and director Danny Boyle have urged their parents to accept their offer of apartments outside of the slums, only Ismail's mother has taken the moviemakers up on their offer.

Thursday, October 29, is a date many of you would have circled on your calendar... if you still circled things on paper calendars. It's the day SAT scores for the test taken October 12 are available online.