Welcome to the Cockkey Ride Home for Friday, October 1st, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. Today, the persisting

myth of tampered with and tainted trick-or-treat candy, and why it's an urban legend that will never die.

Plus, how we humans produce speech and a website that shows you both the beautiful engineering

and the chaos of our mouths.

And a selection of haunted houses you can sleep over at in case you're looking to up the ante

on your spooky experiences this month.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

With increased caution around the spread of germs during our ongoing pandemic,

it totally makes sense that parents would be wary about their kids going trick-or-treating later this month. But based on local news headlines and social media posts from police

departments, the much bigger concern isn't catching COVID from a neighbor, but rather receiving

edibles designed to look like popular candy. One particular tweet from a local news anchor has gone viral. It reads,

Beware, as Halloween gets closer, Ben Salem Police are warning parents to look at your child's

candy before they eat it. They confiscated these snacks that look a lot like the real thing,

all are laced with THC, End quote. The accompanying photos show several

bags of edibles that are packaged to look just like name brand candies and junk food,

sweet tarts, nerds, Cheetos, Sour Patch Kids, but all subtly feature marijuana leaves and

words like medicated and descriptions of the THC potency.

There's a few issues with this tweet. First, as the takeout points out, it never mentions

that these were confiscated from people who were planning to give them to kids. They could

have just had them for their own use as adults. Despite the fact that some Pennsylvania lawmakers

recently introduced a bill to legalize

recreational cannabis, animals like these are still very much illegal in the town where they were

...