Beware of glowing Dew, Halloween hoaxes and Bears hype

"On the way home, can you swing by a store and buy us some Mountain Dew?" my three sons ask.

Don't worry. The caffeine-laden, sugary pop is for science, not drinking, they assure me.

Seems that Ross, Ben and Will stumbled across a very convincing YouTube video of a science experiment titled, "How to make Mountain Dew glow in the dark."

In that video, a guy pours a little baking soda and hydrogen peroxide into a bottle of Mountain Dew, shakes it up, and the liquid glows bright green. He even unscrews the cap and pours the glowing liquid onto the ground to spell his name in lights. This, my kids think, will be great on Halloween night.

The Glow-in-the-Dark Mountain Dew experiment is very impressive, and leaves me very skeptical. But I am the dubious dad who once mocked my sons' insistence that dropping Mentos candies in a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke would result in a bubbling, foamy geyser. And that worked so well, I needed a hose to clean off the sidewalk.

So I buy the Mountain Dew, and Sunday night, after the Bears game, we run a dress rehearsal to verify the glowing capabilities.

We add the hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, shake it up, and get nothing-except a healthy lesson in skepticism for the boys and a reassurance for me that Mountain Dew doesn't contain the same chemicals found in glow sticks, which makes me feel slightly better about letting my kids occasionally drink a Mountain Dew.

The whole glow-in-the-dark Dew thing is a hoax. A hoax published on the Internet.

"Why would someone do that?" one of my boys asks, even cynically suggesting that maybe the Dew folks do it to drum up sales.

Well, it is Halloween, and some people get a treat out of tricking others.

It's not exactly a hoax, but our national fear that a kid-killing maniac will use tainted treats to murder on Halloween has as much validity as glowing Mountain Dew.

"I can't find any evidence that any child has ever been killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating," says pre-eminent Halloween researcher Joel Best, author and professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He's been looking for reports of razor blades in apples and poisoned candy for 51 years. Heck, even finding a kid who gets an apple without a razor blade would be rare in this age when store-bought sweets are the norm.

"I just don't think there is any reason to believe that is out there," Best says of the Halloween sadism he busts as a contemporary legend. The most famous, and perhaps only, poisoning case happened in Texas in 1974, and involved a father who was later convicted and executed for using cyanide-tainted Halloween candy to murder his 8-year-old son.

While there have been isolated cases of razor blades and pins found in trick-or-treat goodies (Best found 12 reports in 1982, the year of the Tylenol-tampering murders), almost all of them were pranks and hoaxes, Best says. Even though we still see warnings in the media to be mindful of Halloween sadism, it would seem that diabetes and obesity are far bigger risks than razor blades and cyanide.

Speaking of things that aren't the way we thought, here's a true story about football fan Jordan McDonald, 10, of Buffalo Grove, and his trip to Dick's Sporting Goods on Saturday.

"He tried to explain to me why Jay Cutler was a good trade for the Bears to make, but I am hard of hearing," reports his grandmother Margaret McDonald of Arlington Heights. "Anyway, he looked at a Jay Cutler jersey at Dick's, only to discover it was $80."

Despite the mythical status bestowed on the Bears new franchise quarterback, 80 bucks was too rich for Jordan. So he went to the clearance rack.

"He found a Rex Grossman jersey reduced to $9," his grandma says, recalling the once-hot Bears quarterback who was booed out of town and now sits on the bench for Houston. "It was identical in fabric. It just had a different name on it."

When the boy checked out, the register rang up the Grossman at a further discounted price of $2.74. So Jordan bought two Grossman jerseys.

After Sunday's nightmarish Bears loss, the grandmother wonders "what Cutler jerseys are selling for today."

Cutler jerseys still sell for more than a six-pack of Mountain Dew, but it is sad that for many of us, both lost their glow before Halloween.