Tue 11 Dec 2012
[Update: 2/8/13: Came across a cool Ganesh costume for an off-Broadway show in NYC - see footnote 2 at bottom]
[Ed. Note: I sit here on a plane to India (via London) in the first week of December. Clearly, a perfect time to discuss this past Halloween, only 2 months late... Ok - actually I never covered Halloween 2011, where this story really begins, so really, I'm a year and 2 months late :-/ Sorry! You'll understand why by the end of this post - or if you don't care, feel free to just check the pix - it's a great costume!]

Lord Ganesh 2.0 at Work, Halloween 2012 (photo by Srabasti Mukherjee)
When this blog last left our Halloween costumed hero, in 2010, the costume was Disco Ball 5.0. The disco ball series are always impossible costumes to follow. No matter what costume I do the next year, many people say “Hey – no Disco Ball this year?” with a tone of mild disappointment.1
To make matters worse in 2011, I was working incredibly hard at a project at the office (one of the two most difficult stretches of my 10 years at Apple) & was dramatically stressed. I really had no time for a Halloween costume that would meet my standards. That being said, I could NOT miss Halloween – I LOVE Halloween!
I was caught in the all-too-common vise-grip of October: between my volunteer political efforts (October = election season) and my job (iTunes updates are often in October, due to our Christmas product cycle) and my own Halloween ambitions, it can be quite the pressure cooker.
The internal part of this pressure comes from my ambitious Halloween requirements. A fully ‘Deepian Halloween requires that:
- ‘Deep can skip Halloween, but will most likely be heartbroken about it.
- ‘Deep can only participate in Halloween if he has a costume that meets his standards. To wit: the costume…
- must impress ‘Deep
- must be primarily self-made
- must have high production values (at least attempted high production values)
- must have a “Wow” factor
- gets bonus points for: crowd-pleasing, interactive, clever, funny
- ‘Deep can possibly reuse a costume, but it is frowned upon.
So given all that, what to do?








Unexpected Proposal-Cam! (courtesy of Hannah Tries)


Courtesy of Adele Burnes