Spookleaf Intro

Welcome to the 304th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal (“NLJ”) and its short-form writing sister publication, The Emu Café Social (“ECS”).

Newsletter day crosses paths with Halloween. Despite all my Halloween photo posts, some of which will be linked and discussed below, I am less than enthusiastic about it – not least because the areas I walk become borderline unwalkable. But let no one say I have not turned Halloween into new articles.

Spookleaves from the week that was

Many of my article publishing plans last week were derailed by work, but I still managed to publish three new NLJ articles since mailing Newsletter 303.

I led the week with Oniguisama – Short Visual Novel Review. The title does not lie: Oniguisama should take most readers less than 10 minutes to read from beginning to end.

My last two articles of the week were photo posts. In Halloween Ghosts in Brooklyn (Happy and Bibliophile), I shared wholesome ghost decoration photos along with my thoughts on less wholesome Halloween decorations. Pumpkin Arranging and Pumpkin Clean-up centers on my learning about porch decorating and clean-up services, illustrated by photos of pumpkin and gourd displays from around Brooklyn.

I published five short articles and posts on ECS. After a hiatus, I published one collection of Pook-Emu Bee: Links For 10-25-26. Later that same day, I published On Instagram Food Trends, where I offered my very positive take on catering dining menus to social media addicts (perhaps not entirely positive). In Churanoumi Becomes First Sumo Wrestler From Okinawa to Reach Sanyaku, I shared a bit of new sumo wrestling history. Next, I combined world affairs with Linux jokes in Bad Puns: Romania Edition. Finally, I explained why I decided to block a web scraper called RSSingBot in Webmaster PSA: RSSingBot.

Leaves from around the web

While I think I had a decent collection of articles and short posts given my workload last week, I did not publish everything I had hoped. But as always, I have been collecting links to good and enlightening writing from around the web for your enjoyment.

Halloween

1 | Burger King Japan shuns Shibuya Halloween spirit, but keeps it alive everywhere else. Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. Oct. 29, 2026.

In recent years the authorities have been cracking down with measures such as restricting alcohol sales and setting up gates and barricades to more tightly control the flow of people in and out of Shibuya on and around Halloween night, as well as public awareness campaigns reminding people that public drinking, littering, and other forms of inconsiderate or unruly behavior are not allowed.

To learn more, read my 2024 research article: Halloween in Japan: Through English Sources.

2 | Who’s haunting Brooklyn Heights?. Pineapple Street Blog. Oct. 29, 2026.

A neighborhood rich in history is bound to have a few ghost stories. From a phantom sea captain roaming Montague Street to the spirit of abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, said to haunt Plymouth Church, there have been reports of Brooklyn Heights hauntings for decades.

While no one should doubt my Brooklyn Heights knowledge, I’m not familiar with these ghost stories. The more you know.

3 | Halloween shopping starts during beach season now. Sam Klebanov for Morning Brew. Oct. 25, 2026.

Many retailers want you to start contemplating your plans for curating an eerie vibe in your neighborhood while shopping for beachwear. For instance, Home Depot dropped its “Halfway to Halloween” product lineup in April.

I first saw a Halloween display in a store in late July. July is highly questionable. April should be illegal.

North Korea From Afar

4 | Highlights From North Korea’s Drone-A-Palooza. Thomas Newdick and Tyler Rogoway for The War Zone. Oct. 30, 2026.

However, huge questions remain as to what degree the mockup is part of a realistic program. We have no details of the program’s development status and planned capabilities. It is highly questionable if Pyongyang is able to produce a functional prototype.

Potomekin drone?

5 | Road Trip at the Borderland. Aube Rey Lescure for Longreads. Oct. 29, 2026.

Someone sets off fireworks outside the window. And there it is, North Korea, across the bank. I can see deep into its dim night from the height of my 28th-floor room. As I stand by the window, I feel bewildered. It is perverse, this voyeurism into the pariah state, and yet I cannot help but look.

This is a long essay about a family and a trip, not to North Korea. But North Korea is visible from across the border.

Sports History

6 | The 1920 Class of Spitballers - Pages from Baseball’s Past. Pages from Baseball’s Past. Oct. 19, 2026. (HT Neil Paine).

On February 9th, 1920, the Joint Rules Committee … [banned] all “foreign substances or other alterations to the ball.” To accommodate major league pitchers who were already established as spitballers, a list was created of seventeen pitchers who would be allowed to throw the spitball for one more year to help smooth their transition to being conventional pitchers.

The grandfathered spitballers went on to demonstrate why baseball banned the spitball.

7 | Larry Bird is back in the NBA as Pacers coach. Jackie MacMullan for Sports Illustrated. Oct. 27, 1997.

When Bird retired, he swore he’d never coach in the NBA. By his third winter in Florida, he found himself clicking on the TV to watch Miami Heat games and focusing on Heat coach Pat Riley. As a player, Bird was too immersed in the Boston-L.A. rivalry to calmly evaluate Riley’s contributions as Lakers coach, but now Bird found himself fascinated by Riley’s tactics.

I watched Bird’s Pacers narrowly lose in seven games against the eventual champion Chicago Bulls in the 1998 Eastern Conference Finals. I guess this qualifies as “sports history” now. In any event, Bird ended up coaching just three seasons, compiling a 147-67 regular season record and advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals in 1998 and 1999 and the NBA Finals in 2000. He then transitioned into an executive role with the Pacers beginning in 2003.

8 | Dave Bing: Sight, Sealed, and Delivered, 1971. Bob Kuska for From Way Downtown. August 6, 2025. (Re-Publishing December 21, 1971 article from Basketball Weekly).

Still Bing made the trip to New York for the opener and, literally as a blind man, scored 24 points as the Pistons beat the Knicks. “I couldn’t see the clock or the score, and I had to keep asking Jimmy,” Bing said. “When we got home the next day, it was even worse.”

NBA Hall of Famer Dave Bing was very productive during his NBA career, including when he couldn’t see.

Breakfast

9 | Cheerios & Ziploc Fix Big Cereal Problem: Resealable Cereal Bags. Annabel Burba for Inc. Oct. 27, 2026.

Cheerios and Ziploc just answered the prayers of moms and breakfast lovers everywhere with a new collaboration that finally brings resealable bags to cereal boxes.

The 21st century is still young but this is going to be a high bar for the scientists and inventors to clear.

10 | Foreign travelers’ lukewarm reactions to traditional Japanese inn food causing changes in Kyoto. Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. April 23, 2025.

Many ryokan take great pride in their food, with some becoming as famous for their cuisine as their guestrooms. However, some Kyoto ryokan are paring back their meal offerings, and some abolishing them entirely, following lukewarm receptions from foreign travelers.

While I am usually a “hot cereal” guy in terms of breakfast, I’d take one of the traditional Japanese dinner offerings that are apparently being shunned by my fellow occidentals.

Fraud

11 | Bucktown clerk was shot during staged robbery tied to nationwide immigration fraud scheme. Tim Hecke for CWB Chicago. Oct. 23, 2026.

Nayi recruited people to pose as robbery victims, paid store owners to use their businesses, coordinated and paid the people acting as robbers, and coached the purported victims through the scheme. Participants paid him between $5,000 and $30,000 each for the privilege of being “robbed,” hoping to obtain U-visas, which are available to eligible victims of certain crimes who assist law enforcement. Upon making payment, the “victims” were told to be at a certain business at a certain date and time, officials said. The “robbery crew” arrived shortly thereafter.

The 2000 Congress lacked foresight in crafting the U visa program. Exhibit number “I lost count a long time ago.”

12 | JD Vance’s tiny hometown is overrun with illegal migrants from Uzbekistan who operate hundreds of shady trucking businesses. Chadwick Moore for the New York Post. Oct. 7, 2026.

Why is this a New York Post story?

Ohio requires English proficiency to get a license and does not issue CDLs to non-citizens. Maineville’s Uzbeks organize “taxis” to Brooklyn, NY — specifically a DMV in Coney Island — in order to obtain their CDLs, a source in the community told The Post.

I knew enough going into the article to foresee the connection.

13 | The leader of ISIS’s British wife and her life in Slough: How ‘supreme commander’ abandoned her and three children to pursue global terror. Vivek Chaudhary and Sophie Carlin for Daily Mail. December 7, 2025.

Mumin’s journey to Britain started in 1990, when he fled Somalia at the height of the civil war and went to Sweden as a refugee, accompanied by his first wife Awa and their young daughter … He left the country in early 2003 after being secretly filmed telling an undercover journalist that he would genitally mutilate his own daughter.

I noted that the ISIS Supreme Commander, who went from Somalia to Sweden to the UK and back to Somalia, picks up exactly one wife at each stop.

Sports Narratives

14 | Revisiting Every Super Bowl MVP. Robbie Marriage for Sports Passion Project. March 31, 2025.

The voters thought they could get cute here, having voted a receiver as MVP last year. They used that precedent to sneak the award into the career of the legend of the game Fred Biletnikoff, who was on his way out of the league at the time of this Super Bowl. This award is all about narrative, and nothing about what happened on the actual field in the actual game.

Mr. Marriage opined that at least a few Super Bowl MVP awards were narrative-drive,

15 | NBA Coach of the Year Doesn’t Reward Excellence. Above the Break. January 21, 2026. (HT Neil Paine).

Out of 63 Coach of the Year awards, only six have gone to the eventual champion, 18 have gone to the coach with the best record in the league, and 27 have gone to a regular-season conference leader.

NBA Coach of the Year has often been used by journalists to compensate for poor preseason predictions.

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

I use a privacy-friendly and entirely local tool called Koko Analytics (see my 2025 article) to track page visits. In each issue of the newsletter, I list our five most-visited articles, according to Koko Analytics, for the one-week period beginning with Saturday and ending with Friday. Below, you will find our most-visited articles for the week of October 24-30 with notes on their cumulative ranking statistics going back to 2021.

1. Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine. (NAF. Jan. 21, 2026.) 41 appearances and 21 top-placements.

2. Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search (NAF. April 17, 2025.) 44 appearances and 23 top-placements in 2026; 71 appearances and 44 top-placements overall.

3. How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name (NAF. March 11, 2021.) 26 appearances in 2026; 36 appearances overall.

4. The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis (NAF. Jan. 18, 2022.) 12 appearances in 2026; 75 appearances and 4 top-placements overall.

5. The Life Masks of John Henri Isaac Browere (NAF. July 5, 2022.) First appearance.

Analysis

We continue to suffer a visitor decline, with all of our top-performers save for my Forget-Me-Not flower essay, which has been holding on to the distant third-place ranking for several weeks, dropping off as of late. With that being said, our overall visitor count has been largely steady in October and is still well above our average for most of 2025 (not to mention prior years). Given our general Google dependence, we may be starting to see some shifting based on more Google results being AI-driven, but time will tell. Our entire top four returns in the same order for the third week in a row. A very soft fifth place race opened the door for first-time entrant The Life Masks of John Henri Isaac Browere, which had one decent day and did just enough after that to take one of the year’s weakest weekly ranking appearances. If we are going to have soft weekly top-fives for the next few weeks, we may well see additional unexpected articles make the ranking.

News leaf journal

I have a Halloween visual novel review planned, so that will be published not long after I mail this newsletter (it may even be live by the time you are reading this). I had more Halloween photos for articles in the pipeline, but I unfortunately did not have time to publish them. With two or three exceptions, I will probably save the excess photos for October 2027 articles (I also have a few unused photos from 2025...).

Taking leaf

If you enjoyed this issue and have not done so already, you can follow this newsletter by signing up for our weekly email, adding our RSS feed to your favorite feed reader, or checking in on our archive page.

With that, I conclude my first-ever Halloween newsletter. November has traditionally been a strong month for top-performing New Leaf Journal articles, perhaps rivaled only by April, so I will work on adding to the collection in November 2026.

See you after the time change,
Nicholas A. Ferrell.