COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

I’m back. Not the news you were hoping for, I know, but I am. How are you? I’m OK, depending on whom you ask.

Everything around here looks about the same, except for the giant pumpkins. You can thank Sean Loftus for that, a proud Costa Mesa resident who organized a pumpkin-growing contest in his neighborhood and encouraged his neighbors to get out there and grow the biggest, chubbiest pumpkin thing they could.

Sean provided detailed instructions and incipient pumpkin sprouts for all contestants, who had to pony up a $20 entry fee, with the pot going to the parent of the most prodigiously plump pumpkin.

Friday was the moment of truth, with the Pumpkin d’Or award going to Mike Palmer for his 226-pound gourd-zilla. 226 pounds, which is half my weight, is impressive, but it got me to wondering about the all-time record, to wit, how much weight could a pumpkin weigh if a pumpkin could weigh weight?

Wait. I think that’s a woodchuck. Forget that. Anyway, Mike Palmer’s pumpkin is a bruiser by neighborhood standards, but it wouldn’t get far in a big deal major league fat pumpkin fest.

According to the University of Illinois School of Agriculture, the chubbiest pumpkin on record weighed in at a jaw-dropping 1,140 pounds.

Now that’s a pumpkin. If the kids want that thing carved, you’re gonna need a lumberjack or a chain saw or both.

The largest pumpkin pie ever made? It was beyond large: 5-feet wide and 350 pounds, with 80 pounds of cooked pumpkin, 36 pounds of sugar, 12 dozen eggs and six hours’ baking time.

Do you know where the word pumpkin comes from? Do you care? Probably not, but I’ll tell you anyway, like you didn’t know that. It was originally a Greek word “pepon,” which means large melon.

The French turned that into “pompon,” which means “squiggly plastic cheerleader thing,” and the English changed pompon to “pumpion,” which means, “If it’s a French word, we’re not using it.”

American colonists changed pumpion to “pumpkin” and the chubby orange fruit — it is a fruit by the way — quickly became a favorite in life and literature in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Cinderella” and “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” with which I was tortured as a kid, along with Peter Rabbit and Peter Cottontail, neither of which I need to hear about again, ever.

What I don’t know, and never have, is how and why these word changes happen. Is there an 800-number you can call? “Hi, we were just wondering — can we still say pumpion?” “No, I’m sorry. It’s ‘pumpkin’ now. Pumpion is out.”

American colonists also came up with the prototype pumpkin pie by carving out a pumpkin, filling it with milk, honey and spices and covering the whole thing in hot embers until it was cooked. According to our friends at the University of Illinois — the annual U.S. pumpkin crop is valued at just more than $100 million and the most prolific pumpkin-popping states are Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California.

And here’s a surprise, assuming you’re easily surprised — the biggest producer by far is Illinois, with an incredible 90% of the pumpkins in the United States being grown within a 90-mile radius of Peoria, Ill.

I hate to doubt a respected university, but how can that be? If anyone out there knows anything about pumpkins and Peoria, please let me know at your earliest convenience. It’s important.

What about “jack-o’-lantern” — another weird name?

The idea of carrying around a glowing piece of coal in a carved out gourd started with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, basically an end-of-summer party.

But who is the Jack in jack-o’-lantern? The name comes from an old Irish myth about a man named “Stingy Jack,” who was stingy and exceedingly unpleasant.

As myths go, this one has more twists and turns than some upside-down, intertwined yoga position and was starting to make me lightheaded halfway through so I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version.

In addition to being stingy, Jack is a sly dog who tricks the Devil into doing favors for him not once, but twice.

Apparently the Irish version of the Devil is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

When Jack dies, which causes no grieving whatsoever, God won’t let him into heaven because he is a slug and the Devil won’t let him into hell because he would still like to strangle him for tricking him, twice, but that would be silly because he’s already dead.

The Devil sends Jack packing with a glowing coal to light his way in the eternal darkness, which is really dark.

Jack put the coal in a carved out gourd and has been roaming the Earth ever since as a ghostly figure known as “Jack of the Lantern,” which was later shortened to Jack-o’-Lantern, probably after someone called the 800-number. “Can we just say ‘Jack-o’-Lantern’ instead of “Jack of the Lantern?”

“Hang on, let me check. Hello? Yeah, Jack-o’-Lantern is fine. Just go with that.”

And that, more or less, is the story of Stingy Jack and the Devil, along with Mike Palmer and the giant pumpkin, which is apparently one of the few pumpkins in the country that didn’t come from Peoria.

Can you get this kind of information anywhere else? Not that I know of.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].