Outlanders! Outlanders! Welcome to the town where kids rule, and parents...well, they cease to exist. This is Whiting, Iowa, a small town with a population of about 300 or so that had the great fortune to serve as the backdrop for the 1984 horror movie "Children of the Corn", which was based on the novella by Stephen King. For those of you too squeamish to sit through the movie, it's about the fictional town of Gatlin, Nebraska, where a young couple find all of the grownups dead and the kids running things from the middle of a cornfield. Malachai and Issac were the two evil kids in charge, and basically they made everyone's life much, much shorter.

If you were to go out and rent Children of the Corn (and by all means, do! The beans give it two thumbs WAY up!), you'll get to see a mighty young Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton as the two adults in the middle of all this adolescent malevolence. Of course, Linda went on to kick Terminator butt, while Peter was mowed down while riding his bike on "thirtysomething"... a tragedy that the beans still haven't completely gotten over, 15 years later. But back to the real town of Whiting. For some odd reason, Whiting's main drag has a flag pole right in the middle of the street. In most places this would only serve as a distraction, but since you're looking at downtown Whiting at rush hour (a traffic jam here is a grain truck passing a tractor), it's probably not that big of a deal. But still, let's all hope that Mr. Horton doesn't ride his 10-speed into it, shall we?

Next, the beans pop by the "Good Lookin' Country Cookin' Wagon Masters Cafe" (try saying that five times fast!), where if you remember in the beginning of the movie all of the parents enjoyed a nice hot cup of poisoned coffee, followed up with a slit throat for dessert. Actually, only the outside of the restaurant was used in the film; the murder scenes were filmed elsewhere, so you don't have to worry about ghosts haunting your lunch. Now, the beans have to admit that they've eaten here many times, and their roast beef lunch special can't be beat. So if you're passing through, be sure to stop in for a bite. Just be careful when ordering the coffee...just in case.

But the real star in these parts is the yellow stuff itself. Corn is big in this area - seed corn, sweet corn, and best of all - popcorn! And if you stand here and listen reeeeeally carefully, you too might hear the faint sound of Issac and his junior evildoers up to no good out there...either that or it's the grasshoppers. Or is it???

To shake their self-induced willies, the frijoles turned around from the corn to the field next door, which was growing something more up their alley - beans!!! These are actually soybeans - tons and tons (or should that be bushels and bushels?) of soybeans, ready to be harvested and used in a million ways. Our brave beans were having a great time conversing with their distant cousins, when...

Oh, no! One of Issac's minions came lurking out the fields and captured the beans! Doom and despair filled the bean's eyes! How would they ever escape the evil clutches of the children of the corn and their half dozen straight-to-tape sequel friends??? Actually, the possessed child took one look at the beans, said, "Oooh, these beans are really old - I'm not eating those!" She then dropped the can and walked away, so everything turned out fine. (What can I say? The beans like a happy ending.) Happy Halloween 2002 from the beans!