In the Wall Street Journal this morning—a real horror story for Halloween. There’s been a shortage of the Pumpkin Spiced Lattes at Starbucks. This is causing a to-do of the same magnitude as the one that occurred when McDonald’s cut back on the Shamrock Shake. Apparently, the shortage can be traced to Starbucks’ buzz machine, which strongly promoted the drink before its launch on September 4. They did their job so well, supplies have dried up.

Maybe bulking up in prison isn’t the way to go. A man escaped from an Oregon jail yesterday morning by squeezing through a hole in the fence while he was taking out the trash. The Klamath County sheriff told a reporter that the man is thin: “99 percent of inmates wouldn’t have fit through that hole.” The Herald and News says the man is known as the ‘Frito bandit’, a nickname he earned after stealing several Frito Lays delivery trucks.

This feud between Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj seems to be getting pretty serious. Carey has hired extra security after Minaj allegedly threatened to shoot her on the set of “American Idol.” The New York Daily News says the dustup “has roiled — or energized, depending on your perspective — the set of the creaky reality show, now in its 12th year.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay explains MLB’s wacky new two wild-card playoff format in today’s paper. He writes: “Sure, it’s nice to be assured that Game 5 will be in your place. But the home team holds, and they only have to take one of three on the road. I still don’t completely see the logic. At the very least it’s debatable. Welcome to baseball.”

Arts and Home? That’s so last year. The Wall Street Journal just announced some rebranding at the paper. The Arts coverage will now be called ‘Arena’ and the paper’s real estate coverage will now appear as ‘Mansion.’ Is it me, or do these sound like nightclubs in Manhattan more than newspaper sections? The Journal explains the decision this way: “We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire, so we have created Mansion to be the home of both aspiration and real estate realization.”

If you didn’t manage to score tickets to Jay Z’s concert tonight in Brooklyn, don’t worry. USA Today says the whole thing will be streamed on YouTube. The show will kick off at 9:30 p.m. EST on Jay-Z’s Life+Times channel, an offshoot of his blog. The channel will operate just like regular TV, says the paper, “right down to monetizing through advertising.”

If you lose your wedding ring, you better have a good story to tell your wife, says Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. The man she profiles in her column today certainly does. It was only after 41-year-old Chris Bires gave the change is his pocket to a street busker that he realized he’d placed his wedding ring in the same pocket. Don’t worry—the story has a happy ending, and Schmich tells it well, as usual.