Pete Cashmore: It's a scream! Halloween gets PC for pets and a Twitter row

Unemployment and crime are zero, and England's football team actually play like they give a stuff at major tournaments. Everything is wonderful.

Well, in this Utopia, you can bet that somebody somewhere would still find something to complain about. It's just in our nature, we will always seek out something, however inconsequential and piffling, to whine about. Look to the United States for an example. . .

In the USA, Halloween is a pretty big deal, certainly more of an event than it is in the UK. They really go for it over there, to the extent if you don't do Halloween, despite the fact that it's really weird and necessitates a belief in ghosts, they think it's you who's the odd one. Americans are strange people.

Anyway. In recent times, mainly due to the fact you can do these sorts of things nowadays, thanks to social media, America has more or less eliminated gender role stereotyping in Halloween outfits, because that's a worthwhile use of people's time, isn't it? You know the kind of thing I mean – men get to be Frankenstein, Count Dracula or a mummy, women get to be 'sexy cat', 'sexy vampire' or 'naughty zombie nurse'. In a nutshell, Halloween outfits were thoroughly vetted for perceived sexism.

And that's fair enough. We're all in agreement that gender role stereotyping in adult humans is a bad thing. It's just. . . Now they're doing it for DOGS.

Yes, you didn't misread that. The Washington Post has this week published a hand-wringing article about the fact that gender role stereotyping is happening in the world of dog Halloween outfits.

What this means is that all of the outfits intended for male dogs are things like 'firefighter' and 'soldier', whereas the ones aimed at female dogs are things like 'fairy princess' and 'witch'.

Brilliantly, in a Washington Post podcast, one of their writers said: "This may seem silly on the surface." This is one of the great understatements of all time. It does seem silly, mainly because IT REALLY OBVIOUSLY IS. They're Halloween fancy dress outfits for dogs! If you care that much about avoiding the reinforcement of gender stereotypes, dress your lady dog as a firefighter! Put your man dog in a tutu! The dog doesn't know any different!

Thankfully, the wider world roared with laughter at the preposterousness of 'sexist dog Halloween outfits' as a notion. All we can hope is that we Britons don't buy into it – but I'm not holding my breath.

Obviously, the notion of 'sexist dog Halloween outfits' would never have got the traction it did, were it not for social media, God bless it.

I like social media – indeed, I embrace it enthusiastically and am constantly using it to try to attract a mate – but dear me, some people need to think twice before using it.

One of the recent phenomena of social media, specifically Twitter, is corporate banter. This is what happens when the people running a corporate Twitter account get into some light-hearted badinage with other corporate accounts. Supermarket Twitter accounts taking the Mick out of other Supermarket Twitter accounts. Occasionally – very occasionally – it can be quite amusing. But not this week.

If you're a Twitter-savvy Aston Villa fan, you'll have been hanging your head in shame this week, or possibly just hurling your laptop out of the window. The fun all started when the Virgin Trains corporate account – I'm not going to give them the oxygen of revealing their Twitter handle – tweeted an image of an empty train carriage, with the caption: "With Roberto Di Matteo leaving, the next batch of potential #AVFC managers have just left for Birmingham New Street. . ."

Now, given that dozens upon dozens of Virgin trains pass through Birmingham every day, I'd argue that mocking their city's main football team's travails is not the best of PR work.

Aston Villa's Twitter account was quick to respond, though, quipping: "Would our managerial candidates actually get here for interviews on time if they arrived via Virgin Trains?" Which I would say is pretty pithy, as retorts go. And, with all due respect to the good people of Virgin Trains, pretty much on the button.

Now, your smart social media account controller would have dropped the microphone at this moment, but Aston Villa's tweetmeister would not let it lie, and bizarrely tweeted at Virgin Trains a list of the trophies that the Villa had won in their proud history.

The problem, of course, was that Aston Villa have a) just been relegated, b) have had a completely dreadful start to the season despite being most pundits' favourites for immediate re-promotion and c) just decided to sack their manager, hence the original mocking Tweet from Virgin. Probably not the best time to be reminding the world at large about past glories.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are a couple of social media account managers currently pondering their P45s and thinking: "Yeah, I probably shouldn't have pressed 'send'."

You may remember that, a few weeks back, I remarked upon how much modern TV programming is becoming like Alan Partridge desperately pitching terrible show ideas like Youth Hostelling With Chris Eubank at an unimpressed BBC mannequin.

Well – and I report this entirely without comment – this week I received an email about Celebrity Haunted Hotel Live, which consists of people loosely described as celebrities – I imagine the involvement of Christopher Biggins at some point – spending the night in a haunted hotel (and, of course, with apologies to our Halloween-loving American cousins, GHOSTS DON'T EXIST) with the whole shebang being hosted by Christine Lampard.

Celebrity Haunted Hotel Live with Christine Lampard, everybody. And somebody somewhere got paid to come up with that. I really am in the wrong business.