At the Dessert Café...

... dig in!

"This fight is not over. We will continue to stand strong. Your Religious Freedom is becoming not Free anymore."

"This is ridiculous that we can not practice our faith. The LORD is good and we will continue to serve Him with all our heart. ♥"

Sign on the door of the Sweet Cakes bakery, which is closing to avoid having to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, which the state Bureau of Labor said violated the Oregon Equality Act of 2007, which forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Is cake decorating a place where freedom of expression should be able to trump anti-discrimination laws? In this regard, is religious expression different from other expression? (I'm assuming there's a big difference between a shop that refuses to serve gay people and a shop that refuses make a product that contains an expressive message supportive of gay relationships.)

"[W]hen the votes of 2.6 million voters were counted and announced, the scandal-plagued outsider Rino Sashihara toppled the seemingly secure incumbent Yuko Oshima..."

"... to become the new 'president' of AKB48, Japan’s most popular female musical act ever."

AKB48 is a massive and massively successful conglomerate, with many local franchises. Group members start off as awkward amateurs and end up skilled professional entertainers...

The girls of AKB48 are sexual chimeras. Although often they are in fact young adults, they are made to look much younger thanks to outfits derived from school-girl uniforms and rehearsed childish mannerisms. The resultant child-woman is then resexualized....

That looks like this:



"The normally circumspect Japan Times denounced the group for framing 'women’s nature as responsive to male desires rather than as active and independent'...."

And to feed these fans’ fantasies some more, the group prohibits, by contract, its members from having sex or dating....

Most legal experts agree that AKB48’s contractual ban on sex has no force. But that didn’t keep Minami Minegishi, once among the group’s inner core of 20, from shaving off her hair in contrition and apologizing to fans after she was seen leaving a young male pop star’s apartment one morning.

That head-shaving + apology was discussed here on this blog back in February. Back to the first-linked article:

Voters in Saturday’s election seemingly rallied to upset these rules.... The race was tight, but in the end, voters rejected rules preventing young women from enjoying their freedoms. They elevated the disgraced Minegishi, her hair still boyishly short, to 18th place. And they crowned Sashihara, who had been banished from the core Akihabara group to an affiliate in Fukuoka after her own dating scandal....

AKB48 may be sexist and prey on prurient tastes....

Oh? Is it? What's the prurient taste for? Cake and jell-o, judging from the video. I thought it was very wholesome. It seemed perfectly clean... but also perfectly dirty in your dirty mind. Shame on you!

People who live in the city are apparently so frazzled...

... that there need to be articles explaining the information that it's relaxing to take a walk in the park. 

A walk in the park is a cliché that signifies an extremely easy activity. If you don't know a walk in the park is relaxing, how on earth do these city people survive in the hectic, harried environment I keep reading about?

In other cliché-based advice to frazzled city folk, let me suggest a picnic and a piece of cake. But remember: You can't eat your cake and have it. (Which is often, confusingly, put in reverse chronological order as You can't have your cake and eat it, or as we coddled Baby Boomers like to think: "You can have your cake and eat it too.")

Which is the oldest of those 4 clichés? It's You can't eat your cake and have it, going all the way back to 1562, according to the (unlinkable) OED:

1562   J. Heywood Prov. & Epigr. (1867) 79   What man, I trow ye raue, Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?

A walk in the park is traced back to 1937:

1937   Amer. Speech 12 155/2   A walk in the park is their [sc. golf caddies'] facetious way of referring to a nine-hole round.

A piece of cake goes back to 1936:

1936   O. Nash Primrose Path 172   Her picture's in the papers now, And life's a piece of cake.

Picnic, in the colloquial figurative sense, is a little older:

1870   J. J. McCloskey Across Continent in America's Lost Plays (1940) 81   Oh, wouldn't that fellow be a picnic for me!

"Imagine you're in the oven, baking."

"Some of us know and accept our sexuality right away and some need more time to cook. I should know — I baked for 33 years."

Just catching up on the metaphors in the Jason Collins "coming out" piece in Sports Illustrated that everyone was talking about yesterday. I found this story boring, but somehow the comments on my post on the subject heated up — like you were in the oven, baking — and they're up to 788 comments. What's going on in there? In my book, a 34-year-old gay guy that has gone to a lot of trouble to stay in the closet — or the oven — in this day and age is hardly a courageous hero. Yes, he's in a major American team sport, but he's at the very end of his career, and who'd heard of him before? I see nothing but a career boost for this guy. What is the big deal? Someone left the cake in the oven for 33 years, and I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and you were about to retire from basketball anyway, oh noooooo! O-oh nooooooo!



That cake metaphor came at the end of a paragraph that began:

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. "I've known you were gay for years," she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin. In her presence I ignored my censor button for the first time. She gave me support. The relief I felt was a sweet release. 

Sweet release with your aunt? Having ignored your censor button — for the first time? really? — you might want to find your editor button. I love that the aunt was all "I've known you were gay for years." The first person he came out to found his announcement boring. I'm with Aunt Teri. It's boring. This cake was baked long ago. I recall the yellow polyester shorts/Foaming like a wave/On the ground around your knees/The birds like tender babies in your hands/And the old men playing checkers, by the trees....

"A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags..."

"... twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

More wind, water, and light. We've gotten used to it here in this windy, watery, light-and-dark world of the Gatsby project. This sentence seems like a made up imitation of a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," but I assure you it's there.

All that's happening here is a breeze blowing through the room, but we have a traffic jam of metaphor: flags, wedding-cake, and wine. What are we supposed to see here? And good lord, it's a room. Must we really believe that something cataclysmic is going on when a breeze blows the curtains? Maybe we should. Maybe all sorts of crazy stuff happens in a room and it is like an epic storm at sea.

The wine-colored rug stands in for the sea, so I have to assume that we're supposed to think of the  "wine-dark sea" we hear about, repeatedly, in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. It is an epic, contained in that room. The dark shadows ripple, turning the wine-rug into sea, so I guess the ceiling is the sky. I guess that's a fancy white ceiling with all sorts of fancy woodwork, resembling the ornamentation on a wedding cake. The curtains swirling around the wedding-cake textures are cloud-like, I suppose. So fabric and wood make the erstwhile cake-like ceiling into stormy sky and curtain-driven shadows make the otherwise wine-like carpet into roiling sea.

It's a tempestuous room, containing a marriage. Raise a toast and let's feed each other cake.

"It is shockingly inexpensive to travel within Turkey by plane."

"Take this segment: from Istanbul to Izmir (about an hour flying time) on Atlas Jet, it's $25 (without additional discounts). For this, we get not only the flight itself, but a warm snack (melted cheese sandwich, cake, coffee or a soft drink) and, too, upon arrival in Izmir, free transportation by bus to towns south of us. Including to Slecuk — another hour's worth of travel."

... worth of travel.

Do you understand it?

"What do a cake, a runner, a rainbow and a kalashnikov have in common."

"10 Contested African Images of 2012."

All over the world, women are self-comforting...

... grasping their skirt hems and rolling, rolling them upward, absent-mindedly.

Meanwhile, women eat cupcakes, cupcakes, which were ranked among the 10 most overrated things in the world, which made me say:

The only reason cupcakes are popular is because people have forgotten actual cake, which is moist and tender. Cupcakes have way too much edge... and that fluting doubles the already-too-much edge. But if you never eat real cake, you don't notice. It's like how good crackers are if you never have bread or how good a popsicle is if you never get a nice big dish of ice cream.

But people won't go back to cake, because you can't get a slice of cake and carry it around with you on the street. How would it be presented? It can't be sliced and left out on the shelves like cupcakes. You'd need some saran wrap or something to keep it from getting dried out.

So here, lonely ladies of America, here's your pre-dried-out cake: cupcake.

It sounds like something an old-fashioned guy would call you if he thinks you're pretty, so maybe you're thinking about him as you walk down the street licking icing and choking down dry cake... and tears.