This one has the word "spiffing" in the title AND comes with a lovely green-and-gold cover, so folks will recognize your sophisticated taste while begging you to stop telling these terrible, TERRIBLE jokes.
With graduation season over, you might be tempted to revel in the heady hopes of a brighter tomorrow, what with all these freshly educated, newly degreed youngins descending upon our workforce and all.
I'm here to fix all that.
This cake was supposed to say - I kid you not - "It's a girl."
That apostrophe placement will be haunting my dreams tonight.
Of course, it's also possible to get the spelling and punctuation perfect, while still completely missing the point:
Granted, this could be a "he said, she said" issue.
Hey, remember when preschoolers were taught to put the square blocks in the square holes, and the round blocks in the round holes?
Do they not do that anymore?
For some reason I'm getting the feeling this is supposed to be a base"ball." Odd.
And remember that toy with the pull string that told you what the dog says?
Do they not have those anymore, either?
Wait. Is that a cat?
Ok, now I'm really confused.
Still, I guess we can take comfort in knowing that these wreckerators won't always be wreckerators:
Eventually they'll get promoted to management.
Thanks to Becky A., Jane R., Stacey S., Jennifer V., & Alissa P., who want to ask that employee in the background, "Hey, why the long face?"
There's 104 days of summer vacation And school comes along just to end it So the annual problem for our generation Is finding a good way to spennnnd it...
Tangent time: I once had a good friend who enjoyed eating actual sand. Turns out she was deficient in some essential mineral. Which was a relief, since we were about to take her to the lagoony bin.
It's a shore bet she would have loved this sand castle cake though:
Wow, that sucker is beautiful! (Specifically, the third one from the bottom.)
Whale, I hope you got your fill of beach-themed sweets (and puns) today. I'm sure you're clamoring for more, but that should tide you over for a while!
Happy Sunday!
*****
P.S. If you actually go to the beach, then clearly you need a mesh tote bag that's in such high demand they couldn't even get one for the photoshoot, and had to photoshop it in (badly) later:
Oh yeah, bad Photoshop is how you know it's good. Well, that, and the 2,000+ 5-star ratings. Turns out this thing is actually pretty awesome, and also comes in blue, gray, or white. Grab yours before the manufacturer tries to snatch it up for another photoshoot.
I'm a firm believer in celebrating just about everything with cake, and from the submissions you guys send in I'm clearly not the only one. However, there's celebrating, say, a new vasectomy or Daddy's parole, and then there's the stuff that some people might consider, well, inappropriate cake material.
Not me, of course. No sir! Heck, I say, you wanna get pregnant? Then SAY IT WITH CAKE:
Or you're happy you DIDN'T get pregnant? Say THAT with cake.
Let's say your friend Cory suffered a nasty seizure recently. That warrants a cookie cake, right?
(Remember, kids: It's "i before e except after c." Except in the word "seizure.")
And remember that time your friend lost a finger to the lawn mower? Just in case he doesn't, let's remind him! With cake!
I like how this is less a "get well" cake, and more an "IN YOUR FACE!With love from the Lawn Mower" cake.
Driving while intoxicated is a serious crime, so be sure to tell your friends you won't stand for such behavior. Also with cake.
I like to imagine the candles are mini breathalyzers.
(How cool would that invention be? Right? I'll make millions. MILLIONS, I say!)
The world is too success-oriented. We should be sending a better message to younger generations. A message that says, "Hey, no matter what, at least you'll get a cake out of this."
Dangit. Why don't I know any lady farmers to give this to? WHY?!
(PS - You misspelled "Awesome." But I'll let it slide, because melons.)
And finally, my favorite:
Hang on... we get cake for that?
WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME?!
Thanks to Anony M., Katelyn, KG, Paul S., Paige S., April B., & Stephanie K. for the inspiration.
*****
P.S. That reminds me of my Wonder Womb DIY, but if you're not feeling crafty you can buy this!
My favorite part is how it's written BELOW the picture.
I almost want this baker to be color blind, just so they have *some* excuse.
Fortunately the baker of this wedding cake followed instructions literally:
See? She *did* write it!
Thanks to Robert B., Tenae Z. & Kate L. for falling victim to one the classic blunders. Just remember, guys: never go against a Simpleton when CAKE is on the line! HAHA HA HAHAH AHAH HA... [thud]
Oops.
*****
P.S. Here's a (hilarious) reminder that English is almost as ridiculous as these cakes:
I just realized that the term "nailed it!" can have two meanings. Well, three. But despite my naughty word outburst yesterday, this IS still a mostly family-friendly establishment, and the third meaning is a little TOO family-friendly, IF you KNOW what I'm SAYING.
Sorry, my caps lock HAS DEVELOPED A MIND of its OWN.
AND I'VE ALSO BEEN DRINKING.
Where was I?
No, I mean yesterday: where was I? Because I'm guessing these feathers came from somewhere.
Perhaps I should start again.
So. "Nailed it." It can mean, "What ho! I have successfully accomplished my intended endeavor!" *OR* it can mean you hit something with your car.
Pay attention now, because this is a very long setup for a very flat punchline:
NAILED IT.
THANKS TO ANN LEE, who I'm hoping can tell me what kind of bird sheds strawberry-scented feathers. And glitter. And...oh. Waaaaiiit....
*****
"What do you need a 5 pack of assorted body glitters for?"
Jane Mondrup is joining us today to talk about her novel, Zoi. Here’s the publisher’s description:
At the age of five, Amira watched footage of the first zoi specimen arriving in our solar system, and she became instantly fascinated with the huge, cell-like creature floating among the stars.
Decades later, she and three other astronauts have taken residence in a zoi as it continues its voyage through space.
They have no way of steering its course. Communicating with their non-sentient host is limited to signals of physical needs. And while the zoi meets those needs, it also exposes its passengers to hormonal and even genetic alterations.
Now, as masses of biological material start growing on each astronaut, their interstellar journey begins a new stage–one with far-reaching consequences both for the humans and the zois.
What’s Jane’s favorite bit?
The phenomenon of life is insanely weird. I’m not sure if that fact is comforting to everyone, but to me it is. Life is weird on so many levels. From the sheer variety of lifeforms and ecologies, behaviors and interactions to the mind-boggling complexity of the basic building blocks: the cell and the genes.
The cell is a world unto itself. Most cells in our body are between one-tenth and one-hundredth of a millimeter, but each one contains an impressive number of structures and specialized units, including what resembles little creatures, toiling away at assorted tasks. For a visualization of this, I highly recommend the animation “The Inner Life of the Cell,” made by XVIVO Animation for Harvard University in 2011 (it can be found on YouTube).
We humans have around 37 trillion of these tiny worlds inside us, comprising our bodies. In comparison, the Milky Way contains only around 0.1 trillion stars. Each cell upholds its own existence through procedures that are, in themselves, complicated, but the cell also reacts and adapts to its environment. When cells are part of multi-cellular organisms, this adaptation also applies to their place in the superstructure, and to the superstructure’s interaction with the world around it. It’s all so very intricate. So very, very weird.
I don’t just love this weirdness. To me, it represents the very meaning of, well, life. As living beings, we’re part of this awe-inspiring phenomenon, more complex than anything else we’ve observed in the universe, since evolution drives it towards increasing complexity and variety. I’m not a biologist, and to tell the truth, I find it hard to grasp most of the technicalities involved, but that does not lessen my attraction. You don’t need to thoroughly understand things (or people) to love them. Perhaps the enigma even helps.
Years before I conceived any actual story ideas for biological science fiction, I came across the Symbiogenesis theory about the origin of the eucaryotic cell that forms the basis of multi-cellular life. According to this widely accepted theory, the evolutionary jump from the much simpler procaryotic cells to the highly complex eucaryotes was made possible by a very fortunate encounter between two procaryotes wherein the smaller was incorporated into the larger as an energy producing organelle called the mitochondrion.
This finally brings me to my favorite bit of the novel ZOI, and of the process of writing it. The scientific concept of a merging between cells did at some point merge with other ideas I had floating around in my mind, surfacing as the kind of dream vision that you sometimes have on the brink of sleep. In this vision, I saw two identical women being separated. They looked desperately sad.
This is inspiration in a nutshell: your subconscious mixing up completely unrelated elements and throwing the result at you shouting, “Catch!” Here we touch on another kind of weirdness that I love just as much as the weirdness of life—the roundabout and unpredictable ways our brains work. The human mind has some capacity for logic, but left to its own devices it’s more inclined to work by free association. As a fiction writer, you need both the logical and associative processes, and the trick is to make them cooperate. I suspect the same goes for science, at least to some degree.
I knew that I had to write a story with this dream vision as its focal point: two people, completely alike, floating apart. Since I knew the source of the image, I understood that the women had been incorporated into a large, cell-like creature. They were clones of the same person, being duplicated along with their host, like mitochondria do when a eucaryotic cell divides. I saw the women being separated into a void, and I concluded that the cell-like creature was a space-dwelling one. It traveled through space, and since it very seldomly encountered other life, it had no need for an immune system. Instead, it had developed the exact opposite: a mechanism to accommodate all life forms it came across, since that would be its only way to evolve.
From there, the story took me in all kinds of interesting directions. There’re lots of other elements that I love, like how I was able to use my own bodily experiences to conceive of the hormonal changes that humans undergo inside the cell-like creatures, the zois. I very much enjoyed the exploration of identity and self in the relationship between pairs of clones, both considering themselves the original. I deeply sympathize with the character who is unable to endure both the hormonal alterations and the cloning, and was greatly relieved when I discovered that perhaps she would not have to just perish. Towards the end, the story points towards some very intriguing perspectives. But none of this would have existed without that inciting vision of a separation, and it remains my favorite bit of the novel, ZOI.
Jane Mondrup lives and writes in the small Northern European country Denmark. In her fiction, she’s exploring the boundaries around and between different speculative genres. She’s published a few books and some short stories in Danish, while Zoi, which will be published in both languages, is her debut in English.
[Note: Today's post contains a mildly bad word, because I put it in to make John laugh and then he said it was too funny to take out. Please parent accordingly.]
According to Urban Dictionary, a unicorn chaser is anything that "serves as a cleansing of the palate after a viewer has been subjected to a distasteful internet image or experience." If you've ever mistakenly clicked a link that showed you something really disgusting, like clown porn or those prairie dresses from Target, then you know what I'm talking about.
You used to be able to buy a Unicorn Chaser from ThinkGeek (RIP), thought they never mentioned what it tasted like. I'm guessing moonbeams and Oreo filling, because I can't imagine anything that tastes better than that, except maybe Oreo filling without the moonbeams. But it might taste like green Skittles, which would be disgusting, and then you'd need another chaser for your Unicorn chaser. Which would be both sad and kind of filling.
Look, my point is that these clouds look like shit:
No, wait. That wasn't my point at all.
My point is, Unicorn horns: Do they really need a point?
Or can they just be a giant lump like a cartoon head injury? Or a large pile of bird doo-doo?
And do unicorns need heads, or can they just puke rainbows directly out of their necks?
Assuming they still have a horn jammed in there somewhere, I mean?
True Story: As I was typing "do unicorns need heads" just now, I could totally hear one of you saying, "Why would a unicorn need a bathroom at sea?" And I was all, "WAIT FOR ME TO FINISH THE QUESTION, IMAGINARY WISE-GUY READER." And then you were all, "Gee, sorry," and I was able to move on after eating a spoonful of Oreo filling for recovery purposes.
This unicorn-pooping-cupcakes cake is adorable, and I won't have any of you speaking a WORD against it.
Unless you want to comment on the wonky elongated nipple/leg. That I'd be ok with.
And finally, you know how when you visit a friend or relative, and you break something, and you just lay the broken bits down like they're not broken and hope nobody notices until a few days after you leave? No?
Ok, how about this:
You know how when you can't get a cake unicorn head to stand up on its own, so you just break it off and plop it back down on the body at an unnatural angle and pretend it's supposed to look like that?
o.0
[backing away slowly]
If anyone needs me, I'll just be over here eating Oreo fillings in the moonlight. Just as soon as I find a picture of the moon for my computer screen.
Hey Laura B., Andrea & Anne Marie, Joshanna R., Robin E., & Samantha S. - why the long face and creepy demon eyes?
*****
P.S. Oh! For you minions who have both a pool and a sense of style:
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