It's all about me...

So my post today is pretty much all about me. Some of you may know, but I have started a little side business doing desserts and catering small parties. Today was my first "official" party - a baby shower for a girl at work. I was fairly nervous something would go horribly wrong (and my roommates would kill me for taking up all the room in the fridge with assorted baked goods), but all seems to have gone well. A lot of my coworkers took my business cards, and everyone was complimentary about how it looked and tasted. Most importantly, our little mama-to-be was pleased.

These are some cookies I did - my mama's sugar cookie recipe covered in royal icing and topped with little sugared sleping babies. I also made a few cookie lollies on a whim. Clearly my co-worker is having a boy... : ) 

Even more cookies.... : ) 

This is my piece-de-resistance: the cake. I had loads of fun making this even though I had to pipe out each tuft of fur individually in my sweltering kitchen last night (and I proceeded to smoosh the piping tip at work today). Everything except the binkie is edible. And I am now friends with fondant, which may be the most important thing. : ) We've worked out our differences - I've promised to roll it thinly and not make it work in humidity, and it has promised to look pretty. 

Messages in celluloid...

I have a cousin who is much younger than me; when he was little, his proclivity for running around the house in his underwear earned him the nickname "SpongeBob No-Pants." Predictably, he hated it and often proclaimed his disgust for the show.

SpongeBob SquarePants debuted 10 years ago this spring. If you were to tell me that 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it out of hand. I was still babysitting then and well-versed in kids shows. I'd seen SBSQ and thought it was stupid, bordering on occasionally gross. But James Parker wrote an article in the June issue of "The Atlantic" that made me re-examine the show more closely for meaning I had not previously attributed to SpongeBob. 

That article pushed me toward re-thinking other cartoons and looking for lessons hidden in the technicolor. Sneaky adults, trying to sandwich morality between mythical blue creatures wearing white mushroom-shaped hats and multi-colored bears with magical powers in their tummies...

Yahoo! News had an article this morning on a movie remake of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" that is in the works. Studios are trying to ride the rodent wave begun with "Ratatouille" and continued by "The Tale of Desperaux" and "G-Force." I have to confess, when I read the Newbery medal-winning book years ago, I had a hard time with it. The feeling of having to slog through it comes back to me. I think I struggled to keep all the rats straight. However, as the article pointed out, refreshing my memory, the story - Mrs. Frisby needing the help of former lab rats to move her sick son and escape from imminent death-by-farmer's plow - does have a distinct parable regarding evolution and community about  in it. 

I wish the subject of my last story had been around when I was younger. The New York Times previewed a new web-based (the things they come up with these days...) cartoon-series that will "air" on the AOL website and feature an animated version of super-investor Warren Buffet. The series, called "The Secret Millionaires Club," aims to teach 6-11 year-olds how to be responsible with money and avoid pitfalls like credit cards and impatient investing. While I had no credit cards and no concept of the stock market when I was younger, kids do these days, and it's a smart move to arm them with information now, while they are still adaptable enough to absorb it. 

(Image courtesy of the New York Times)

All around the world...

I realized this morning I've been monopolizing this blog with good news from the US. I suppose I'm fighting the US media bias of only reporting "local" news, but I've also been going with stories that came to me, rather than actively looking for articles. Today I did a little more of the latter and found a bunch of good news from other countries. 

The Washington Post (yay for the US reporting on something other than the US!) had a brief story on a new customer relations technique debuted in Japan - service with a smile. Now, you're probably protesting this concept is as old as the hills, but the Japanese have taken it to a new technological level. Employees at the busiest train stations - ones that serve hundreds of thousands of commuters every day - now have the option to check their uniform in the mirror and their smile on the computer. Software on laptops in 15 of rail stations can measure the employees' smile curvature to tell how broad a grin the individual is sporting. 

Also in the Pacific is news of a more far-reaching nature. Yesterday, the leaders of Taiwan and China exchanged their first direct messages in 60 years. The enmity between these two countries goes back a long ways, pretty much ever since China annexed Taiwan against the Taiwanese people's wishes. If I were Taiwanese, I'd be pretty peeved too. But according to USA Today, the Chinese president sent a congratulatory message to Taiwan's leader after he won an election to the ruling party's chairmanship. 

Moving a little farther west, presstv.ir reports that a mosaic depicting an angel has been uncovered in the Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Originally a basilica before the Ottoman Turks took over the city in the 15th century, the angel (one of a set of six, it is believed) were covered after the building underwent its own religious conversion. 

Lastly, I finish up in the West - Canada to be more precise. The Toronto Star reports on some welcome relief to prospective adoptive parents. Recently, Imagine Adoption Agency, which was handling adoptions between Canadians and children in an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, filed for bankruptcy. That move halted the adoptions of over 40 families, many of whom spent years learning Ethiopian culture and language in preparation for their new child(ren). However, a mining company has stepped in and donated $100,000 to help the orphanage in Ethiopia keep going and facilitate the adoptions already in progress that were frozen. 

(Photo courtesy of presstv.ir)

Lost and found...

There was a pattern at the end of last week, with stories being posted on things of great value that had been lost for a long time - in one case for centuries. However, I was firmly encased in my cranky pants on Friday and instead chose to be very lazy and just post a video my friend J sent me that has blown up into an Internet craze. Today, I am back to my usual posting self. 

Yahoo! News posted a story on a recent archaeological find in the Mediterranean. A team of archaeologists have found a "graveyard' of five nearly perfect Roman trading ships that sunk off the coast of Italy, and the earliest dates back to the first century BC. Underwater images show the well-preserved contents of the ships spilling out after the wood rotted away.

Also on Thursday, and as an addendum to the shipwreck story, Yahoo! News featured an article on two "new" works from Mozart. Apparently the International Mozarteum Foundation has had one of the works in their collection for a while, but only recently verified it was, in fact, written by Mozart as a young man. The results will be made public in a presentation on Aug. 2 in Salzburg, Austria, when an Austrian musician will play the piece on an original Mozart piano. The foundation also had a hand in authenticating another found Mozart composition in the possession of a French library last September.

Perhaps the sweetest of the three stories today concerns an object of less intrinsic value than those in the previous two articles. Once again, I mined Yahoo! to find this little gem... A love affair between a British man and his Spanish sweetheart was rekindled after 16 years when a missing love letter was found behind a mantle. The couple, who married two weeks ago, were reunited after the woman was brave enough to phone her former fiancee after discovering the letter.  

(Photo courtesy of www.about.com)

Wedding season...

My apologies to the person who sent this (and the two to whom I forwarded it) since it will not be a new blog to them, but it is the only thing that has made me laugh on this horribly gross and rainy day.

Science=Magic...

To me, nearly all science is magical. Not in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated by it, but more in that way most people regard watching someone get sawed in half. It's a "how did they DO that?" feeling. In school up until college, I took all the requisite classes - biology, chemistry, earth science, etc. My college transcript is less than stellar in that category, boasting a single class called "Natural Disasters." So I still regard scientific achievement with a certain degree of mystification. In this way I supposed I'm not that different than people from the Middle Ages or those of a very superstitious culture/religion.

Yesterday was the longest solar eclipse since 1991. It cut a swath across Asia and the Pacific, lasting for up to six minutes and 39 seconds in places. Indian astrologers were making predictions of widespread violence and evil according to their beliefs that what happened during a solar eclipse was that a dragon swallowed the sun. Fortunately for us (and the sun) neither mass panic and crime nor the sun being swallowed actually happened. Instead people had something really cool to look at, while some very confused cows in Japan decided it was dinner time and went to their troughs. 

The Seattle Times had a story a few days ago on something that may be neither science nor magic. This one struck my attention because of my interest in animal behavior. Mary Phillips, a hospice nurse in the state of Washington, credits her co-worker's Maltese Poodle, Jacque Pierre, with saving her life. She arrived at work one day and was struck by a crippling headache. While lying on the floor resting, Jacque Pierre came in and, despite the fact Phillips and Jacque Pierre weren't buddies, licked the size of her head exactly where the pain was the most excruciating. That unlikely gesture convinced Phillips to go to the ER where they found a walnut-sized aneurysm in her head. Phillips had recalled times when hospice patients' pets refused to leave their dying owners' sides at the exact moment of death, and she stated those experiences were what made her finally seek help.

What might quite possibly be magic in the sue-happy American society of today is University of Michigan Health System doctors have found that admitting mistakes and offering compensation up front has actually saved them from malpractice suits. According to Google News, after implementing this "common decency" approach malpractice claims dropped by half from 2001-07, the time to process claims dropped from 20 to eight months and costs per claim were halved. Patients who have been on the receiving end of medical mistakes in the system but who received an immediate apology and compensation have stated their satisfaction with not feeling abandoned. I guess nice guys don't always finish last. 

Wondering at Nature...

As I have stated before, I do not enjoy "roughing it," but I am still capable of being sufficiently awed by the forces of nature. Some of my favorite photos come from the genius Ansel Adams. I do love me a good view of the countryside after tramping up hundreds of stairs to the top of whatever tower/cathedral/really tall building is handy. The stone I stole from the Cliff Walk in Rhode Island reminds me, among other things, of the power of the waves and the time it took for that rock to become so smooth. 

I do recall one incident sophomore year of college where I was more confused than cowed by Nature, however. I remember being woken out of a dead sleep in my East Coast dorm room without a clue why. I was more peeved than anything else since it was before I had to get up to go to work. Later at the tennis camp where I taught I found out what had woken me up was a low magnitude earthquake. 

I'm not sure if this next story really qualifies as good news, but it isn't bad news unless you're a Kiwi or Aussie who really hates the other nationality. A 7.8 earthquake has moved the island of New Zealand one foot closer to Australia and actually enlarged NZ, as one side of the country moved farther than the other. I guess what does qualify as good news is that despite it being the biggest tremor in the world so far this year, it caused relatively little structural damage and no injuries. 

Yahoo! seems to be the go-to story site today. I just realized all three of my stories are from there... Attached to the earthquake story was a little article on a new contest to name the seven natural wonders of the world. Two years ago, New 7 Wonders held a contest to name the seven man-made wonders that produced the following list: the Roman Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Lost City of Petra in Jordan, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, Macchu Picchu in Peru, and the Pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico. For the new contest, there are 28 finalists which people can vote on by phone or the Internet. The winners will be announced in 2011. 

The photo belongs to an AP story hosted on Yahoo! News. The popular seals who sleep and play in a cove in La Jolla have been granted legal protection from being forcibly ejected from the area. A couple years ago, some idiot, ahem, the disgruntled swimmer mentioned in the article filed suit because s/he wanted to swim in the cove and not share it with the seals. This ruling also prevents some poor soul from suffering the indignity of having to walk down the beach with a loudspeaker blaring the sound of dogs barking (to scare away the seals) accompanied by one of San Diego's finest (to ward off attacks from pro-seal demonstrators.)