I got to have me some cake this week.¹ I ate it, too. And this cake-having inspired me to think about cake. So I’ll be serving up a list of cake-oriented things for this week’s ThThTh.
Bon appétit!
A Cake List
Cakes are used for lots of holidays and celebratory events in many cultures. Some examples include birthday cakes, going away cakes at office parties, French bûches de Noël or German stollen at Christmas. Also…
Wedding cakes. Usually elaborately decorated multi-tiered cakes meant to serve all the guests at a wedding. They can be quite tall, and easily knocked over or smashed for comedic effect in movies or sitcoms.
stripper in a cake. A tradition (if it really happens outside of TV and movies) of having an exotic dancer jump out of a large cake-shaped container. (You can make your own, if you like.) (I toyed with making a list of movies/shows where you see a stripper cake, but could only remember “Under Siege,” where the stripper fell asleep in the cake. Anyone have any others?)
sexy cakes. A sketch on Saturday Night Live with Patrick Stewart as a baker of cakes decorated with erotic images. That is, erotic if you have similar ideas to the baker as to what’s “sexy”. (The video seems not to be up on the SNL website, but you can read the transcript. Come on, go read it. It’s funny. Especially if you imagine Patrick Stewart’s dignified stentorian voice for the baker’s lines.)
“Let them eat cake!” A phrase attributed to Marie-Antoinette, reflecting her insensitivity to the hungry masses who could not afford to buy bread. It was likely not really said by her. (And certainly not in English.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of someone using a similar phrase under similar circumstances in 1767, several years before Marie-Antoinette even arrived in Versailles.
the icing on the cake. An expression meaning an additional bonus, benefit, or other desirable thing. As in something good on top of something else that’s good.
cupcake. A small individual serving-sized cake. Also an endearment.
babycakes. Another, even cutesier, endearment. (Want to see something creepy? Check out this YouTube video of someone making a realistic sculpted baby cake. Perhaps not as deeply unsettling as bread made to look like dismembered body parts, but creepy nonentheless.)
Pat-a-cake. (or Patty-cake). An English nursery rhyme. Also used for a clapping game.
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Pat it and roll it and mark it with “B”
And put it in the oven for Baby and me.
a piece of cake. An idiomatic expression meaning “easy.” As in “eating up all that chocolate was a piece of cake.”
have your cake and eat it, too. An expression describing a desire to have things 2 different ways that are not compatible. More along the lines of “save your cake and eat it too.”
takes the cake. An expression meaning “the most extreme example,” such as the winner of a contest or other comparison. As in “I thought Martin was a geek, but his brother Andy really takes the cake.”
Cakewalk. A game, set to music, where the winner gets win a cake. I hadn’t realized it had origins as an actual dance:
Cakewalk is a traditional African American form of music and dance which originated among slaves in the Southern United States. The form was originally known as the chalk line walk; it takes its name from competitions slaveholders sometimes held, in which they offered slices of hoecake as prizes for the best dancers.[1] It has since evolved from a parody of ballroom dancing to a “fun fair” like dance where participants dance in a circle in the hopes of winning a free cake.
Cake. A band. My favorite song of theirs is probably their cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive.”
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¹ Actually, what I technically had was a celebratory fresh fruit tart, with a preamble of a couple of donuts holding some candles. But these were symbolically cake:
Today is the first day of May, or May Day. Since I haven’t found an opportunity to dance around a maypole, I’ll present this flower-themed ThThTh to you as a sort of virtual May basket.
a bunch of flowers
“April showers bring May flowers.” An expression that makes reference to the frequency of rain in the month of April (in the Northern hemisphere, at least), and the Spring flowers that benefit from the watering. It has the meaning “Some unpleasant occurrences bring about better things.”
Flower children: a term for hippies, based on their tendencies to wear flowers as symbols of peace and love.
Victorian Language of Flowers. A means of sending messages during the Victorian era. Specific flowers or colors of flowers had specific meanings attached for the recipient to decode. For example, a lobelia meant “malevolence” and a morning glory meant “love in vain.”
(s)he loves me, (s)he loves me not: a tradition of plucking the petals off a flower to determine whether one is loved. For each petal, the plucker alternates saying, eg. “he loves me” and “he loves me not.” The final petal, and which of the two phrases is slated to be spoken as it is plucked, establishes or refutes the love being questioned.
“Roses are Red.” A short poem (with many variants), sometimes used in Valentine’s Day cards. For example:
Roses are red, violets are blue
Honey is sweet, and so are you.
I like this one better:
Roses are red, violets are blue
Some poems rhyme
But this one doesn’t
American Beauty (1999) A movie with Kevin Spacey, which features rose gardening. It also has the famous dream scene with Mena Suvari in a pile of rose petals. (Why did I think it was Heather Graham? I guess it’s been a while.) American Beauty is also the name of a variety of roses¹
“Edelweiss” A song about the small white Alpine flower that is widely believed to be a traditional folksong, but was actually written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the musical “The Sound of Music.”
Edelweiss, Edelweiss
Every morning you greet me
Small and white, clean and bright
You look happy to meet me
El Seed from the animated Tick series. A megavillain who is an anthropomorphic sunflower. (The name is a play on El Cid.)
Certain poppies are used to produce opiates (opium and heroine). Poppies also have a drugging effect in the field of poppies from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her companions (at least those that are mammals) are drugged to sleep when they enter a field of poppies. (Here’s the corresponding book chapter.)
The Orchid Thief: A non-fiction book by Susan Orlean about a man who illegally collects rare wild orchids. The movie Adaptation (2002) is in part about this story, and in part about the process of adapting a book into a screenplay.
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Gregory Maguire’s second novel for adults². This reinterpretation of the Cinderella fairytale is set in 17th century Holland during the peak (and then crash) of the tulip craze.
Carnation: In the Avengers series, Steed would typically wear a carnation in his buttonhole. Characters in various fictional stories, especially spy stories, will wear a red carnation in order that they may be identified by someone who doesn’t otherwise know their appearance.
“Dennis Moore,” the Monty Python episode where a bumbling Robin Hood-type character steals lupins from the rich to give to the poor. “Your lupins or your life!”
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¹ There are so many rose-related things out there, including several fairy tale rose references, that I could easily do a list just of roses. I probably will at some point down the line. Consider this a token rose for now.)
² He had written several young adult/kids’ novels before writing Wicked.)
Okay, I admit it. I’m feeling a tad burned out. What with the trip for the conference, the conference itself, the prep for the conference, the hard drive failure, and the various illnesses of the past couple of weeks, I feel like I’m due for a break. But sadly, I’ve got to get cranking on the next poster for the conference in Brazil, which is now (most startlingly) less than 3 weeks away.
And not that you wanted to know this, but I am now plagued by heartburn. I had this problem when I was pregnant before, especially as I got huge. I thought things might be better this time around, but either the timing was coincidental, or the stomach bug I got pushed me out of the comfort zone, and into the fire.
Hello zantac, my old friend,
I’ve come to look to you again,
Because the acids softly creeping,
Left my stomach while I was sleeping,
And the fire that was planted in my throat
Really blows
Giving the burn of reflux.
Anyhow, I owe a ThThTh list, but I’m not feeling sufficiently fired up to do a thorough job. But here are a burning bits to toast your marshmallows. (Please feel free to fuel the fire, too.)
Phoenix, a mythical bird who burns and is reborn out of the ashes
Quest for Fire, a 1981 movie base on a 1911 French novel. About prehistoric people. Who, um, want fire or something like that.
Out of the the frying pan and into the fire, an idiom meaning “leave a bad situation for a worse one.”
Firestarter. A 1984 movie starrying Drew Barrymore as a pyrokinetic kid. Based on a Stephen King novel.
The Human Torch, a comic book character. Who gets all fiery.
Flame war or flaming: “the hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users”
And here, how about a whole bunch of songs I like with a fiery theme.
Burning down the house, Talking Heads Beds are Burning, Midnight Oil Fire on Babylon, Sinead O’Connor London’s Burning, The Clash Firestarter, Prodigy Light My Fire, The Doors Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash (also Social Distortion) Who by Fire, Leonard Cohen Dig for Fire, Pixies It’s a Fire, Portishead Into the Fire, Sarah MacLachlan Keeper of the Flame, Nina Simone
With work keeping me crazy busy, and life in general pulling me in all sorts of directions, it’s no wonder I feel I’m going a bit bananas. And what with yesterday’s big banana-related news, it’s no wonder I’ve got bananas on the brain. Seeing as I don’t have a whole lot of time tonight, this ThThTh list may be on the short side. So please feel encouraged throw in your own bananas.
A small bunch of bananas
banana split. An ice cream sundae characterized by a banana that has been split in half lengthways.
The Tattooed Banana: a blog devoted to “the emerging appreciation of banana art.”
Banana Yoshimoto. A Japanese author. Not actually a banana. Her first novel was Kitchen.
Bananarama. An 80s musical group. They weren’t bananas either. Actually, the members were all female.
“The Banana Boat Song.” A song made famous by Harry Belafonte. Here’s a clip from the movie Beetlejuice with the song:
top banana. An expression meaning “head honcho” or “big cheese.” Has origins in burlesque performances.
slipping on a banana peel. A common slapstick-type sight gag. (cf. this batch of cartoons.) For further insights into the phenomenon, check out this insightful post, which also led me to this fabulous banana-peel-slipping-related dialog from the 1966 Batman movie:
Batman: [reading a riddle] What has yellow skin and writes?
Robin: A ball-point banana!
Batman: [reads the second riddle] What people are always in a hurry?
Robin: Rushing people… Russians!
Batman: So this means…
Robin: Someone Russian is going to slip on a banana and break their neck!
Batman: Precisely, Robin!
Banana in the tailpipe: a prank involving shoving a banana up the tailpipe of a car, causing the engine to stop. Made famous by a scene with Eddie Murphy in the movie Beverly Hills Cop (1984).
This may come as a shock to you, but I find the word banana itself to be funny. (Yes, much like the word pants.) I might even go as far as saying that I find banana to be an inherently funny word. This may be part of why bananas are featured in a lot of jokes. Some of them remarkably silly. I found a page of banana jokes that someone posted on a joke blog, and lookie what I found there:
With Easter around the corner, and with nesting on my brain, it seems like a good time to break out the eggs. While there are loads full of eggs out there, to help moderate our cholesterol intake, I’ll restrict this ThThTh list to a dozen egg things.
A Dozen Eggs
Easter eggs. Eggs that have been dyed and/or decorated as part of Easter traditions. Linked by some to the concept of rebirth. Linked by others to an anthropomorphic bunny.
Easter egg: a hidden message or bonus in video game, DVD, or other (ususally digital) media. (Can you find my Easter egg?) They can also be found in print or other media, scuh as maps, as a means to protect from copyright infringement.
Fabergé eggs. Elaborate jewelled eggs made by Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé, many of which were commissioned by the Russian imperial family. They often had surprises hidden inside.
Chocolate eggs. Not actually eggs flavored with chocolate, which probably comes as a relief to many, but egg-shaped chocolates. I’m partial to Kinder eggs. A type of chocolate egg containing a plastic yolk with a surprise inside. When I was little, the toys were much cooler than the prizes you could find in, for example, Cracker Jacks. Cadbury Creme Eggs are pretty tasty, too, but the yolk contained within is messier to play with.
“the egg scene” from Angel Heart (1987) (clip on YouTube) “You know, some religions think that the egg is the symbol of the soul,” says Robert Deniro during the scene where he malevolently peels and eats a hard-boiled egg.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
It has quite a bit of lore associated with it. (Did you know it was a riddle in earlier forms, with the eggness of Humpty being the answer?)
Palestinian egg story: A Palistinian folktale about an egg trying to discover its identity. I was exposed to it during a field methods class, where we worked with a speaker of Palestinian Arabic. I particularly remember the line [ʔɪnti mɪʃ Хudra], or “You are not a vegetable.”
Eggbert, the Slightly Cracked Egg, a picturebook by Tom Ross, illustrated by Rex Barron. A story of an egg who is an individual. And a slightly cracked one.
Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss. A story of an elephant who is talked into sitting on a nest.
“She was a bad egg.” An expression meaning “she was a bad person,” and a quote from the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) by Gene Wilder when Veruca Salt was dumped down the chute after being identified as faulty by the egg-dicator.
“Egg Baby” Parenting an exercise or assignment sometimes used to teach teenagers about parenting and responsibility. Kids are given an egg to “care for” for a set amount of time. Featured in “First the Egg” (1985), an After School Special starring Justine Bateman. Also in the Buffy episode “Bad Eggs.” Of course, in this case, the eggs turn out to be evil demon spawn.
Last week we covered lions. Not too long ago we covered bears. It seems about time I should get to the tigers. So here they are, populationg a ThThTh list in all their stripey goodness.
Year of the Tiger. The tiger is one of the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac. The next Year of the Tiger is 2010, which is not all that far off.
“The Tyger,” a poem by William Blake:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
“Tiger, Tiger,” a song by Duran Duran off their album “Seven and the Ragged Tiger”
Tiger. The nickname for Mac OS v10.4. I still haven’t upgraded.
“The Lady, or the Tiger?.” A short story by Frank R. Stockton with a surprise ending. It has also become “an expression, meaning an unsolvable problem.”
“Eye of the Tiger.” A song by Survivor. From the Rocky III soundtrack.
Tiger’s eye: a chatoyant gemstone. Sort of stripey and brown.
Tony the Tiger. The mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal, featured in commercials. Says of the flakes: “They’re grreat!”
A variety of tiger folktales can be unearthed, such as How Tiger Got His Stripes, a Folktale from Vietnam, the Cambodian “The Origin of the Tiger,” and “The Tiger’s Whisker,” a Korean folktale.
The Story of the Little Black Sambo, by Helen Banneman.
A story about a boy who meets (and outwits) a bunch of tigers in the jungle. In the end, the tigers turn into a big puddle of melted butter, which the boy’s family uses to make pancakes for dinner. Originally written by a British woman in India, the story has a complicated story of its own, due to the controversy about racism and racial stereotyping in the character names and original illustrations. (The name of the protagonist, contained in the book title itself, is considered to be a racial slur.) Recent updated versions have kept the tigers, but lost (at least in many people’s eyes) the racist overtones. (To see how people respond to this book today, it’s interesting to read the reviews on Amazon of the original, as well as the updated books The Story of Little Babaji and Sam and the Tigers. You can also read the full text, without illustrations.)
Eeny, Meeny, miny mo: A children’s chant, used to select (or rule) out people as part of a game. (To pick who is “it.) Also somewhat tainted by racial controversy, though I’d never heard of the offensive variants till I was an adult.
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
My mother says to
pick the very best one
and you are not it.
Life of Pi, by Yan Martel. The main character gets to know a tiger when both are shipwrecked.
Shere Khan. Mowgli’s nemesis (a tiger) in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories.
Leo the Late Bloomer, by Robert Krauss, Jose Aruego. A picture book about a tiger cub who takes his time growing up.
Hobbes. Calvin’s tiger companion. Looks like a stuffed toy when other people are around.
Tigger. The beloved and very bouncy tiger from A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Woods. Close friend to Winnie the Pooh.
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” (2000). A movie directed by Ang Lee, and one of my favorite movies. (It’s a movie with kick-ass women, to boot.) It doesn’t really have any tigers in it, aside from in the title.
Here’s my first ThThTh list of March. In like a lion, as they say. Or in with a list of lions, which they don’t really say. But I’ll say it. Or I just did. Here are some lions for you.
Leo. The astrological sign of the lion. Based on the constellation.
The Cowardly Lion from L. F. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Also in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz.) A lion who wants to get courage.
Aslan. The lion in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the other six books in the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis.
The Lion King (1994) . An animated Disney movie, and a broadway play based on the same.
The MGM Lion. This lion mascot (actually several different lions since 1924) appears roaring in the MGM logo as part of the (much parodied) opening sequence of Metro Goldwyn Mayer film productions.
“The Lion Sleeps Tonight“. A famous song with a more complicated history than I’d realized.. The original version “Mbube” was recorded in South Africa in 1939. Many versions, some also going by the name “Wimoweh,” have since been recorded around the world. Best known perhaps is the version by The Tokens. (Hear it on YouTube in a video with a singing hippo and dancing dog.)
The lion’s share. An expression meaning “the biggest portion.”
“The Lion’s Share“. A song off 10,000 Maniacs’ album Blind Man’s Zoo.
Fed to the lions or Thrown to the lions. Expressions meaning that a person has been placed in a metaphorical position of danger or a situation for which they are not well prepared. (Ancient Romans threw people to the lions as a spectator sport, and in a less figurative way.)
“The Slave and the Lion.” An Aesop’s fable about an escaped slave who removes a thorn from a lion’s paw, and thus gains the lion’s loyalty. And avoids getting eaten when he is thrown to the lions.
“The Lady and the Lion.” A fairy tale told by the Brothers Grimm about a young woman who is held captive by a lion, who turns out to be a cursed prince. The story has much in common with versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale. A retelling of the story is available as a picturebook.
The Lion and the Unicorn. Symbols of the United Kingdom. The lion gets to wear the crown on the UK Royal Coat of Arms. There’s also the related nursery rhyme:
The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown
The lion beat the unicorn all around the town.
Some gave them white bread, and some gave them brown;
Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town.
Here it is, February 28th. What is typically the last day of February. However, this year, as I’m sure you are aware is a leap year. So we get another day this month, making this year 366 days long.¹ Anyhow, this leaping business of leap year has inspired me to think about frogs.² And thus you get a froggy ThThTh list.
A Few Frogs
leap frog: A game you play by leaping over crouched people. (I can’t really describe it. Go see what Wikipedia says.)
Frogger. A classic 80s arcade game. The goal is to get a frog to hop safely across a road and a river without getting squashed or dunked. You can play online.
Kaeru: This Japanese word means both frog and return, leading to frog charms being carried for luck by travellers.
The Frog Prince. A fairy tale about a princess prince-turned-frog-turned prince. It has some variations I’m less familiar with:
Although in modern versions the transformation is invariably triggered by the princess kissing the frog, in the original Grimm version of the story, the frog’s spell was broken when the princess threw it against a wall in disgust.[1] In other early versions it was sufficient for the frog to spend the night on the princess’s pillow.
The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a book by Beatrix Potter. Mr. Fisher is a frog who goes fishing for his meal, but after some mishaps, opts to dine on grasshopper.
Frog and Toad. Characters from the series of books (including Frog and Toad are Friends) by Arnold Lobel. They are a frog and a toad. Who are friends.
Kermit the Frog. The beloved Muppet, created by Jim Henson. The orginal version was made from a discarded coat and ping pong balls.
Michigan J. Frog. The singing frog from the classic Warner Brother’s cartoon.
Keroppi Hasunoue. A Sanrio character. (It’s not actually clear to me what he is a character of, beyond toys and other merchandising.)
Froggy, a character in various books by Jonathan London, such as Froggy Gets Dressed.³
The frog scene from the movie Magnolia (1999). It rains frogs. Really big frogs. It gets messy.
Five Little Speckled Frogs. A children’s count-down song:
Five little speckled frogs,
Sitting on a hollow log,
Eating some most delicious bugs,
Yum, Yum.
One 1 frog jumped in the pool,
Where it was nice and cool,
Now there are four 4 speckled frogs,
Glub, glub.
A frog in one’s throat: an expression describing the gurgling and croaking⁴ that people sometimes get when talking with phlegm in the throat.
Crunchy Frog: a Monty Python sketch about a chocolate confection with a dead frog center.
We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.
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¹ Has anyone else noticed that this is perhaps an unfortunate year to choose for the inaugural year of Blog 365, where people commit to blogging daily for the whole year? But I see they have a planned day off for tomorrow.
² Because they leap.
³ We recently got a different Froggy book for Phoebe from a Scholastic catalog, namely Froggy Eats Out, and were a bit dismayed by the message of this particular one. In it, Froggy behaves like a brat and embarrasses his parents so badly at a nice restaurant that they must leave. They then reward him by going out to a burger joint, like Froggy had originally wanted.
⁴ Or irregular phonation. Which sounds less frog-like than croaking and gurgling.
There are times when the world conspires to make me ponder a topic for a list. This week the world apparently wants me to reflect on punctuation.
I’m quite fond of punctuation, really. Not so much the prescriptive uses of it. I like the informal uses of it that reflect the prosody of spoken language. You can break up a sentence or phrase with periods to show the strong emphasis of making each word its own intonational phrase. (What. The. Hell?) There’s the use of parentheses or commas for, you know, parenthenticals. (And I’m quite partial to parentheticals.) Or you can use ellipses to signal that you’re trailling off…
So I offer you a ThThTh list with an abundance of punctuation marks.
First, I offer to you the Evidence of Punctuation Conspiracy:
Apostrophe Abuse. Its the cats pajama’s in terms of misused apostrophe’s.
The Ominous Comma. A blog. While not actually about punctuation, it gets points for having such a cool punctuation-related name.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. A book on punctuation that is said to be entertaining. (Yes, I should have read it. I have it. But haven’t read it. It will probably tell me to stop with the sentence fragments. Or some such. Screw that.)
There’s a punctuation “game” based on the book. (I use “scare quotes” here to suggest that there is not a lot of “fun” or “playing” involved.)
More fun is the panda joke that is the inspiration for the book title (offered up by Geoffrey Pullum of The Language Log) .
I love you period
Do you love me question mark
Please, please exclamation point
I want to hold you in parentheses
Let’s not forget the colons and semi-colons of the island nation of San Serriffe:
The native people of San Serriffe are the Flong. However, the dominant group are of European stock, the descendants of colonists, known as colons. There is also a large mixed-race group, known as semi-colons.
Finally, I offer a bit of cartoon swearing. As in using punctuation marks in place of swear words, usually in a cartoon. (This allows me to end the post with a bang. Or 2.)(Sorry, a little punctuation mark humor.)(No, I’m not sorry. I’m dorky like that.)
I got to have me some cake this week.¹ I ate it, too. And this cake-having inspired me to think about cake. So I’ll be serving up a list of cake-oriented things for this week’s ThThTh. 
