It's Time to Kill the Cupcake

(The following post was inspired by Tom Scocca)

WARNING: This blog post is not about sports. It is about cupcakes. So if you were expecting a sports-related post and you do not want to read about cupcakes, you might want to get out while you still can.

As for the rest of you, hold on to your dicks.

It is time for us as human beings to completely abolish the existence of the cupcake. I say this without the least hint of irony, sarcasm or tongue-in-cheekness. The cupcake is the bastard child of the dessert world and its existence is a black mark on human ingenuity. When I see a cupcake, my first urge is to drop it down a well.

I’m not some kind of ranting madman, though. I have a sound, well thought out and highly logical argument in favor of the cupcake’s eradication. I have little doubt that by the time you finish reading this post you will share my disdain for the cupcake, and if not, you are probably the kind of person who thinks that Glenn Beck would be a cool dude to party with.

My main issue with the cupcake derives from the fact that not one person in the history of human existence has managed to eat a cupcake while simultaneously:

• Not looking like a complete fool
• Managing to not make a huge mess
• Managing to get 2 consecutive bites that are equal parts frosting and cake

Don’t believe me? Let’s do a quick walkthrough of how the standard cupcake eating experience usually unfolds.

When you first examine a cupcake it becomes clear that you cannot just go after it by taking a normal sized bite, because doing so would leave you with more than half of the cupcake stuffed in your mouth, and then everyone who has gathered in the breakroom to sing happy birthday to Marilyn will look at you like you are some kind of gluttonous freak. Samantha might even say something bitchy like, “Hey sport, take it easy there! We only bought 12 you know! Ha-ha-ha.”

Being the classy person that you are, you decide that this cupcake needs to be eaten slowly and gracefully, like a lovely duck confit. So you begin by peeling down the front half of the little wrapper that surrounds the bottom of the cupcake. As soon as the wrapper is pulled down the damn thing shits crumbs all over you. Here you are, handling a freshly purchased pastry, and the thing has already started to crumble into dust before it has even been touched.

After dusting the crumbs off of the front of your nice sweater vest, (the only one you own by the way and will now have to wash because you accidentally rubbed some of the cake into the fabric while you were trying to brush it off) you begin trying to formulate a plan of action for your first bite. You can’t give it a full bite for reasons previously discussed, but too small of a bite will leave you with a meager mouthful of cake and frosting all over your nose.

So you decide to that thing where you kind of tip the cupcake backwards at a 45 degree angle in an attempt to keep the frosting away from your face and you take a bite that is about 80% cupcake and 20% frosting. This inevitably leads to more crumbs falling off, which leads to you doing that thing where you cup your other hand and bring it up by your jaw so that the crumbs don’t go everywhere. We all know that this particular move always makes you look super cool. No doubt someone, most likely Kristine, will witness you doing this move and you'll respond by doing that thing where you raise your eyebrows slightly and nod at her as if to say, "Mmmmm, good cupcake!" But what you really want to say is, "I'm so glad you are watching me make a fool of myself Kristine. Perhaps you could look elsewhere before I jam this cupcake into your face."

Now you’re one bite in and staring at an angled concavity that makes it impossible to take the cupcake head on once again. You decide to try and attack one of the newly created corners, which you might be able to pull off with moderate success. This will be the highlight of your cupcake eating experience.

With the corners eaten, you are now faced with a sheer wall of cake underneath an overabundance of frosting. Knowing that you have to even things out, you lick some of the frosting off of the top. It tastes gross.

This is when the real trouble starts. At this point about half of the cupcake is gone, and Laurie is undoubtedly going to ask you if you would be able to seal this pile of envelopes really fast and get them in the outgoing mailbox before 1:30 PM. This means you will have to put your cupcake down—but guess fucking what—with half of your cupcake gone it is way too top heavy to set down without it tipping over and getting frosting all over your desk. Now you have to go find a napkin or plate that you can gingerly lay your cupcake on while you do Laurie’s work for her.

With the envelopes sealed, it’s time to get back to the torturous duty of eating your cupcake. Now that half of it is eaten, you find yourself having to peel off more of the wrapper in order to expose edible areas. This will greatly limit the space with which you can grip the cupcake, which will no doubt lead to further mishaps with crumbs and frosting getting where it doesn’t belong.

At this point you’ve got about two onerous bites left before you are left pinching a thin spire of cake with a massive gob of frosting at its peak. You decide to just shove what’s left of it into your mouth all at once and you go into a sugar coma. Marilyn, of course, will see do this and cast disapproving eyes in your direction.

Bearing these truths in mind, I have created a graph which demonstrates just how useless cupcakes are to us as consumers of food.

Area=Value

We begin by plotting the food in question’s deliciousness in relation to how easy said food is to eat. From this plot point we draw intersecting lines, thus creating a rectangle that’s area is representative of the food’s overall value.

As you can see, pizza, which is just as easy to eat as it his delicious, creates a rectangle with a very large area, giving it a very high value.

Cupcakes, on the other hand, are not represented well on this graph due to their moderate deliciousness and eminent difficulty of consumption.

I’d also like to point out that I’ve presented this well reasoned argument to many friends who have called me crazy upon hearing about my hatred of cupcakes. As of yet, not one of them has been able to present me with a logical rebuttal.

I have been told, “Well Tom, cupcakes are supposed to be messy when you eat them!”

O RLY?! So if I told you that I didn’t particularly enjoy getting stabbed because it hurt really bad, would you reply by saying, “Well Tom, getting stabbed is supposed to hurt, so that’s not a good reason to hate on getting stabbed!”

If you get enjoyment out of how difficult cupcakes are to eat, you are a masochist and a sick fuck.

Worst of all, I have had people tell me that I should just eat cupcakes with a fork if I have such a problem with their form.

Want to know why I don’t eat cupcakes with a fork? Because if I was going to do that, I would just eat a regular piece of cake like a fucking adult.

Thanks for your time.

Feel free to contact the author of this post at leyt345 at gmail dot com.

Overdue Album Review: Mt. Desolation

What happens when members from groups like Keane, The Killers and Noah and the Whale come together to record an alt-country/bluegrass album? You get Mt. Desolation, whose debut album was released this past October. Is it worth picking up? Read on for my review!

The Brilliance of Chris Paul

I know Chris, I missed you too.

Three years ago I was best described as a casual basketball fan. Then I watched Chris Paul perform in the 2008 NBA playoffs, and I wasn’t a casual fan anymore.

Chris Paul’s run during that postseason made me want to be a basketball fan, much the same way that reading The Great Gatsby made me want to understand literature on a deeper level, or how seeing Die Hard for the first time increased my love of Christmas tenfold. The barrage of crossovers, floaters and bounce passes that Paul let loose in those playoffs left me in awe, and I wanted more.

And then, tragically, Chris Paul just sort of disappeared. After missing almost half of last season with a knee injury, he returned to the court this year as a deeply lessened version of himself. He still managed to put up decent stats and get his team into the playoffs, but the knee was clearly holding him back. Watching him this season was like watching Die Hard 2, still fun, but nowhere near as good as the original.

As a basketball fan, this circumstance made me very sad, because when Chris Paul is playing well he is more fun to watch than any other player in the league.

I say this because there is something incredibly unique about Paul’s greatness; in that it is not derived from pure athletic force, but rather from subtlety and craft. When you look at guys like Dwight Howard and LeBron James you immediately know why they are two of the best players of the league, and while watching them do their thing is no doubt impressive, there also isn’t really much to it. They are simply bigger, stronger and faster than everyone else in the league, and they know how to take full advantage of their physical gifts.

Paul is different, though. He doesn’t make other players look silly by jumping over them, he does it by unleashing an ever so slight flick of the wrist or bob of the head. His movements are so subtle that sometimes you can’t even see them until the play is shown again in slow motion.

Take the play at the 2:01 minute mark of this highlight reel for example. Watching the play at full speed, it’s not exactly clear what Paul does to make Jason Kidd temporarily lose control of his limbs. If you look carefully, you can see him do something with his right hand, but it’s just a brief flicker, there and gone before you make sense of what just happened. Paul’s like a magician performing a card trick. You know you saw him do something with that damn card, and yet it’s still nowhere to be found when he opens his hand.

It’s not until the play is slowed down that the genius of Paul’s subtlety becomes apparent. You see him feign a crossover to his left as he slides his right hand underneath the ball, leaving it spinning in place like a yo-yo. You see him calmly re-collect the ball with his right hand as he explodes past a bewildered Kidd. You see him finish with a spectacular pass that is completely mundane when compared to the magic trick that started the play.

You feel bad for Jason Kidd.

It is plays like this that made me fall in love with Chris Paul, and subsequently the game of basketball. This is why it was so sad to see him playing as a shell of his former self, to be forced to acknowledge the possibility that Paul’s best days were already behind him.

And then Sunday night’s game against the Lakers happened.

There was Chris Paul, mercilessly exerting his will onto the Lakers defense, utterly in control of every facet of the game and finishing with 27 points, 13 rebounds and 15 assists.

Paul played brilliantly the entire night, and yet as the game was winding down I found myself still waiting for that one magic trick of a play, the one play I’d need to see over and over again in order to fully understand what had happened (this ridiculous crossover move on Bynum came awfully close).

It was on the game’s pivotal possession, with the Hornets up three and fourteen seconds left on the clock, that I got my wish.

Paul isolated against Kobe Bryant at the top of the key, drove left, and then did this (fast forward to the 4:00 minute mark of the video).

When I saw the game live, I had no idea how Jarrett Jack had ended up with the ball just inside the free throw line. I saw Paul go careening down the left side of the lane where he was enveloped by the limbs of Pau Gasol and Kobe Bryant, and then the ball just seemed to appear in Jack’s hands, who proceeded to knock down the game clinching jumper.

Stranded in mid-air with nowhere to go, facing what would have at best been a brick off of the back board and at worst a blocked shot, Paul somehow managed to see Jack cutting towards the lane out of the absolute furthest corner of his eye; and with one quick flick of the wrist, he’d pulled off another card trick.

And it felt good to be dazzled once again.

Feel free to contact the author of this post at leyt345 dot gmail dot com.

Overdue Review: Portal 2 (PC)

Butler brings you the scoop on Portal 2 and his thoughts on what makes for an effective sequel.  He'll try to keep his delighted squealing to a minimum, though promises nothing.  Find out if this game is awesome, or the awesome-EST after the jump.

U MAD, ADRIAN?

On Tuesday night a shorthanded New York Knicks team lost 96-93 to go down 0-2 in their first round playoff series against the Boston Celtics.  The Knicks had to play the entire game without Chauncey Billups and a majority of the game without Amar’e Stoudemire

If you were wondering how the Knicks were able to keep the game so close without the services of Billups and Stoudemire, look no further than Carmelo Anthony’s stat line: 42 points, 17 rebounds and 6 assists.

If you are a sane, rational person you will probably look at that stat line and say, “Wow, Carmelo really played great!  He sure did his best to help his team win!”

If you are somewhat insane and brutally illogical, however, you probably have a lot in common with Yahoo Sports columnist Adrian Wojnarowski.

 "Where's my oat meal! I've got a column
to write!"

Following Tuesday night’s game, Wojnarowski penned this column, which I like to imagine was written on a roll of toilet paper in between bare-handed bites of cold oat meal and shouting matches with disembodied voices.

In his column Wojnarowski argues that ‘Melo in fact failed his team on Tuesday night, first by making wrong decisions on the court, and second by offending some kind of imaginary honor code during his post game press conference.

Wojnarowski begins by taking aim at ‘Melo’s apparently bankrupt soul:

“Once again, he still doesn’t understand that a superstar’s code calls for different disposition when a losing playoff night is over. Whatever he’s done, it isn’t enough. Let everyone else praise you, but the superstar doesn’t take bows when his team is down 2-0 in a series where he ended one game missing 10 of 11 shots.”

It’s hard to imagine a more quintessential example of sports writing hackery than the invocation of the “superstar’s code,” which Wojnarowski claims that ‘Melo violated by not brow-beating himself during his postgame press conference.

Wojnarowski wanted ‘Melo to act a certain way during his press conference, and the fact that he didn’t does not make him a bad person, it just gives Wojnarowski a reason to be a nattering twit.

In Wojnarowski’s world, ‘Melo’s comments were proof that he does not grasp the “superstar’s code,” which is itself a meaningless, abstract ideal that is the construction of curmudgeonly sports writers who want desperately for the games they write about to mean whatever the hell it is they want them to mean.

There is no such thing as the “superstar’s code.”  There is no governing law of basketball that demands that players of a certain skill level conduct themselves in a way that sports writers deem acceptable. 

I’d wager that if you asked Wojnarowski what the “superstar’s code” was he’d just babble something similar to, “GURGLE…Larry Bird...GURGLE, GURGLE…Michael Jordan!  Team Play…GURGLE…ULTIMATE SACRIFICE!”

It’s not real; it’s a fucking figment of the collective imagination of a bunch of self-righteous dudes with lap tops.

So to sum up, Wojnarowsk is mad at Carmelo Anthony for making an imagined slight against an imagined code of conduct.  Seems reasonable.

Once he’s done gnashing his teeth over ‘Melo’s post game comments, Wojnarowski goes on to have a hissy fit over ‘Melo’s decision to pass the ball to a wide open teammate in the final moments of the game.

Down 94-93 on his team’s final possession, ‘Melo received the inbounds pass near the elbow and was quickly double teamed by the Celtics.  ‘Melo quickly passed the ball to Jared Jeffries, who was wide open under the basket, who then decided to try and pass the ball to a cutting Bill Walker rather than taking a shot.  Jeffries pass was intercepted by a rotating Kevin Garnett, and the game was essentially over.

Wojnarowski thinks that this sequence is evidence that ‘Melo is a coward and a big fat dummy.  Of course he does:

"...he made the safest possible play to ultimately deflect criticism, the one that deep down he knew would free him of blame when it predictably crumbled."

I can barely even stand to address this statement, wherein Wojnarowski is essentially claiming that ‘Melo's decision to pass the ball to a WIDE OPEN teammate in the waning seconds of a close game was not a basketball decision, but rather a PR decision.  I think the intense idiocy in such an assumption is pretty self-evident and does not really need to be parsed out, but yeah, it’s really stupid to say something like that.

Which brings us to Part II of Stupidest Thing Written in this Batshit Column, in which Wojnarowski claims that Jeffries failure to lay the ball up or make a clean pass to Bill Walker is somehow ‘Melo’s fault.

“When the ball leaves your hands for Jeffries, what he does with it is your responsibility. That’s how it works…Melo needed to let everyone else celebrate this magnificent performance and hold himself to a higher standard, a superstar’s standard. And that isn’t going, ‘Hey, I gave the ball to a lousy player, who made a lousy decision so how’s that on me?’”

Look!  It's Jared Jeffries!

Oh, ok.  So instead of defending his decision to pass the ball during his press conference, ‘Melo should have said something like, “Yeah, it’s totally my fault that Jeffries didn’t lay that ball in.  I should have known better than to pass it to a worthless piece of shit like that.  In fact, I’m surprised the mongoloid didn’t just drop to the floor and start dry humping the basketball right there!  Next time I’ll be sure to shoot over the double team.”

I wonder which clause of the “superstar’s code” that would fall under?

The simple truth is that ‘Melo made a routine basketball decision.  He was double teamed, and his teammate was wide open under the basket, thus giving him what appeared a better chance at scoring than ‘Melo had.  There is nothing inherently wrong with ‘Melo’s split-second decision to pass the ball, things just didn’t work out the way he had hoped they would.  Sometimes in life and in sports things just don’t work out, and we don’t always have to go searching for some greater meaning in these moments.

Which is really what’s so aggravating about Wojnarowski’s column.  He can’t just let the game be, he has to go digging within its crevices in search of some sort of revelation with which he can construct a narrative about ‘Melo’s shortcomings as a person and as a basketball player; and when there was no meaning or revelation to be found, he made one up.

Maybe, just maybe, there really isn’t anything to be said about this particular game other than a very good basketball player played very well in a very exciting basketball game that his team ultimately lost.

That's a column I would like to read.

Feel free to contact the author of this post at leyt345 at gmail dot com

New Music Review: KT Tunstall's "The Scarlet Tulip EP"

KT Tunstall has certainly made a name for herself for her radio hits like "Suddenly I See" and "Black Horse and The Cherry Tree".  Tunstall's real talent, however, is her ability to make amazing music with just her voice and her guitar. Her new EP "The Scarlet Tulip", released just last Friday, is a great highlight of that. Read on for my review!

On Dots, Baseball and the Depravity of my Mind

CONFESSION TIME: I spend a lot of time watching baseball games on the internet. Now I know what you may be thinking, “Why does this warrant a confession, Tom? I watch stuff on the internet all the time. In fact, I just watched an episode of Parks and Rec on Hulu. Boy, that Leslie Knope sure is hilarious!”

The thing is, friend, that I don’t watch actual games on the internet. I watch a two dimensional Java application that updates the game action through use of various colored dots. I do this because A) I’m a really exciting person, and B) I have fantasy baseball players to keep track of, and most of Jaime Garcia’s starts are not nationally televised affairs.

Here’s a picture of what I’m dealing with, just to give you a better idea:

So if the pitcher throws a strike, one of those little red dots appears, and if he throws a ball, a little green dot pops up, and if the batter makes contact with the ball, a little blue dot pops up and then you are told via textual updates what the outcome of said contact was (groundout, flyout, single etc.). Cute, isn’t it?

Actually, it’s not cute at all, because those little dots are going to fucking drive me insane. I’ve come to realize that the dots are not here to pass along information to me about the game, they are here to mock me and my inability to not obsess over the outcomes of ultimately meaningless baseball games.

Watching a live baseball game (either in person or on TV) comes with a certain kind of rhythm that prevents you from having to think too much. The pitcher throws the ball, the batter steps out of the box to fidget with his testicles, the ball is returned to the pitcher, the pitcher wipes some sweat from his brow, resets and throws again. That’s basically 90% of the action during a game, and it’s really quite comforting in its monotony.

The Dots (I capitalize here, so as to fully portray their menace), on the other hand, take everything that is comforting about this monotony and replaces it with anxiety and self-loathing.

There is no rhythm or flow associated with the cold, faceless dots. You simply stare at the screen until a dot appears (Red dot! Strike, woohoo!), and then you wait…and you wait…and you wait…until eventually another dot appears (Blue dot! Ball, fuck me!). The entire time you are waiting for the next dot to appear, your mind is racing and slipping deeper and deeper into madness, because there is no brow wiping or nut adjusting to comfort you, there is only the rattling of your own brain.

An example:

“Okay, 1-2 count, gotta strike him out here. Throw the slider in the dirt, Jaime. C’mon throw it. Jesus Christ where is the next dot? Why is this taking so long? Did something happen to him? Oh God what if he hurt his elbow on the last pitch and there are taking him out of the game and that’s why this is taking so long? SERIOUSLY, WHERE IS THE NEXT DOT?!”

Blue dot—Homerun.

“GAHHHHH!”

None of this has been exaggerated. It is pathetic and disgusting and I do it every day.

That's right, it's always a party

at Tom's apartment!

And I haven’t even mentioned the comments section at the bottom of the page, which usually consists of people with screen names like GOSAWX691!!1 typing things like, “Phil Hughes throws like a FAIRY!” And yet sometimes I find myself actually reading through some of these comments, as there often people out there who are bigger losers than me who like to watch the game on TV and on the computer at the same time; and these cretins will often alert you when something big happens long before The Dots have time to update.

The worst part of all of this is that while you are sitting there watching this bullshit, you are perfectly aware of how ridiculous and inane the whole thing is.

Another example:

“God, I can’t believe that I’m sitting here watching baseball on a fucking computer screen. It’s 70 degrees outside right now. What the hell am I doing with myself? This isn’t healthy; I really need to re-evaluate my--Red dot! Yes!”

It makes you feel like a heroin addict who knows that he’s destroying his life, and yet he just can’t stop chasing that dragon. Only in this case, I just can’t stop chasing that red dot.

The Dots aren’t digital representations of simple information. No, they are in fact mirrors of a sort, mirrors that reveal to all those who look into them the true nature of the human mind. A mind that at its core is obsessive, neurotic and ultimately masochistic.

So, if you plan on watching a baseball game on the internet, be careful. You might not like what you see.

Feel free to contact the author of this post at leyt345 at gmail dot com.