It often happens that, when reading celebrated music blog Said the Gramophone, I will have my brain slightly wrinkled by the image chosen to accompany the post. It might be Leonard Nimoy-in-costume-as-Spock leaning against a late-model Chevy. It might be a cake that looks exactly like a piece of furniture:

Ceci n'est pas un sofa

The occasion was an art show/tasting put on by the Tate (London) and Kreemart, “an organization that lets artists explore desserts as a medium” (according to Cakehead Loves Evil).

Sweeeeeet

Demolition

You can see lots more photos from the event at ArtInfo (NB: you will also see boobies, so keep that in mind before you click).

What makes this creation so fascinating is that it is simultaneously realistic (I mean, looking at the first picture, would you guess it were a cake without being told?) AND absolutely scrumptious-looking. Look at the photo above and tell me you don’t want those people to cut you a slice. I enjoy watching Ace of Cakes and those other cake-design shows on food TV networks, or the lovely works in the Sunday Sweets feature at Cake Wrecks. The cakes you see there are definitely beautiful and amazing, but they don’t look particularly edible. Looking at this sofa-cake, I have a deep desire to plunge face-first into it.

Speaking of cake, Jezebel is a women’s interest blog, but it doesn’t really do recipes. But yesterday, contributing editor Sadie Stein posted a family recipe of hers (on the occasion of American Thanksgiving) for something called Wine Cake (the photo at left accompanied the post; I’m not sure if it’s an actual photo of Wine Cake or simply a Wine Cake-like cake).

Like many of the best mid-20th-century recipes, this one has only five (well, six) ingredients: yellow cake mix, vanilla pudding, oil, eggs and cooking sherry (the additional ingredient, icing sugar, is combined with sherry for the glaze).

Now, “cake mix” doesn’t exactly count as an “ingredient” by today’s epicurian standards — and often rightfully so. For instance, last year I made a couple batches of Bakerella’s Cake Balls for festive use and, on the recipe’s suggestion, used pre-pepared mixes and frosting. The result was something that people praised but in which I was disappointed. Prepared foods always have that inescapable chemical aftertaste, you know? This year, I plan to make the Cake Balls with from-scratch cake and icing. And I might make it gluten-free, too. I think the Wine Cake would lend itself to gluten-freeing as well — vanilla pudding is often found in GF baking for its binding and texture-enchancing qualities.

This morning I came across a new-to-me blog called Pictures of Cake. As you might be able to tell, it is relevant to my interests. The most recent post might also be relevant to Sadie Stein’s — it included this image:

Too bad we missed the big day!

From Lindsey, who is abroad, in France:

Balances out the gloominess induced by arriving home at 5 p.m. in near-complete dark.

If only this were the main romantic pairing in the series.

A lot of ink has already being spilled about the juggernaut of a movie that opened this weekend — New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight series (or “saga” or whatever). And the column inches will continue to rack up, and believe it or not, I’m not unhappy about that. Sure, I find Twilight, its premise, and the vast majority of its characters offensive on a visceral level. But, as many critics are today noting, New Moon’s utter domination at the box office this weekend means that what the industry dismissed as woman-oriented “flukes” over the past year (Mamma Mia, Julie and Julia) possibly weren’t, and it’s not just hormonal young men who want to go to the movies (I’ll skip the Megan Fox invocation here).

Here’s what Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood had to stay on the subject:

It seems to me that while Hollywood felt comfortable dismissing Sex and the City, Mamma Mia (because the audiences for those were primarily over 25), and even Twilight (as a one time wonder), there is no way that these numbers could be dismissed as a fluke.  THEY ARE JUST TOO BIG.  Women and girls are looking for material that they connect with just as much as guys and boys are, but they thing that blows me away about the success of New Moon and even The Blind Side [Sandra Bullock's new-benevolent-white-lady-saves-poor-black-kid movie -J] is that the theatres were just packed with women not caring if the guys came with them.  This was a weekend where the gals went in bunches and left the guys home cause they wanted to see this movie more than they wanted to see whatever their boyfriends or guyfriends wanted to see.

Frankly, despite my personal distaste for all things Twilight, I’m glad the movie did well. If Hollywood things women go to movies, then presumably more movies with women characters will be made. And while Twilight is full of feminist fail — a “heroine” who has no interests or hobbies beyond cooking dinner for her dad and being rescued by her undead paramour, for example — I’m going to take it as a baby step.

Let me be clear that if Twilight is your guilty pleasure, I won’t hold it against you. It’s OK to like bad things. We all do, from time to time. And I accept that the story, for some, is far more true-to-life in its emotional resonance. Read Molly Langmuir’s excellent post at This Recording:

Most of the teenage girls I knew at the time experienced some version of this story as well. But most of us also managed to eventually grow out of our teenage versions of romantic bliss (and move on to the version embedded within Jennifer Aniston vehicles, but that’s a whole other story). The movie makes no room for this reality, though, and simply goes about affirming my early conceptions of love with the delicacy of a chainsaw.

Let it be said that I tried to read Twilight; I even purchased a copy, back when I was hearing rumblings about how so many people loved it. Then I started reading and could NOT get through that damn books, because it’s so boring. Nothing happens in it. So I abandoned it in favour of reading Cleolinda Jones’s recaps. Cleolinda’s gotten a good amount of mainstream exposure recently, and deservedly so, because her work is hilarious. How she sums up the phenomenon:

Emo teenage girl moves to new town, meets mysterious boy, realizes he’s a sparkling vampire; Greatest Love of All Time Omg ensues. In later books, a love triangle forms with the addition of a werewolf. Babies are of paramount importance; going to college is not. Some readers rank the series up there with Pride and Prejudice and the works of Shakespeare; some readers… beg to differ. Severely.

+++

Let’s leave the world of massive media events and return to the humble burg of Winnipeg, where my activities this weekend, regrettably, did not include going to the annual Art from the Heart sale. My pal Mama Cutsworth was DJing the soirée, and I’ve always wanted to go. Thankfully, Ariel Gordon has  a recap of the event.

My own weekend activities were the following:

• Going to the Lo Pub on Friday night to celebrate a friend’s birthday; appreciating that even an onslaught of ridiculous hipster bands can’t cancel out the establishment’s inherent comfortableness.
• Playing mermaid toys and paper dolls with a bilingual three-year-old. (Click here for a photograph of the homemade mermaid paper dolls, which the young one took home and, according to her mother, who made the photo, is still enjoying
• Eating pizza and watching Star Trek on a big-screen TV with my brother
• Setting up my first ever personal Christmas tree. (A process that is, of now, incomplete; details and photos to follow.)

Hudson’s Bay Co., Portage Ave. store, July 29, 1929

This Was Winnipeg points out cool history facts every day, and one today is this:

November 18, 1926 – The Portage and Memorial Bay store opens for business at 9:00 am. The ceremony includes George Galt, HBC Board Member, using a golden key to unlock the Portage Avenue doors.

This I have spent a lot of time in this the Bay* downtown over the years, largely because I’ve passed through it on my way home for, oh, eight years or so.

In a post earlier this month, Emma at Winnipeg O’ My Heart mentioned the Bay in a post about Downtown Issues. She writes:

To me, the epitome of this is The Bay. Have you been to The Bay downtown? Structurally, it’s amazing. Stately pillars. Mile-high ceilings. Hardwood floors. The ladies’ bathroom is a snapshot in time: there are banks of little vanities where you can actually sit down on a chair, place your purse on the counter, and fix your hair or lipstick. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a film set, not in modern day. It’s wonderful. And yet, the store is run down. There seems to be no sense of pride in the gem we have on our hands. (And I was really surprised to see it made the Sun’s list of 100 reasons to love Winnipeg.) This Bay doesn’t seem to be given as much attention as the ones in the malls.

I agree with her take. The Bay Downtown is simultaneously amazing and depressing, especially if you venture beyond the first floor (which is dominated by shiny cosmetics counters staffed by smiling, impeccably-coiffed women). I usually only visit the third floor (women’s wear) and the basement (where there’s a quaint, outdated, but quite serviceable and affordable grocery store, as well as a bizarre assortment of clearance goods).

Bay Basement Grocery photo by Jason Penner (check out his Flickr stream for more great shots from the Bay Basement)

As a shopper and a style-hound, the Bay’s women’s clothing department is an essential stop for me, especially because I don’t have a car and can’t get out to the suburbs’ big box stores very often. Great deals on designer and designer-quality garments can be found there, more often than not in chaotic clearance racks. The deals are easier to find than the staff people. Getting service in the Bay — anywhere in the Bay — is really difficult. I don’t know if it has to do with my age or what.

My friend Cynara is the one who showed me how to shop effectively at the Bay. She was the one who cracked the code for me on the strange layout of the women’s department, pointing out where the plus-size racks were and where extra plus-size garments were seeded elsewhere on the floor. (She taught me a lot about shopping, actually — things like, always try it on, make your decisions on a per-garment basis, not on a brand or store-of-origin basis.)

Cynara in one of her amazing outfits (skirt and shoes sourced at the Bay)

A fun thing about shopping at the Bay is that often the item price when they ring it up will be less than marked, due to a constantly rotating schedule of sales and, I think, the fact that they just don’t get around to updating the tags.

Anyway, when I’m at the Bay, I usually feel like I’m shopping there in spite of the store’s best efforts to turn me off from the whole thing. The thing is, as a car-free urban resident, I rely on the Bay for a lot of my needs, and the case is the same for a wide variety of downtown residents. It’s almost as though the store coasts on the patronage of existing downtown denizens and has given up entirely on drawing clientele from elsewhere in the city.

Back to Cynara — she moved to Vancouver for grad school this fall, and told me that she visited the Bay there, and found it lacking the “charm” of ours. Apparently the plus size and maternity sections were ghettoized in a separate land from the rest of women’s wear (hideous fatties and pregnant ladies must be kept away from the sensitive buying public, I guess), and the selection wasn’t as inspiring. (Then again, Cynara now lives in the same city as Jane Bon Bon, so I think she’ll get over this quickly.)

Photo by Bryan Scott of Winnipeg: Love & Hate

There are always rumours about the University of Winnipeg continuing its colonization of downtown by moving into this majestic building. And, of course, there’s always plenty of doom and gloom about downtown, matched only by boosterism of questionable efficacy.

*For non-Canadians, “the Bay” is short for “the Hudson’s Bay Company,” the oldest commercial corporation in North America (incorporated 1670). It began as a fur trader and now is a general retail conglomerate.

Twilight parodies are utterly essential these days. This one, from College Humour,  is excellent — not just because it stars Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, but because her character’s fascination with Three Wolf Moon guy is about as understandable and compelling as Bella’s fascination for Edward. (IMO. I say this as a person who was unable to get through even the series’ first volume, I was so bored by it. I have, however, read extensive, in-depth plot and character summaries, and so feel I am qualified to make judgment on the phenomenon and, of course, hate it.)

Anyway.

As the meme matures, so we mature with it.

A year ago today, the world’s oldest polar bear, Debby, was euthanized at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg. She was 42 years old and left behind six cubs. Her death was met by a variety of reactions — many Winnipeggers had fond memories of visiting her at her zoo enclosure; others lamented the fact that she lived her entire life in captivity. In a run-down, shabby zoo, no less (though the condition of the Zoo is scheduled to be ameliorated over the next ten years as part of a $180M improvement effort — including a new polar bear enclosure).

Given that Debby was an orphan cub, it is a near certainty that she would have died had she not been taken into the custody of humans. Whether a life in captivity for such a majestic mammal is preferable to an early death is a question for animal lovers, ethicists and philosophers to debate.

But let’s take a moment on the anniversary of Debby’s passing to celebrate the majestic polar bear, which is something of a provincial emblem here in Manitoba, though polar bears live only in the very farthest northern portion of the province, nearly 1000 km from the bulk of the population.

Of course, it’s not like that’s a bad thing, because these bears are huge, wild, and rather dangerous as huge, wild animals the world over tend to be. That’s why bears have always been my favourite animals: they are both fat and deadly.

Remember that time Rick Mercer and The Mercer Report went to Churchill? (Rumour has it they were less-than-welcome in the town, with their characteristic Torontonian southern entitlement, but still.)

Flickr user ucumari has a lovely photo set of rescued polar bears Wilhelm and Masha, who reside in North Carolina.

While we’re on the subject of Wilhelm (also known as “Willy”): my pal LMac pointed me to this recent news story about a special delivery of ice cubes spiked with maple syrup that was recently delivered to his enclosure. He enjoyed it. Witness:

Despite the fact that polar bears’ natural habitat is far, far from the city of Winnipeg, our city is home to many polar bears — in statue form. They’re part of an anniversary project called Bears on Broadway, to celebrate CancerCare Manitoba’s 75th anniversary.

And now, some cool polar bear stuff.

urone317's felted polar bear at Flickr

Ibride's cardboard polar bear shelf

Hello, I Love You art print by Julia Pott

The Hat Menagerie knitting pattern -- makes not only this super cute polar bear baby hat, but other animals as well!

I couldn’t end this post without mentioning my favourite fictional polar bear (well, sort of): Iorek Byrnison, from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, pictured here with heroine Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon:

Illustration by Gold-Seven