Better Science Through Cookies

This year we decided to do something different. The Christmas cookie medium has often been about a look back on the year that was. Unfortunately though, 2008 was kind of a rough year. I wasn’t sure if Christi’s nephews really needed a Christmas cookie depicting Ayn Rand raging through Wall Street, with foam and scraps of credit default swaps frothing from her mouth, as she rips chunks of flesh from the necks of hapless bankers? I imagine that that’s the image you could drop in the time capsule if you really wanted to sum up 2008, but as a Christmas cookie?

Also, it should be noted that Christi and I spend our Christmases with her family in Texas, one of the few remaining places where people still hem and haw a little before begrudgingly acknowledging that, yeah, I guess George Bush did break the world. Since the Bushes would be moving to Dallas after their occupation of the White House was over I saw no need to be making fun of the neighbors with some political jab at the outgoing administration. So I thought it best this year to, for the most part, look forward instead of back, to focus on the positive and shy away from the political this year. And that’s how this holiday became the year of the Stem Cell Christmas Cookies.

Coming out of one of the more historic elections this country has seen, the end of 2008 was rife with optimism. Times were starting to get rough but there was hope that fresh ideas at the country’s helm might bring about positive change. Among the many changes possible was a hope that the next few years would see science treated a little differently.

I don’t want to go all buck wild politico in this blog but I do have to go on record as being pretty disappointed in our country’s stem cell stance over the last 8 years. For what it’s worth I originally wrote a couple hundred words outlining my views on the subject. But looking back I decided to chop it out of this post. Spending 400 words to say “science is actually a good thing” seemed like a questionable use of your reading time. Instead I will simply assume we are all in agreement on this one. If anyone can explain to me how the ban on embryonic stem cell research was anything other than a case of the firewall between church and state not being properly maintained, then please help yourself to my comments section. If I am missing something here I would be happy to understand the issue better.

In the meantime I will just say that I am grateful to find out that our Christmas cookie optimism was not misguided. The current administration this week overturned the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Beyond just unshackling this vital field of research, I feel the president’s action goes a long way towards making us all look a little less retarded as a nation. For that I thank the President and wish I had actually saved him a cookie.

Coincidentally this week also marks the release of the DVD for Rachel Getting Married which almost got it's own cookie. I had very much wanted the obscure-media-slot in this year’s Christmas cookies to be filled by one of the scenes from that movie. While I’m not a real connoisseur of the torture porn genre, I’m hard pressed to imagine anything disemboweled from one of the Saw movies that could be as excruciating as the wedding toast that Anne Hathaway gives in Rachel Getting Married. Unfortunately I didn’t quite know how to nail the essence of a scene like that in almond sugar icing. So instead, the obscure-media-slot this year is filled by page nine hundred twelve, the last page of Roberto Bolano’s brilliant behemoth 2666, one of the many pages I never saw in 2008.

2666 got such unanimous praise that I actually considered wrestling with its over 900 pages. In the end though it just seemed like a damn lot of words. I’m more than man enough to admit that I was not man enough to conquer 2666 in 2009. And this might have been for the best after all, considering that an unpublished 6th section of 2666 was recently rumored to have been found. Bolano the author may have died in 2003 but he's quickly becoming the Tupac of Latin American lit. If I could put up blog entries half as many times as this dead guy puts out new books, this blog might be worth bookmarking. Anyway, even before 2666 became the new never ending story I felt it wouldn't hurt to give his masterpiece some cookie props

Sitting to the left of page 912 in the picture above is this year’s 3^rd cookie, the memorial cookie. As I get older it seems like more and more important people die every year. I suppose that when I was 9 there simply weren’t so many people that I personally labeled as “important”. Just as many famous people must have been dropping like flies every day but I never noticed. In my late 30’s though, the names of those that have died are slowly becoming more recognizable. The obituaries are becoming home to people I’m bummed I will never get a chance to meet. One of those people is Gary Gygax. 2008 was the year that Mr. Gygax, as my good friend Dario so eloquently put it, “apparently couldn’t make his saving throw against abdominal aortic aneurysm.”

There were definitely people more famous than Gary Gygax who died in 2008 (Paul Neuman). There were also people who were funnier (George Carlin), more stylish (Yves Saint Laurent ), more conservative (William F. Buckley), more bigoted (Jesse Helms), more naughty (Betty Page), more literaryish (David Foster Wallace), and more Dolemitey (Rudy Ray Moore). But a case could be pretty well made for the fact that there was no one dorkier.

And that’s not to say we didn’t lose a lot of nerds in 2008. Robert Asprin, Majel Barrett, Arthur C. Clark, Bobby Fischer, Dave Stevens, Michael Turner, and Stan Winston are just a few of the new celebrity guests at that big convention in the sky. But still, I don’t know of anyone more identifiable as an icon of a certain type of Nerddom, than Gary Gygax the man most associated with the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons gaming system. So I felt quite justified in taking a yummy memorial moment to give remembrance to someone who added a decent amount of joy to my formative years.

And finally there was also a TV death that I felt deserved to be memorialized last year. It might seem insensitive to diminish the death of an actual person by placing it on a plate next to the death of a mere TV show. But I hope it is forgivable in this case.

Every so often a work of art is produced that transcends its medium. Like a person, it grows and matures and becomes something more than just an amusement that entertains us for some short break. It becomes a teacher of sorts. It helps us to see something in the world that we could never have experienced alone. In a way it becomes a friend that we are sad to see go.

2007 saw the end of The Sopranos and 2008 saw the end of a show just as powerful, just as complex, just as worthy. After 6 dense years of life, The Wire finally completed its arc on HBO. It didn’t seem right to have done a Sopranos cookie in 2007 and then this year ignore what very well could have been the single greatest show to ever make it onto TV. So that’s why I knew I had to come up with a Wire cookie this year. There was only one problem, and that problem was this, at no time in my entire life have I ever seen so much as a single episode of The Wire.

Naturally, I've always been aware of the fact I was supposed to be watching The Wire. I even made Christi get me the box set of season 1 for my birthday. But truth be told, like proper dental care, it was something I have stubbornly ignored to my own detriment. Sorry. Until now this hadn’t hurt me too much. At Christmas though, I saw that having never watched so much as a single episode of the Wire would definitely complicate the act of turning it into a cookie.

However, I soon figured that I could wing it if I just played it safe and stuck to the obvious things. Based solely on the one or two publicity stills that I must have seen accompanying the rave reviews I have been ignoring all these years, I decided to go with the two things that would absolutely have to be in the final episode of The Wire.

1) I figured that there had to be a gun somewhere in the episode, possibly fired, possibly only referenced in flashback. I don’t know how you do a show like the wire and not have some sort of gun somewhere in the final episode.

And 2) I knew that at some point during the episode Yaphet Kotto had to have cried. It didn’t have to be a full force Keitel Cry, maybe just one solitary tear marching solemnly down his cheek, but at some point Yaphet Kotto would have to acknowledge what he had witnessed, and it would break him.

Of course I have no idea if Yaphet Kotto actual is, or ever was, in The Wire but that’s pretty much irrelevant as far I’m concerned. A final episode of The Wire in which Yaphet Kotto doesn’t cry makes no sense to me whatsoever. And if for some reason it turns out that Yaphet Kotto doesn’t end up crying in the final episode of The Wire, or has never actually acted in The Wire, then I do not even want to know about it. Clearly a mistake has been made. I will just hope that by the time I finally get around to catching up on The Wire it will all have been fixed with some sort of CGI special edition.

So that was 2008. While I have no idea what cookies 2009 will bring, I have to imagine that by the time this year's done with us there might be a lot that needs icing.

(And for what it’s worth I fully understand that Yaphet Kotto doesn’t have blue eyes. I simply felt the welled up sorrow Mr. Kotto was releasing in such a powerful scene was best represented by sky blue icing. Poetic license. )

Not Vagina Cookies

This is something of a first. I actually have had posts done but just haven't been able to get them up for technical reasons. I spent the weekend reinstalling Windows and whatnot and if you're seeing this I must have fixed whatever needed fixing. Hopefully this means I'll actually be able to put up more than a post a month for a little while. So feel free to check back more than monthly (this month at least)

Anyway, for those of you who've asked about this year’s Christmas cookies, in the end I decided I wanted to commemorate something that had made an impression on me, a cultural milestone or turning point from 2007. Obviously, like all years, this one had plenty of memorable moments: Military surges, stem cell breakthroughs, viable nontraditional presidential candidates, and the like.

However, there was one addition to the cultural landscape that stood out in my book. While it wasn’t the most politically or technologically relevant event, it was something that really made me say “Wow, the times they are a’ changing.” It was the almost mainstream acceptance of vagina paparazzi.

Now obviously both celebrities and vaginas are nothing new. But I don’t remember exactly when it become politely acceptable to stick a camera up a celebrity’s skirt as she’s coming out of a car, take a picture of her bare womany parts, and then publish it for worldwide consumption.

If a celebrity wants to wear a miniskirt without underwear, and fly out of the limo crotch first flapping that thing in everyone’s face, she definitely has that right. I’m just saying that I can’t pretend to be so hip that at least some part of me doesn’t say “Hmmm, that’s um, that’s, uh… am I really supposed to be seeing that?” Of course, with the rate we’re going I would imagine this will all make me look like quite the mayor of Squaresville in a decade or two. But I have to admit that I am still impressed by how much young Hollywood va-jay-jay that I can Google these days.

Of course, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me. I am neither anti-vagina nor anti-celebrity. I always have and always will find both celebrities and girl bits to be a source of bewildering fascination, individually and together. Nonetheless, I still want to say that I have always liked underwear as well. I would hate to see celebrities eventually force panties and boxers to one day go the way of the monocle and top hat.

So this year I decided to use the underutilized medium of Christmas dough in the hopes of reaching the kids of today and letting them know that, regardless of what Britney Spears might try to tell them, underwear is still cool! And that’s why I chose to celebrate underwear as my cookie theme this year (that and the realization that if I made actual vagina shaped cookies for Christmas I might not get invited back next year.)

As you can see, I mostly went with the cotton brief as the most easily recognizable underwear icon. But I also made a longer striped boxer for all the celebrities who seem to be spending so much time in the slammer these days.

Of course the one group of celebrities this year that chose to proudly wear undergarments, and then some, were the crazy love struck astronauts. Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove extra covered in her long haul adult incontinence wear. So the Astro-Pampers cookie is to commend astronauts in general for bucking the commando trend with such hell bent enthusiasm.

The red dotty square was just my attempt to shoehorn some Aqua Dots into this year’s batch of cookies. The idea of a children’s toy that put a date rape drug into shinny, candy colored dots, and that was shipped over here from China, had a lot going for it in my search for the most “Wow!” story of the year. But in the end it just got an honorary mention in the form of my failed attempt to make AquaDot based underwear.

In the end you might be asking, did the project on a whole work? Were the cookies well received? Well, as the photo of Christi’s nephew Cam clearly shows, I think underwear, or at the very least underwear based cookies are once again cool with the kids. While they might not have been Tamiflu cool, they were enjoyed nonetheless.

And to prove that you can like underwear and still be a complete badass I’m throwing in this picture of Cam from the Dallas World Aquarium. As his fist full of death clearly shows, Cam is not someone to be trifled with lightly. (I’m not quite sure what mid 90s, spare change massacre prompted this sign, but it did force me to look at the nickel in a whole new light.)

Bonus Cookie:
While I was relatively satisfied with the choice of pro-underwear cookies this year, I did have a back up cookie just in case. The other milestone of note that I felt deserved cookiezation came from TV. 2007 saw 13 seconds of TV that we had waited over 7 years for and that we were still talking about months after it aired. It might seem old hat now, like underwear, but still I have no problem giving cookie props to the final episode of the Sopranos. Personally I can't remember when a blank screen has sparked so much emotion and discussion. So here it is the official Last-13-Seconds-of-the-Last-Episode-of-the-Sopranos Commemorative Cookie (with onion ring cookies).

Scabbing for Cookies

I have always believed that if you are one of the truly lucky ones, there will come a time in your life where you discover that which you were meant to do, that which you do so much better than all others. There occasionally comes that sublimely rare moment when a Tiger Woods picks up a golf club, a Michael Jordan picks up a basketball, or a Brian Lamb picks up a Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. So you can imagine my happy excitement when I felt that I too had discovered that which I was meant to do.

As the lag between posts on this blog clearly proves, if there is any task that I feel that I can truly throw my back into, and do as well as almost anyone on this planet, it is the act of not writing. So when I first heard of a so called “writers strike” I honestly thought that my time had come. It suddenly occurred to me that there are few things for which I have so much innate flair for as I do for “not-writing.” And now I was being told that my secret talents could be put to the greater good. My not-writing would become a devastating tactical Strike upon our corporate overlords. I figured I would not-write my ass off, nonstop, day and night, until corporate America could no longer stand the weight of my boot upon its throat.

And there I was this week, quite satisfied with how aggressively I’ve been tea-bagging "The Man" these past few months, when Christi unfortunately broke the bad news to me. What she tells me is that I don’t actually belong to the WGA.

Hmmm. Apparently, as she explains it, there is actually a guild of some sort that writers join. For whatever reason, I imagine perhaps a screw-up with the postal service or a problem with my cell phone, I never actually got an invitation to this clique. Christi also goes on to point out that, in my case, a doubling of my DVD residuals will not actually come out to all that much. So much for “being of use.”

On the bright side, what that means is that I am free to write again and just in time since I’ve decided to try using this space for something I usually abhor, two way communications.

I read somewhere that one of the strategies for growing a blog’s readership is to actively court and respond to reader’s comments. Now, I realize that this might make sense for a less narcissistic writer. However, what originally attracted me to this whole idea of keeping a blog in the first place wasn’t the new media ability to have actual interaction with a readership. Rather it was just the idea of being able to blah, blah, blah about myself in a public forum, for free, and without necessarily having to be interesting.

Why then did I enable the anonymous comments feature on this blog? Well, in all honesty I actually enjoy reading and erasing spam comments. It’s been interesting to watch them evolve in sophistication. Just yesterday I got a spam comment that actually found the phrase “Take me to the river” from an earlier post of mine and cut out a Wikipedia entry on Al Green that had the same phrase, and then posted the entry into my comments section, with their web address at the bottom and a link to "sportsbook" thrown in randomly. I was so impressed I actually left it up for the time being if you want to see the latest in spam-tech.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am exaggerating somewhat. I do enjoy getting nonspam comments as well. I’m just not a big fan of interacting with other people when I can avoid it. Getting comments is kind of like getting phone messages and emails, in that people sometimes expect you to return the interaction. While this is by no means unreasonable, it is annoying nonetheless.

And also, more often than not, what happens when people make a comment is that for some reason it suddenly becomes about them. It’s all: “I think that you’re brilliant Mike” and “I can sense the powerful virility of your loins” the stuff that they think and that they feel. By no means did I start this blog so that other people could talk about themselves.

(Now obviously I know that you have interesting things to say and if it was just you, I would have plenty of time to respond to and consider anything you might have to say. But you and I know very well that not everyone has as many well thought out things to say as you do. Once again, as it has so often been the case in your life, other people are ruining it for you.)

Nonetheless, putting my aversion to social interaction aside for a moment, I am actually requesting help in the form of your comments and suggestions if you have any. I am hopeful that one of the more creative amongst the half dozens of people who read this blog might be able to help me come up with ideas for Christmas cookies.

For quite a few years Christi’s family in Dallas has invited Christi and I to share Christmas with them. Traditionally, Traci, Christi’s Uber-Mom sister in law, bakes up Christmas cookies that we all get to decorate. Naturally there are only so many times you can decorate a tiny fir tree or a rotund old guy in a red suit and still have it be interesting. So over the years we have tried to expand the design possibilities at least a tiny bit.

The first year was really primitive. Maybe an occasionally angry snowman or some peapods (Christi loves English peas).

The second year was still sloppy but at least I tried to work more within a theme, counterfeiting holiday money.

Two years ago at the height of bird flu mania I figured the best thing I could get for Christi’s nephews and niece would be some fine Tamiflu antiviral cookies.

And then last year I decided to honor various members of the Bush administration who are no longer with us. (Due to my almost photo realistic craftsmanship, who the cookies represent should be obvious. Nonetheless, I’ll label them at the end of this post just in case you have trouble figuring out who is who.)

And then this year I figured I’d try something different. I decided I would open up the floor to see if anyone out there had any thoughts. So, if you’ve always had a remarkable concept for a holiday cookie that you desperately want someone else to steal and pass off as their own, now’s your chance.

Of course, there are a number of things that I’m looking for in a design. Naturally we’re looking for topical originality. But I also need simplicity in execution. If you have a brilliant idea but it would involve me having to recreate Picasso’s Guernica, in icing, on a dozen cookies, that is probably going to be more annoying than it’s worth.

While it doesn’t have to be directly holiday related, at the very least it has to be age appropriate. If appreciation of your idea is going to involve me having to try and explain to a nine year old what exactly balloon fetishes are, or Picasso’s Guernica for that matter, I’m going to have to pass.

And finally, you will get bonus points if you can work within the confines of standard cookie cutter shapes, triangular trees, stars, reindeer and whatnot. This is not a prerequisite, but if it saves me the trouble of carving custom shapes in the dough and therefore plays to my laziness it will be appreciated.

So far, I think the Tamiflu cookies were the best received. It was a simple design that didn’t take much explaining and seemed like fun to eat. (I understand that the color of the capsule is wrong but I had supply problems. I think Camille hogged up all the yellow to make stars or something like that. Through the pain of experience I’ve learned that sometimes fighting an 8 year old over frosting is more trouble than it’s worth.)

The Bush cabinet cookies were not shunned, but they weren't gobbled up with the same enthusiasm as the Tamiflu cookies. As it turned out no one seemed quite as excited to eat an almond iced John Bolton cookie as I had hoped, except for Bella of course, their angelic if somewhat slobbery 900 pound Mastiff, who jumped up on the table and ate the entire administration when no one was looking.

And now, this year, I'm putting it in your hands. So if anyone has any topical and easily reproduced design ideas, I would love to hear them. Of course, if your design is chosen you will not be mailed any finished cookies, and in fact you won’t really get much of anything out of it except the satisfaction that I feel when my life is made easier. However, if the dog doesn’t get to them first I’ll post a picture up here and the kids will of course thank you. And by thanking you I actually mean me, since they don’t really know you very well.

(In case you needed help with the Bush cabinet cookies, moving counter clockwise from the upper right hand corner you quite obviously have cookies to commemorate ex-US Representative to the U.N. John Bolton, ex-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, ex-Secretary of Defense Donald “Rummy” Rumsfield, ex-director of FEMA Michael “Brownie” Brown, and of course ex –Secretary of State Colin "The Colon" Powell.)