Cupcakes ARE different from cake. Is it that hard to see? They are smaller. You can eat them with your hands. There is more frosting (generally) per unit of cake. Cake is about community. Cupcakes are about self. For a country that is so frequently characterized as based on consumption, we are really, really bad at consuming.

In a food fight cupcakes are good because you can smash them, frosting first, into the face of a nearby enemy or hurl them, with greater accuracy than, say, a pie, across great distances.

So, when I got a temporary crown put in today by my new dentist, (to replace the awful “permanent” one my old dentist put in, you see) I ask about getting a gold crown. With the old one, I didn’t know how things worked so when they put the awful one in, I didn’t know when to ask about whether I could get a gold one until it was too late.

So, this time I ask. And I’d have to pay $800 extra because my insurance considers it cosmetic. She tells me that it would last longer and that ordinarily they don’t ask if people want gold for their teeth near the front. So, I fume while she matches the shade of porcelain I’m going to end up getting. Am I detecting an ethnic bias in the policies of my dental insurance provider or is this just standard serving up lemon jello and telling me it’s dessert Ticketmaster doublespeak?

Update: Visit www.brand-garland.com for information on Garland’s development of a “unified branding and marketing campaign” and for project updates.

This morning one of our GIS-heads proudly displayed a colleague’s side project.

On a related note, you can help stop the spin…

Rick, Danny, Andrew et al — au plaisir de vous revoir….

– Doc

I imagine all of us have had those moments when an unexplained knowledge leaped into our minds–an emphatic warning heeded, a sudden peace arriving spontaneously in a troubled time, a story of some other past brushing our own view of an object or place…. Please speak of such an experience.

It’s a kind of “bulletproof” book; the more you find in it to reject, the more interesting it becomes.

If a child asks — “Mama, why did you give me the last of the food and take none for yourself?” and the mother says “Because I love you” — that is a better answer at that moment than one that would have described genetically reinforced mechanisms aimed at species survival. Yet, if the child asks many questions about her world, and each time the answer is — “Because God made it that way” — a lack of satisfaction is going to appear and a strong desire to see what is hidden will begin. Because we want to know, we like to believe that a complete knowing may be reached: the physical perspective sees the path as one of incremental tearing down and rebuilding and adding to; the spiritual sees it as already present but dimly perceived — each person a hole cut in dark fabric with the starfield flickering behind it. In each of these perspectives problems arise (and will always arise) when the authority of a Complete Knowledge is drawn upon before it is possessed or can be compellingly demonstrated. But I wonder — what would we be when there was nothing left to learn? Here I come down on the side of Wallace Stevens, in “Sunday Morning”:

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receeding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.