The frozen top tier of my wedding cake was good the next year. 'Course, still being silly and going "Gosh, we're married! We're having an anniversary, just like grown-ups!" might have had something to do with it.

I'm so glad that the fruitcakes were appreciated! I've only been making them for a few years, but they're already an important part of my Christmas.

ita will be glad to know that the rum in said fruitcake must be Goslings. None other will do.

Jimmy Smits isn't goodlooking.

He is damned hot, though. I wonder how he does that.

It's the Malkovich factor.

I think I've mentioned before-- I'm baking my grandmother's recipe. Her tradition was to age it for a year, adding 1/4 cup of brandy to the cake every month.

I'm not sure that I've ever had fruitcake. But typical Christmas food for me is popcorn and spring rolls, so I'm pretty much out of most Christmas food discussions.

Thinking it over, I don't know that I've ever had boozy fruitcake either. Weird.

We've kept up some things. Not lutefisk, though.

I fear that my kinswoman Sarameg is losing her heritage. Christmas without lutefisk is like, um--ok it's just like Christmas with lutefisk but less stinky. Still, tradition!

Paging bon bon!

Remember when we had that discussion about the "largest urban park"? I thought it was Griffin or Fairmount and you mentioned a park in Arizona.

What was the real deal?

I ask because the LATimes had an editorial about Griffin park and mentioned it was the largest and I'd love to be able to ding them with a correction.

eta I found a blog that has acreage on parks which is making me laugh.

About fruitcake: Have any of you had a Monastery Fruitcake from Holy Cross Abbey? They are supposed to be excellent.

I'm not a fruitcake partaker, but the truffles look good and I trust the Trappists as they make great beer.

The science of cute [link]

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.

eta: Oh my, we are such a silly species:

A recent study at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the University of Michigan showed that high school students were far more likely to believe antismoking messages accompanied by cute cartoon characters like a penguin in a red jacket or a smirking polar bear than when the warnings were delivered unadorned.