Comfort surfing

by Diane Duane

Those of you who’ve looked at the length of the various blogrolls off to the side will have gathered that I websurf a lot. This would be true. Sometimes it’s about work (honest): sometime’s it’s for research: sometimes it’s just random curiosity.

But some of my surfing is for comfort. There are websites I love to visit because they just make me feel happy. This would be one of them:

NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com

It’s about tea and the things you have with it. There is comment, but not terribly trenchant, by and large. Mostly it’s Nice. And sometimes it just makes me laugh. This next quoted bit did, for example. (I have to quote it because they don’t seem to have permalinks.)

Its Cake Jim, but not as we know it

(A NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown special report)

Mars is nearer to us at the moment than at any other time in the last 60,000 years, and so we are marking the occasion with this special report into ‘Universal Cake Theory’. Is there life on Mars? Well probably not but here at NiceCupOfTeaAnASitDown we are more concerned if there is cake on Mars and somewhere for a nice sit down out of those 200 mile an hour winds that are prone to whip around the red planet.

Two little old space-alien ladies having a nice sitdown

So what is ‘Universal Cake Theory’? Well its my theory that cakes must be universal. Where there is intelligent life in the universe they probably make and eat some kind of cake. It’s obvious really. I like to think that when Carl Sagen was wandering around his dodgy colour separation over layed spaceship in his epic TV series ‘Cosmos’ pretending to look at nebulas and stuff in awe and listening to Brian Eno, that he was thinking ‘the vastness of the cosmos and cakes, there must be a connection’. Well of course if he had of thought that then that would have made two of us.

Now I know what your all going to say, ‘What about silicon based life forms Nicey! Or beings composed of pure energy or those who inhabit places where the laws of physics preclude the formation of cake, or even flapjack?’. Well, the silicon based life forms probably would be quite at home with Iced Gems, or maybe an assorted selection of Spanish biscuits, which whilst not cakes are quite similar to rocks. As for those beings composed of pure energy, they probably would have something a bit like a cross between a Swiss roll and Duracell battery. The folks that live where the laws of physics preclude the formation of cake, they want to get with the plot and move house.

We know that man has baked cakes from the earliest times, infact in the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ earliest known written story ever dating back to nearly 5000 years ago, there is a bit about flour or something. Cakes have deep cultural significance, and are baked and shared at important events in our lives and across many different cultures. Now if I was Eric Von Daniken, I would probably attribute this to visiting Space Aliens in our distant pre-historic past who introduced us to baking and probably had some form of advanced technology like a fan oven ideal for getting tricky sponge cakes to rise evenly, and non-stick cake tins. Of course we would have to wait until we sent men to the moon before we discovered how to make non-stick cake tins using space age teflon.

(chuckle) Oh, and don’t miss the page about the taxonomy of biscuits.

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