Google™ has about 2,090,000 results for a search on cupcakes and school.
A Michigan elementary school has banned the classroom tradition of celebrating a child’s birthday with cupcakes.
The interestingly spelled Syndee Malek, principal at the South Redford elementary school, insists that birthdays be honored with “healthy foods.”
Schools, the first bastion of fat-kids-with-high-self-esteem over performance, have had gravy on the French fries instead of vegetables and soda machines in the halls for more than a generation. Now, in 2010, the same schools promote student nutrition and fitness. Lunch at Ms. Malek’s school is very different from most schools. Nothing is fried, hot dogs are made with turkey, and she thinks the kids love the fresh fruit and vegetable bar.
Cupcakes have a nutritiously terrible ingredient list: all purpose flour, sugar, baking powder and baking soda, a teaspoon of salt, some shortening, water, eggs, and milk. Chocolate cupcakes add a little vanilla and some melted, unsweetened, baking chocolate. For comparison, Hard Do Bread, a popular artisan bread sold in West Indian stores, has all purpose flour, white sugar, water, salt, vegetable oil and margarine, and yeast. Pasta has all purpose flour, baking powder, a teaspoon of salt, some butter or shortening, and eggs.
Cupcakes also have a long and momentous history. In 18th Century France, for example, Marie Antoinette was permanently enjoined from bringing them to school for having the audacity to tell the school administrators, “Let them eat cupcakes.”
Another Internet search turned up list after list of the significant benefits of cupcakes. Cupcakes apparently cure AIDS, arthritis, and autism. They alleviate eczema and emphysema. Certain special recipes ameliorate hair loss and headaches. They mend Parkinson’s disease by flushing toxic metals from the body. All cupcakes palliate stuttering. They sweat out viral and yeast infections. And, perhaps most important, they rectify low SAT scores.
My handy Roget’s Thesaurus shows us that cupcake also stands in for any number of terms of endearment for the fairer sex: angel, babe, bathing beauty, beauty queen, broad, bunny, centerfold, chick, cover girl, cutie, cutie-pie, doll, dollface, dream girl, dreamboat, fox, glamor girl, good-looking woman, honey, hot dish, hot number, peach, pin-up, raving beauty, sex bunny, sex kitten, sex pot, and even tomato.
Perhaps they have been banned out of political correctness after all.
Whatever the benefit, whatever the reason, you still can’t bake cupcakes to send to school with your kids for their birthdays anymore.
For the record, I could have expanded this to 1,000 words or trimmed it to 100. Moderation in all things is important, so it is just 400.
We’re back! There is no inflation. The Cost of Living has not risen yet again and seniors get stiffed for the second year in a row. I wrote this column in April but there have been developments:
The Associated Press reports that “the government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through another year without an increase in monthly benefits.
“It would mark only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year.
“Based on inflation so far this year, the trustees who oversee Social Security project there will be no cost of living adjustment for 2011.”
Cost of living is by definition the cost of maintaining a certain living standard.
Employment contracts, pension benefits, and government payments such as your Social Security check can be tied to a cost-of-living index, typically to the CPI or “Consumer Price Index.” Federal law requires the Social Security Administration to base its Cost of Living Adjustment on the consumer price index changes in the third quarter of each year (July, August and September) with the same quarter in the previous year. Remember that.
The CPI reports the average price of a lot of stuff — what is called a constant “market basket of goods and services” — purchased by average households. According to Bloomberg Business News, the CPI wonks add up and average the prices of 95,000 items from 22,000 stores and 35,000 rental units. Those prices are weighted by assuming that you distribute your spending along strict percentages. Housing: 41.4%, Food and Beverage: 17.4%, Transport: 17.0%, Medical Care: 6.9%, Other: 6.9%, Apparel: 6.0%, and Entertainment: 4.4%. Taxes are exempt from the CPI totals so when your property tax or sales tax or income tax or ObamaCare health tax or gasoline tax or telecommunications tax or blue cheese tax rises, it doesn’t actually cost you any extra.
In calculating the CPI, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a formula that reflects the fact that consumers shift their purchases toward products that have fallen in relative price. Although this substitution game means the BLS reduces what we pay by “living with” store brands instead of name brands, BLS says my analysis is incorrect. Their objective “is to calculate the change in the amount consumers need to spend to maintain a constant level of satisfaction.” As long as the BLS gets to define “satisfaction.”
Where, oh where is Mick when we need him?
The Social Security Administration writes, “Since 1975, Social Security’s general benefit increases have been based on increases in the cost of living, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. We call such increases Cost-Of-Living Adjustments, or COLAs. Because there has been a decline in the Consumer Price Index, there will be no COLA payable in 2010.” Or 2011.
Did your cost of living go down?
Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup costs between 80 cents and $1.29 per can in most markets today. Do you remember when it was 40 cents? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
A five-pound bag of flour costs about $2.49 in most markets today. Do you remember when it was a buck? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
Gasoline prices dropped in the third quarter but its cost is flying upwards again; it will be over $3 before I get back to Florida this year. Do you remember when it was $0.999? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
According to USAToday, health insurance premiums cost about $13,375 per annum in 2009. (And despite the new law, insurers say they do not have to cover kids with pre-existing conditions.) Do you remember when a family policy cost $2,500? I do. But your premiums will still go up. And, of course, the Cost of Living has declined.
Milk costs between $3.50 and $4 per gallon in most markets. Do you remember when it was $1.75? Or $1? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
Property taxes on the Vermont house are $3,869.96 and $3,892.26 on the Florida house this year. Do you remember when they were each $900? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
The AP report continued, The stagnant Cost of Living Adjustment is “not seen as good news for Democrats as they defend their congressional majorities in next month’s elections.
“Last fall a dozen Democrats joined Senate Republicans to block an effort to provide a bonus payment to Social Security recipients to make up for the lack of a COLA this year.”
I wish stuff didn’t cost so much but even more I wish our “leaders” didn’t lie to us about stuff costing so much. Oddly, I still cannot vote myself a raise.
Bob reminded us last time this appeared that “taxes dont go into the CPI” so I updated the list to include property taxes. I didn’t include the little increases in government programs “recovery” on the phone bill or the increasing number of cities and towns implementing local sales tax “options.”
44 million Americans subsist below the poverty line because the cost of things we buy has skyrocketed past our incomes. Guess how many of those Americans depend on Social Security?
It is likely that Medicare Part B premiums will remain frozen at last year’s levels but premiums for Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, will rise.
Federal law requires that the Cost of Living Adjustment be based on the CPI changes in the third quarter of last year to the third quarter of this year. Well, Ollie, some of the items in the CPI haven’t changed much, so seniors are now behind the same eight ball as they were last year.
Except their taxes, insurance premiums, drugs, heating oil, and cable TV subscriptions are all going to cost more.
Good thing there is a sale on cat food down to Price Chopper, isn’t it? Mmmm. Cat food.
The aesthetics police are alive and well in Vermont.
Vermontasaurus is (not really) held together with bubble gum and duct tape but nothing really is level or plumb. On the other hand, the Downing’s cross is straight, true, and well lighted. Really well lighted.
Vermontasaurus is a 25-foot-tall, 122-foot-long Americana folk art “dinosaur” that Brian Boland and a host of volunteers found in a scrap wood pile at the Post Mills airport in the town of Thetford, Vermont. The airport caters primarily to hot air balloons and gliders. The Town required a $272 permit for it. The state Natural Resources Board notified Mr. Boland he would need an Act 250 permit.
Richard and Joan Downing built a 24-foot cross outside their private chapel in Lyndon, Vermont. They light it during holy seasons. Lyndon’s development review board limited the number of days it can be lit. Officials now want the cross removed under Act 250 rules.
Blasphemy. Both cases.
Vermont’s Land Use and Development Act, Act 250 of 1970, created nine District Environmental Commissions to review large-scale development projects. The 10 criteria have changed little in 40 years; the reach of the environmental commissions has extended into everything from crosses to parades.
“It’s art, not edifice,” Brian Boland said. I agree.
Mr. Boland, a hot-air balloon designer and pilot, runs the 52-acre Post Mills airfield. He had a pile of broken wooden planks and other debris on the edge of his property. Volunteers spent nine days with splintered two-by-fours, half a bunk bed ladder, the rotted belly of a guitar, and one rule: no saws, no rulers and no materials other than what was in the scrap pile.
The result of random carpentry is a Shelburne Museum -sized slice of roadside American folk art that made the Smithsonian Magazine.
Lyndon’s Municipal Manager Dan Hill said that Act 250 decision came because the cross’ “aesthetics it did not meet the character of the neighborhood.”
Right. The Downings own about 800 acres of rolling Vermont land. They opened the chapel five years ago, in 2005, for their family of seven children and the 35 foster children. The chapel is open to the public. They added the cross two years later. Three other Dozule crosses have been built in Vermont.
The neighbors who apparently do not drive around looking at holiday lights in the neighborhood at Christmas, say the cross looks like a neon sign for a business.
“We just think that they’re infringing on our rights to practice our religion, and I think that they’ve gone a little too far in this case,” Mr. Downing told News Channel 5.
The state has not yet decided if a permit is required or, as Mr. Boland says he might have to dismantle Vermontasaurus entirely.
Lyndon expects a court ruling on the cross in November.
A man’s home apparently is no longer his castle in (liberal) Vermont where the neighbor and the state knows better than the landowner.
Here in Vermont, people believe the ultra-restrictive state land-use law can override the Constitution and that this is a good thing.
The Boland and Downing position is very simple. They have every right to do pretty much anything but spread bedbugs or shoot at their neighbors on their own land.
I must be a racist. After all, I’m white and conservative, and I don’t think we should have an African-American president.
There. I said it.
I AM absolutely convinced we should not have an African-American president.
Read the next sentence in full because regular readers know what I think of Mr. Obama’s ability to govern. I’m perfectly OK with Barack Obama as a black man or a “person of color” or a purple man with pink polka dots but we ought not have an African-American president.
We should have an American president. Period.
Anyone who thinks we should have a hyphenated president is just plain nuts.
“No person except a natural born Citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” Not a natural born citizen of Europe. Not a natural born citizen of Antarctica. Not a natural born citizen of Africa. A natural born citizen of America. Those who become citizens here by birth or immigration are no longer citizens of somewhere else. They are Americans, darn it, not European-Americans nor Antarctic-Americans nor African-Americans.
Americans.
This whole argument irks me. Are there racist idiots in the Tea Party? Absolutely. Are there racist idiots in the Communist Party of the United States? Positively. Have the Lefty Loons trotted out the race card every day since 2008 to deflect us from their failed policies? Without doubt. Have the Tighty Righties stupidly responded to those slurs over and over again? Right again.
Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean called Fox News “absolutely racist” on Fox News Sunday. Vermont state veterinarian Robert Johnson also says there have been an unusual number of fox attacks this year, but it’s not cause for alarm. The latest attack happened a couple of weeks ago in Bennington when a rabid fox bit 8-year-old Rimmele Wood on the leg. His father killed the fox with an ax.
Some of our liberal friends are probably considering that solution for Fox News.
Perhaps everyone, not just the Wood family, needs the rabies shots. As my roofer friend Dino likes to say, sometimes I think I fell down the rabbit hole and we’re wandering around with Alice in Blunderland.
