The Cupcakes of Desperation

My Brother came home from the bar last night with a couple of treats: two homemade cupcakes, each topped with frosting and a half Twinkie decorated to look like minions from "Despicable Me." He gave me the single-eye-goggled one and kept the double-eyed one for himself.


A quick Google Image Search reveals that Minion Cupcakes
are a thing out there in the world. Who knew?

Apparently, someone's child had been diagnosed with cancer and this was one of the ways they are trying to raise the funds for her treatment.
I am quite confident that, if you were to ask anyone in that bar (this being southern Florida), they would all profess to be adamantly opposed to Obamacare, opposed to government mandated health insurance, opposed to "socialized medicine," and, in addition, are all oblivious not just to the irony but the pure obscenity of having to hold a bake sale to raise funds for life saving treatment for a child (or anyone else, for that matter). My Brother lost his own health insurance last year when his employer unilaterally decided to drop it. Still, he would rather die (and doesn't recognize the increased odds of that happening) than vote for a Democrat. Instead, they all buy cupcakes at $2 a piece and hope things work out because that's the way it is.

On a not entirely unrelated note, my niece (12 years old) is facing her third open heart surgery this fall. Although her parents do have health insurance, and most of the direct bills will be covered, the incidental expenses, ranging from food and parking during hospital stays in Boston to lost income during parental custodial time off and additional doctor bills, means they have had to set up a (slightly more organized) fundraiser for her.

It's wonderful to live in a first-world country in the Twenty-first Century. I'd like to try it some day.

The Anti-Feng Shui House

There is a house along the route of my morning walk which has, for it's front yard, a planting of trees and shrubs which is almost but not quite perfectly misaligned, misplaced, mis-spaced and mis-selected to produce not just a space that is impossible to appreciate--or use--but impossible even to walk by without an inward shudder for the lack of artistry, design--grace even.

I say "almost but not quite perfectly" because to say otherwise would imply intent, consciousness and awareness to the planter of this monstrosity. And there was a planter. This is not a happenstance of nature. Nature, indifferent though it may be, is natural. There is nothing natural in this layout*. The precise misplacement of each item proclaims its anti-naturalness. Yet there is a sincerity to the place that precludes one from proclaiming "Here be Irony!"

*Besides, when this town was originally laid out, the entire peninsula was scraped down to the limestone. Perhaps one in 10,000 of the original trees was spared.

Act of God v. Graven Image

So...,

Is this evidence of God's non-existance, that lightning can strike, with impunity, His devotees' object of veneration, or

evidence that He's real and pissed at the violation of His Second Commandment?