Fruitcake... NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[ gnuf's photos]

I. Do. Not. Like. Fruitcake!

But then, who does?

It surprises me that there is still a viable market for fruitcake. A Google search brings up about 207,000 hits for fruitcake, and not one of the hits on the first page is negative. In fact one of the links is the pro-fruitcake Society for the Protection and Preservation of Fruitcake.

Sigh

I was perusing the newest videos at Will It Blend when I found this one:


[Will It Blend? - Holiday Hassles]


The fruitcake makes quite the mess.

This video is actually just a glorified ad for Bill Me Later and its subsite Operation Fruitcake

Operation Fruitcake doesn't have a lot of material yet, but it looks promising. Only 3 videos up so far. I like this one:

[Operation Fruitcake - Incinerator]


Just out of curiosity I Googled I hate fruitcake and came up with 266,000 hits. However on closer inspection there seems to be a lot of sites along the line of fruitcake for people who hate fruitcake

Here is a genuine fruitcake hater - bless him!

The I Hate Fruitcake Hate Page

While conducting my in-depth reserch for this post I ran across the videos of Marie Rudisill, "Ask the Fruitcake Lady" from the Tonight Show.

I had forgotten about her videos. Here's a classic:

[This LADY loved CAKE and FRUIT]


And to finish, an anti-fruitcake classic:

[Grandma's Killer Fruitcake]


And btw. A YouTube search for fruitcake gets you 694 results.

Bonn, Germany

Dear Stan,

I am currently in Bonn, which makes it the 3rd ex-capital city I have visited in just over a year. (Turin used to be the Italian capital and East Berlin was the capital of East Germany). I have so far seen only the Beethoven House. He is plainly the city's most famous son, as you can tell from the numerous statues and signs pointing to the Beethoven House. It is well worth the €5.00 admission fee, as it contains the largest collection of Beethoven memorabilia in the world - his pianos, desks, viola, portraits, letters, manuscripts and, most poignantly, the ear trumpets and conversation books which he was forced to use as his deafness progressed. It also contains his death mask and a lifemask made 15 years earlier. I must confess that I had never even heard of a "lifemask" until I saw his, though it is a obvious procedure to use in the pre-photography age.

I had a fascinating few hours in the German-Roman Museum in Cologne. From the outside it is the sort of hideous square concrete box which gives neo-Brutalism a bad name - all the worse as it is right beside the peerless Cathedral. Once inside, it is endlessly enthralling. The interior design is far more appealing than the exterior, with one stairwell designed around a large Roman mosaic discovered in 1941 when building an air raid shelter. It boasts "the largest collection of Roman glass in the world" and I would not argue with this claim to fame. The beauty and intricacy of the craftsmanship in glass and ceramics surviving 2,000 years is a marvel in itself. It brings everyday Roman life back to life in a way better than any other museum I have seen. It includes children's toys, rings, hairpins and cosmetic pots used by the ladies, cooking pots, recreated domestic interiors, part of the Roman walls of Cologne and a rebuilt Roman carriage.

There was a wedding in progress when I visited the Town Hall, with the radiant bride and groom oblivious to the traumatic history of the building (totally rebuilt since WW2 leveling) and the nearby glass pyramid which covers the deep shaft of the Jewish ritual cleansing bath discovered at that site. The local Jews, as in every part of Europe, suffered pogroms well before the Nazis arrived. Round the corner from the Town Hall is the enormous tower of Great St Martin, a church which would be a cathedral in any other city, also totally rebuilt since 1945.