Cakes and Caked Blood

I saw a segment on KITV news last night which led me to this website where I spent a half hour ogling cakes.  Kailua's Cake Lava's designer/owner Rick Reichart will be competing on the Food Network April 4th in a cake challenge.  Here are two of the hundreds of cakes pictured on the website. 
 

The cake on the left is one of my favorites and the handbag below is also a cake!  Amazing!  Who would want to slice up and eat such works of art?  Me!!  I was reading the page devoted to "flavors" verrrry carefully and if anyone's ordering one of these cakes for me, I'd like the Hawaii Five-O:  Chunky pineapple cake layers with fresh bananas, mango curd, coconut cream, and shredded coconut. 

And take a look at this leopard skin handbag.  It looks like maybe it belongs to one of their clients--because obviously these cakes are not in the Costco Bakery price range!   It's kind of funny to think of eating a purse, but I swear there's a photo of a toilet cake on their site!  I wonder if they put a chocolate lumpy something in the toilet.  Ewwww!

Now this next topic I wanted to bring up is not funny like a toilet cake, but icky also.  I may or may not have mentioned that I've been reading Tess Gerritsen books lately.   I was very excited to find another medical thriller author because they're one of my favorite genres.  After reading her first two I went out and borrowed four more.  She's one of those writers whose books you can't put down and I soon realized that she isn't necessarily a medical thriller writer even though the original two I read ("Harvest" and "Life Support") were medical thrillers. 

The second set of books and I believe the majority of her books are serial murder thrillers and as far as I can see, all involve the kidnapping, torture and murder of women.  Although I wanted to stop reading once I realized this, I found myself attached to her recurring characters (a female detective and a female medical examiner) and so I kept reading, often skipping over the icky parts--and there was a lot of skipping because the gory details were not spared.  I admit I was disturbed that this wonderfully talented writer was abusing women.  This series, incidentally, is being developed into a TV series starring Angie Harmon and I hope it won't be as dark because I love Angie!

I have a whole shopping bag of paperbacks from a relative.  I looked through the bag because I needed a respite from the mental images of Gerritsen's women who've been sliced and diced, mummified, decapitated, and peat-pickled.  Ok, this J.A. Jance book, "Day of the Dead," looked interesting because it seemed similar to a Tony Hillerman novel set on a Native American reservation.  Cool!  Ohhhkay,  a chapter or so in I  realized that young girls were being tortured, raped, murdered and cut into pieces by J.A. Jance.  Once again, however, I was already sucked into the book because of good storytelling and a need to see justice done. 

This was not the first bag of books I'd received from friends or relatives and in the past I weeded through them and tossed out the "stalking" books--often half the bag!  It now dawned on me that there are way too many books written by women about the stalking, torture, raping, and murdering of females and what's more astounding is that these authors (Gerritsen, J.A. Jance, Jordan Dane, Tami Hoag, and Lisa Jackson to name a few) are bestsellers.  So my question is why do women like to write and read this stuff?? It's unsettling to think that women are entertained by this violence against other females, albeit fictional characters.  (Since none of Leonard's friends bring him boxes of books, I'm going to guess that women, not men, are buying and reading these books.)  Are there any psychologists out there who will comment on this phenomenon?  Meanwhile, it's back to Maeve Binchy and Janet Evanovitch for me---if only they'd hurry up and write more books.

Want to hear something creepy?   Yesterday I was reading that J.A. Jance book where a woman kills her husband's young sex slaves (whom she supplies him with) and chops them up.  Despite enjoying reading everything in the book except the parts involving the violence, I was feeling understandably disturbed and decided to stop for a while.  I looked at the clock and noticed the Oprah Winfrey Show was half through and turned on the TV.  Lisa Ling was discussing how young women in China were having surgery to add a couple of inches to their height by having surgeons break their legs.  You guessed it, they had to show us the surgery and that's exactly when I tuned in: camera focused on skinny legs in metal frames being cut up.  I sat there wondering if I was being sent a message.

So readers, if I should suddenly disappear and I'm found in pieces, it won't be a total loss.  I'm thinking my blog will finally get read by more than the three of you!