AND THEN…

United Kingdom: Love Will Set You Free performed by Englebert Humperdink

An inoffensive song, but sung by Englebert Humperdink who has an offensively bad name to go with his offensively bad hair, and carrying the fear he might die of cultural inertia from the collective disinterest of the British Isles.

*     *     *

Hungary: Sound of Our Hearts performed by Comeback Disco

An electronica ballad performed by, seemingly, an aging boy band with a token female backing singer. They seem earnest, but in a way which makes me wonder if they’ve really listened to what they’re saying.

*     *     *

Albania: Suus performed by Rona Nishliu

A cross between Björk and Regina Spektor, inasmuch as I had no idea what she was singing, but I didn’t really mind and quite liked it. Weirdly overacted in places though.

*     *     *

Lithuania: Love is Blind performed by Donny Montell

He’s wearing a blindfold for such complicated artistic symbolism that it might require a whole separate post to properly explore. I’d have rather liked it if everyone had hidden before he took it off

*     *     *

Bosnia & Herzegovina: Korake Ti Znam performed by Maya Sar

Blonde Cher with an overwrought dress, an overwrought light show and an overwrought song.

*     *     *

Russia:  Party for Everybody performed by Buranovskiye Babushki

That was just creepy, then terrifying. There was one moment where one of the old ladies was chasing the camera around which reminded me of Don’t Look Now.

*     *     *

Iceland: Mundu Eftir Mér performed by Greta Salóme & Jónsi

Boring.

*     *     *

Cyprus: La La Love performed by Ivi Adamou

I loved the desk made of books, and I’m biased towards my quarter-countrymen, but the song’s pretty forgettable in spite of Ivi Adamou eye-fucking the camera.

*     *     *

France: Echo (You And I) performed by Anggun

I really hope none of the gymnasts borrowed from the French Olympic team injure themselves at Eurovision. That would be embarrassing. Anggun’s wearing a lovely dress (a special piece designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. The song? Yeah, it was alright.

*     *     *

Italy: L’Amore E’ Femmina performed by Nina Zilli

Wow, they weren’t kidding when they said she was reminiscent of Amy Winehouse. She also looks a bit like Kat Denning around the mouth… Italy’s first genetically engineered entry perhaps?

*     *     *

Estonia: Kuula performed by Ott Lepland

A nice enough song and a really good voice, but I’m sure he was slipping insults into the ends of lines. And Ott claps with one clenched fist.

*     *     *

Norway: Stay performed performed by Tooji

All I can hear is Satisfaction, and not the (I can’t get no) version. This one…

*     *     *

Azerbaijan: When The Music Dies performed by Sabina Babayeva

Surprisingly sultry at the outset it changes tack to soaring when they bring in the wailing man from the opening performance. I quite liked it.

*     *     *

Romania: Zaleilah performed by Mandinga

This is the height of pointless kitsch and an awkward juxtaposition of musical elements and influences, so it’s a natural fit for Eurovision. I use the word juxtaposition too often.

*     *     *

Denmark: Should’ve Known Better performed by Soluna Somay

A former busker in an awesome hat and jacket, Soluna Somay doesn’t belong in the competition because the song is actually bearable, and potentially something that wouldn’t make me crash a car in the hopes it would be quicker than turning off the radio.

*     *     *

Greece: Aphrodisiac performed by Eleftheria Eleftheriou

An adequate pop arrangement with unoriginal non-sequiturs about a pretty girl with an unimaginative name wanting to have sex with her audience. They will, the plan must go, vote for the song and weird line-dancing in the hopes that this might actually be the case.

*     *     *

Sweden: Euphoria performed by Loreen

I think Loreen is trying to kill the audience with her intermittently violent tai-chi dancing, strobe lighting and her eyes. Great voice though.

*     *     *

Turkey: Love Me Back performed by Can Bonomo

Not at all a threatening title for a song, but Can’s brought a posse of uncowled nautical Batmen to reinforce the subtext. It’s like a high camp sea shanty from a musical that played to empty rooms night after night at the Fringe.

*     *     *

Spain: Quédate Conmigo performed by Pastora Soler

It’s all starting to blur together, is this an Evanescence song without guitars, have I heard it before? Pastora Soler has a beautiful voice, but the song is standard sincere ballad and the toga-bra will never catch on.

*     *     *

Germany: Standing Still performed by Roman Lob

Written by Jamie Cullum (whom I once heard referred to as “a fat-fingered jazz troll”) and a couple of other people whose names I didn’t catch, Standing Still is the music that would accompany the heartbreak before the reunion in a formulaic romantic comedy. This is not a compliment, and it was me that called Jamie Cullum a fat-fingered jazz troll. Unnecessary, but amusing at the time. I apologise.

*     *     *

Malta: This Is The Night performed by Kurt Calleja

The spinning camera is presumably a trick to stop the audience noticing that Mr. Calleja is wearing one yellow fingerless glove… But he works in renewable energy by day, so I can try to overlook that.

*     *     *

F.Y.R. Macedonia: Crno I Belo performed by Kaliopi

I like the electronic violin and double bass and the guitarist’s waistcoat. Kaliopi has a really lovely voice but the beat is tedious as hell and overpowering.

*     *     *

Ireland: Waterline performed by Jedward

Village idiots have seldom been quite this stupid, but the genetically atavistic twins who represent a true culture nadir won’t go away. At least in this they look as daft as they might actually be, dressed as space knights from a particularly low budget sci-fi matinee.

Serbia: Nije Ljubav Stvar performed by Zeljko Joksimovic

I know it’s only because he’s following Jedward, but I could comfortably ignore this. The majority of the music is actually pretty good. I just wish there was less singing.

*     *     *

Ukraine: Be My Guest performed by Gaitana

A truly baffling song in the finest tradition of Eurovision, this is nonsensical and psychedelically coloured gibberish with its backing dancers in fairly garish, semi-drag. Not Disney.

*     *     *

Moldova: Lautar performed by Pasha Parfeny

The cheeky gardener strikes again. What the hell is he doing with his hands? Is he really saying “this trumpet makes you mine girl”? Why is the line not always followed by a trumpet?  This is actually odder in almost every regard than the Ukrainian entry.

*     *     *

AND THEN…

The pretty presenters and Azerbaijanian Wil Wheaton (also pretty) say we can vote. I won’t. Wait, don’t show me clips of all the songs again… NOOOOOOO!!!

I passed out at this point but awoke briefly when Azerbaijan was referred to as “the land of fire”, which can’t be safe with all that oil around, before returning to the dead eyed fugue with which I watched the last 14 songs.

The interval performance proves that bombast can also be boring, even if you dress your dancers like Starfleet officers, and if you kiss a flag I’m going to distrust and dislike you… In some ways the Eurovision is a forum in which the countries involved air a year’s worth of casual racism, with the British commentator making bitchy remarks about every song and every country’s representatives but their own. It’s a process I’m sure is repeated in the coverage for every participating nation and which can’t be hidden when the votes come in. Whilst it’s not as funny with a sober Graham Norton as I remember it being with a hammered Terry Wogan they can usually be to relied upon to “predict” the usual favouritisms and nepotisms and laugh bitterly when the inevitable twelve points are announced. Greece gets the first set of top marks, which must terrify them because hosting the contest next year would actually bankrupt them. I’d laugh a little, and then feel bad about it, so I’m watching them bounce on and off the top spot. This provides some actual weight to the competition’s result, even if that’s between disaster and irrelevance, but that looks like it’s fast becoming an increasingly remote possibility. Greece’s economic downfall will not be laid at the feet of Eleftheria Eleftheriou. Scott Mills is one of the few monoglots presenting scores, which is embarrassing, but not as bad as crowbarring in a mention of the Olympics… Sweden’s votes are revealed by a woman who looks like she might be the Sarah Millican of ten years hence, only with a different-but-still-English accent. It’s a highlight, but not as funny as watching Englebert Humperdick trail for almost the entire evening. It’ll be blamed on his being the first act to perform, but it can’t have helped that it wasn’t an interesting song. So Britain may have lost, hilariously badly, but the real winners are those who didn’t waste 3½ hours watching the damned Eurovison Song Contest, or those who did so surround by copious amounts of friends and even copiouser amounts of alcohol. And Loreen.

Not that these more restrained aesthetics stopped me from wincing the night away and looking down when something surprising or explicitly graphic seemed likely, but it did mean that watching The Raid felt a little bit less prurient or psychotically detached than some films of a broadly similar ilk. It falls to a few genre stereotypes nonetheless; the film perpetuates the tired cliché of violence as something balletic, something with an intrinsic style and beauty, which is an idea belied by literally every act of genuine violence in history and any competitive marital arts you might care to watch. In addition it undersells the physical cost of any injury, short of death or maiming, by having some of the characters suffer the kind of abuse that would probably leave them in intensive care for a prolonged period of time and instead makes them stagger for a few minutes. There’s also that convention by which everyone you encounter seems to have trained in some form of unarmed combat, Pencak Silat in this case, for at least a few years… An understandable necessity perhaps, but still faintly absurd when the entire workforce of a meth lab suddenly begin to fight with an ease and aplomb Bruce Lee would have had to have given his sincere approval.

It’s not surprising, given that the action and martial-arts movie genres seldom have much more to recommend them than these particular indulgences, but that ring of absurdity is actually fairly pervasive. The tension ramped up by the enclosed setting of a single block of flats and the fits and starts of horrifically plausible violence go out of the window somewhat when, for instance, someone bashes an opponent’s head against the wall fourteen or fifteen times in a matter of seconds. At which instance, and similar, I laughed, though I felt certain that the laugh wasn’t intended by writer/director Gareth Evans and wasn’t approved by my own moral compass. In its cinematography and choreography The Raid is stylised and accomplished, frenetic without sacrificing clarity except on those occasions which demand it, and extremely well cast. The story’s paper-thin, but the acting manages to take the backstory from mere suggestion to something that feels like it’s there and motivating everyone involved. Impressive and viscerally horrendous in perilously equally measures, the only thing I can say for sure is that The Raid is probably the best cinematic Welsh/Indonesian collaboration I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying… something?

BACIGALUPO

(BAH-CHI-GUH-LOU-PO)

RINGS A BELL

BY THOM DICOMIDIS

Bacigalupo wakes up late

his alarm-bird didn’t take its bait

So he skips breakfast, skips the shower

but then his Whirly’s out of power

Desperate now, he fires a flare

and moments later a Cantone is there

The driver looks slightly askew

but steers the Cantone straight and true

which is fine, up to the bend

and then there comes an abrupt end

But Bacigalupo won’t be stopped

although his day’s already cropped

he swaps an Aviand for a lie

and boldly shoots into the sky

and finally reaches The Fell

where Bacigalupo rings a bell

THE END

The metric along which the distinctions between art, erotica and pornography are measured has always been open to a particularly broad reading of its definitions, being as much a matter of personal taste and an indication of one’s social and sexual politics as anything which can be demarcated into rigidly defined categories. Room in Rome, loosely based on the Chilean film En la Cama and the first predominantly English-language film by Spanish director Julio Medem, comes from a cinematic tradition far more physically and sexually unabashed than its mainstream British or American counterparts. Since sex and sexuality are integral parts of the human experience, even if only in their diminution or disavowal, this allows for the idea of a romance which extends beyond the purely romantic and into the carnal, the erotic in all its charged potential, with the characters nakedness as much a concern of feelings as flesh. But whilst the act of entanglement can itself be very expressive it does open up a film to the criticism that it offers merely, for instance, the titillation of a Sapphic tryst… So does Room in Rome work as something akin to art or, in the absence of some deeper meaning of thematic concern which justifies the sex as a necessary component of the narrative, is it nothing more than well-intentioned softcore pornography?

I’d argue, though tentatively and with certain caveats, that it’s the former. By throwing the two characters Alba (Elena Anaya) and Natasha (Natasha Yarovenko) together, both of whom are essentially on the run from some unpleasant truth about the state of their everyday lives, Room in Rome can explore ideas of a desperation that would not be so complete were it not shared. When the two meet Alba is looking for a brief respite, one night of sex with someone other than her partner, one night that isn’t tainted by grief, and that the object of her lust professes to be straight merely adds a frisson of challenge to the seduction, effort undercutting the infidelity. If she had taken home a more assured partner there would have been no film, just fucking followed by guilt, but as she and Natasha open up to one another, albeit at first with defensive lies and stories which reveal more than intended, their shared motivations bringing them together. But again, this would merely be a friendship without the sexual component, and Natasha’s shift from fear to ecstasy through wavering passion is integral to that. Her hesitation, and the fact that we see it gradually diminish, is vital, even if the camera is arguably more enamoured of the sex than the substance of any given moment.

So the sex, while necessary, seems focused a little too heavy on exciting the audience’s libidos rather than conveying the story, but there’s more to the film than that. Alba and Natasha’s couplings are interspersed with dialogues, games where they catch each other out and discover more shared experiences. Their depressions complement and foster a connection, until out of the desperate loneliness they share their attraction becomes the seed for something more, an escapist fantasy (on which creatively delusional aspect of depression I’ve written about before). These are emotionally diverse roles which could have easily been subsumed to the erotic, played as unnecessary interludes, but which are handled deftly save an occasional intrusion of melodrama where seriousness overshoots its intended affect (yes, “affect”). The playfulness of the two lovers, who speak to one another in English because it’s a language they share but whisper secret and not-so-secret admissions in Russian and Spanish, is endearing, the build-up to a seemingly inevitable ending full of a heartbreak that the audience are not spared. The sincerity of the film, its obvious aspirations to be something more than merely fodder for prurient interests, and the genuine need to explore the physicality of the characters mean that Room in Rome is a better film than its marketing suggests, a genuinely warm and insightful film.

With sex in it.

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN CHANGED ALMOST IN ITS ENTIRELY IN RESPONSE TO SERIES CREATOR & SHOWRUNNER DAN HARMON BEING FIRED VIA PRESS RELEASE.

The previous version of this post was critical of Community in the way that only a despondent fan would choose to be; focused on my ambivalence towards the commissioning of a fourth season given that the third was more inconsistent in quality than its predecessors. But in the shadow of a cowardly piece of politicking by Sony Pictures Television and the light of a three part season finale which was both brilliantly funny and incredibly touching, that critique seemed embarrassingly entitled, seemed unfairly harsh. Whilst these episodes reminded me what I would be missing if the programme had been cancelled, the news of Dan Harmon’s abrupt dismissal firing made me more livid than I would have guessed possible.

I was a huge fan of Community (PROOF!) from the first time I saw it, a smart character comedy which I hyped and proselytised about to friends, friends of friends and the friends of friends who were mainly fans of Friends. I was even glad that the first season and change had already aired; it just meant I could watch all the episodes I’d missed in a glut, gorging myself on twenty minute bursts of exceptional comedy. Soon (too quickly) I was caught up, and so I had to learn patience (tempered with repeat viewings to prevent brutal withdrawal) as I waited eagerly for each new episode, always slightly resentful of any activity or event which meant I might have to wait a few days longer.

Dan Harmon created Community, and fought the studio at every turn in order to deliver a programme as close to his ideal as possible and, given that the only other writer from the first season and two key producers have also departed, can the programme really be anything other that a pale imitation of its former self? To quote part of Dan Harmon’s disproportionately gracious response to the news which he himself heard via the internet reporting on the press release the studio sent out: “I’m not saying you can’t make a good version of Community without me, but I am definitely saying that you can’t make my version of it unless I have the option of saying “it has to be like this or I quit” roughly 8 times a day.”

So what are we, the devoted audience, to do? Do we boycott season four out of principle, or because to watch it seems likely to be as though we are watching the jerking, unnatural movements of a loved one’s revenant? Do we watch and scorn, showing Sony how badly they’ve misstepped by trampling over something we love and a creator we trust? Should we expect the cast and crew to quit en masse and heap opprobrium on any or all who stay on? That last one’s a “no”, obviously; but if someone takes one of your favourite things and smashes it to pieces before handing it back should you be expected to say “thank you”? The audience doesn’t own Community, even Dan Harmon only owns 10% of it, but  just as that 10% is essential the calibre of fans the programme has deserved and attracted (for the most part) has been vital.

We’ve taken up the hashtag sixseasonsandamovie on Twitter, used blogs and Tumblr and every social network and community platform going, and we’ve shared our enjoyment with friends and family and total strangers alike. Community was something we shared in too, but the heart of the show has been torn out in an incredibly callous and calculated fashion in service to a bottom line which cares nothing for creativity, sentiment, or even quality. The new showrunners, without even the meagre contractual protections offered to Dan Harmon, will be bullied into kowtowing, into making the programme the way the studio wants to see it. Except that ideally they don’t want to see it, they just want to sell it, which means bland homogenisation, the death of ideas. It means Community in inexorable decline.

They had tried to limit the extent of their culpability, had reduced the choice to blind luck, a lottery, but since they had overturned the decision once themselves when the result condemned the Mayor’s daughter, it didn’t help them sleep any easier. Still, they had held off the choice as long as possible, kept Hannah as safe as circumstances allowed, but to no avail. The priest had discovered her three days previously, the pain of her damned existence finally too much to suffer under any longer, hanged from the beams in her room, her ward, her prison. The rope she had used, if you could call it such, was made from the pages of her bible, her only possession, softened in saliva, bundled and twisted until it was strong enough to support her tortured and emaciated form, if only for just long enough.

So the inevitable, the horrendous task they had been diligent in avoiding and that they had faced only twice before, was upon them. They picked the name in silence, a draw whose simplicity belied its importance, and shamefully relieved that it was a loss they could all stand, they carried the terrible news to the girl’s family. Her mother opened the door and began to weep, quietly at first and then in wracking sobs as she felt her daughter’s future collapse into a cycle of endless horrors. Nonetheless, she went upstairs and fetched her daughter down and let the priest rebaptise her, a new name for her new purpose, the mark a martyrdom she might never understand but which would protect her village. She was taken back upstairs to bed, so that the nightmares might begin, and the elders left, heads low and walking away from one another without looking back.

To those who had first made the deal the price had seemed acceptable, a sacrificial offering in exchange for protection from the plague that was ravaging the hamlets and villages around them, the plague which had cut a decaying, necrotic swathe through the town and cities with upon whom their trade depended. One girl, a farmer’s daughter named Hannah who had incurred the then-priest’s wrath over some rebuff, with whom the power which offered them protection could toy and tarry for the rest of her life, could tease out the threads of her sanity until her mind and soul were left in tatters. But then, when she died, driven to take her own life, the plague returned, and the elders were offered a choice. There would always be a girl, a plaything for the darkness to torment, or a vile death would claim them all, and everyone who tried to flee. So the elders chose a girl and called her Hannah thereafter, and when she died they chose another, and as the elders died their children took their places, and then they chose another.

Some parents fled, taking their accursed and haunted children with them as though the distance might spare them, as though evil measured miles and abided borders in the ways mere mortal shells are forced to, as though their departure wouldn’t be punished by the encroachment of an impossible sickness their ancestors had unfairly avoided. Others had, very rarely, exercised a kind of mercy, offering their child whatever lies on the other side of oblivion rather than the pain which Hannah’s life promised. A cruel kind of mercy really, since their daughter’s passing meant that the elders would be forced to reconvene and select another sacrifice to carry the burden of a long-distant sin. To select another Hannah.

Titles in white on staid grey, austere and sombre, the quality and the content laid out in a choice of colours. Quiet and intense and serious in that slightly too earnest way, that slightly too calculated manner, which undercuts the film’s own intended gravitas. The score, Spartan, a finger on the scale, an affected change in the measure of Womb dramatic weight, gives way for wind and waves to scream. Portentous moments in distant wide-shots, sullen faces in unhappy close-ups, the minutiae is everything, but not always enough, in bleak greys and cold blues, sickly greens. Laden with metaphor and light on discourse, this is simplified science fiction, a way to explore love as obsession, an abuse which transcends death and begins before birth when it overrides the possible. Nature is kinetic, change and entropy, held static by desire it may not die but it does mutate, becoming gnarled and ugly and bitterly cruel. She is weak and selfish and afraid, he first sinister then tortured, whole persons living halves, pallid shadows, of the lives that were intended for them. The tension of what we know, what the victim of this horrendous love doesn’t, appals and nauseates. The taboo of incest, emotional if not genetic, an inevitability we try not to see coming. Credits, again in white on staid grey, run backwards, a sign of the love story inverted, abnormal and broken.

This blanket denial of wrongdoing and Cardinal Brady’s refusal to resign as the senior Catholic in Ireland are in spite of the report’s revelation that after a complaint received in 1975 against Smyth, in which the names and addresses of several concurrent victims were given to then-Father Brady and others, he was allowed to continue to abuse one boy for a further two years and other members of the boy’s family up until 1988. During the interrogation of the victim who had come forth the questions, asked of a fourteen year old survivor of sexual abuse who besides being isolated from his father for the questioning was also asked to swear an oath that he would not speak of the assaults to anyone besides those members of the clergy, seemed intended to guide him in such a way as to indicate some shared culpability. The guilt of a fourteen year old boy used to assuage the churches fears that Smyth may have simply been an abhorrent person they had chosen to believe was a pious and righteous man. Neither the police nor the families of those other children identified as victims of Smyth were contacted.

In defence of his continued authority and his refusal to resign Cardinal Brady, who in his own words of the time was “dispatched to investigate the culprit”, has said that he did his job in taking evidence of abuse and passing it on to his superiors. Even if you were to argue that Cardinal Brady did the right thing in passing the information up the hierarchical chain, in which case you’d be utterly and provably wrong, the proper response to his superiors not acting upon that knowledge would surely have been to do something himself, not to feel reassured that he was spiritually covered by what little he had done. Not that the wilful corruption ends with Cardinal Brady; Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s chief prosecutor of canonical law, when confronted with the idea of an endemic culture of abuse and secrecy could only say, pathetically, “we are on a learning curve”. In defence of Cardinal Brady he offered, with almost sickening gall, the argument that the church needs “leaders who have learned the hard way and are determined to protect children”, the politicisation of an appalling failure in both the morals and ethics of all involved.

That such men pass themselves off as having some kind of moral authority, that they deem themselves fit to speak for a power they cite as the ultimate source of goodness and righteousness isn’t just absurd or wrong, it’s obscene. If there were a hell I have no doubt that it would be filled by men like Cardinal Sean Brady, people who not only commit these terrible wrongs in the defence of their station and their dogma but dare to sit in judgement on others in spite of the harm that they themselves have been complicit in. Men whose actions speak to a belief more fundamental than their faith and humanity: that the reputation of the church is more important than the safety of the children they claim to care for. These men, protecting the reputation of an imagined version of the church which is founded upon a lie, are not monsters by inclination or illness, by a sickness of the mind or of the soul they profess to hold dear, they are monsters by choice.

*   *   *   *   *

Quotations and other information were taken from:

This World: The Shame of the Catholic Church: available in the UK until 09/05/12.

Cardinal Brady will not resign over ‘abuse failure’

Cardinal Brady’s statement in full

Cardinal Brady revelations: reaction

DISCLAIMER: I play somewhat fast and loose with the measurements when I’m baking, so if you think something looks or tastes wrong then adjust as required with my blessings.

*   *   *   *   *

*   *   *   *   *

Ingredients

For the Cupcakes³

150g of butter

150g of caster sugar

110g of self-raising flour

50g of good cocoa powder

3 medium free-range eggs⁴

*   *   *

For the Icing

250g of icing sugar

112g of softened butter

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

*   *   *

For the… Oreosity?

4 packets of Oreos

1 tub of Miniature Oreos

*   *   *   *   *

*   *   *   *   *

Method

Preparation

Shuck two packets of Oreos, separating the biscuits from the fillings.

Crush the shucked biscuits into quarters or smaller.

Preheat the oven to 200°C or Gas Mark 6.

*   *   *

Making the Icing

Sift the icing sugar and add gradually to the softened butter, stirring continuously.

Beat until the icing is smooth and of a soft spreading consistency.

Blend in the filling from the shucked Oreos.

Powder a handful of crushed biscuits, sieve into the icing and mix thoroughly.

*   *   *

Making the Cake Mixture

Break and whisk the eggs, mixing in the remainder of the crushed biscuits a handful at a time and stirring until they are completely broken down⁵. NB: SEMI-IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE

Blend the butter with the castor sugar and stir into the egg/biscuit mixture.

Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and blend until the mixture is completely combined.

*   *   *

Baking

Lay cupcake or muffin cases⁶ out on a baking tray or similar.

Place an Oreo in the base of each one⁷.

Put two tablespoons of the cake mixture over each Oreo then leave a few minutes to settle.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a knife pushed into a cupcake comes out clean, then remove and leave to cool.

*   *   *

Decoration

Once the cupcakes are cool to the touch use a butter knife spread the icing in a loose swirl⁸.

Top with a mini Oreo.

*   *   *

…Post-paration?

Eat the Oreo Cupcakes, or share them with friends and discover a sexual magnetism you hitherto hadn’t suspected you might possess⁹.

*   *   *

Variation

I suppose this would work with bourbon biscuits or custard creams too, just take the cocoa powder out of the cake mix if you’re making the latter.

*   *   *   *   *

*   *   *   *   *

Footnotes

1. In lieu of being able to eat one (or more) of these cakes, I lavished an almost disturbing amount of time and attention on taking the accompanying photo for this post…

2. Plaudits and honours from representatives of most deities and demi-gods will be considered.

3. If you’ve got a preferred chocolate cake recipe, then use that instead.

4. I suppose the eggs don’t have to be free-range but now I’ve raised the issue and, as a result, you’ll feel a small but nagging sense of guilt if you end up using eggs from caged hens.

5. You can add small splashes of vegetable oil, milk or water if the biscuits aren’t breaking down. Or just stop adding biscuits.

6. If you’ve gotten this far in trying out the recipe without realising that this instruction was coming, and consequently don’t have cupcake or muffin cases then don’t panic, it just means that you’re an idiot. Use a cake tin or line a deep oven tray in greaseproof paper and make it a cake instead. Idiot.

7. If you don’t mention this part to people they can become amusingly excited by the discovery. Or sometimes choke.

8. I just slather it on; no-one really cares once they’re eating the cakes.

9. This is not guaranteed¹⁰.

10. It’s not even plausible really, is it?