On Girl Guides and Fruitcake

Why write about fruitcake in May? I blame the Girl Guides and their addictive cookies. Not the cookies themselves, actually, but the box they come in. Did you know 2010 represents the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Girl Guides? That's a pretty cool achievement - that means the Guides have been around longer than Canada's been a sovereign nation. Go look up the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and the Canada Act of 1982. I'll wait.

(Funny way my brain rambles: I wrote the word "achievement" up there and immediately drew a connection between Microsoft's Xbox 360 Achievements and the Scouts' and Guides' merit badges. Top Achievements of the 1910s: "Achievement unlocked: Milked a Cow." "Achievement unlocked: Got Drafted." "Achievement unlocked: Avoided the Spanish Flu.")

So the Guides have been around for one hundred years. You know what else has been around for one hundred years? Every single piece of that disgusting, rock-hard, dusty, crusty, teeth-cracking, tongue-curling, stomach-punchingly multi-coloured hunk of fossilized leprechaun turd people call fruitcake.

I'm not a fan. (Achievement unlocked: Understatement)

Portal was right, the cake is a lie. Cake is spongy, light, sweet; it tastes of children's laughter and angels' joyful song. Fruit "cake" is drywall plaster mixed with sawdust; moistened with the tears of a four-year old whose teddy bear's head just fell off; and then crushed into blocks the density of lead. This lead-like density is important, as the "fruit" is radioactive plastic debris leftover from the ruin of Chernobyl. It has been the Ukraine's chief export since 1986. Normally, this would be an unthinkable health-risk, not to mention completely irresponsible and utterly unethical, but the sheer density of the "cake" stops the radioactive particles neatly in their tracks, like the lead-lined vests your dentist drapes over your lap for an x-ray. Once embedded in the cake, the radioactive particles simply bounce around in the fruit pieces, giving off energy and imbuing the fruit with their unnatural green and red glows.

I once had a completely normal, highly intelligent friend of mine totally convinced that fruitcake had been designed during World War II as a humanitarian alternative to dropping high explosives on Germany. (Achievement unlocked: Guillible) The theory was that since it was so dense, you could drop fruitcake from a bomber and it would destroy whatever it hit, while at the same time preventing starvation among the now homeless civilians. He believed me partially because I have my Masters in History and seemed to know what I was talkinb about, but mostly because he too has eaten fruitcake and instantly grasped its inherent weapon-like traits.

Was it some misanthropic monster that concocted fruitcake? Or did some goodly and well-meaning baker one day simply choose the wrong recipe book on day (H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Fthagn Fruitcake and Other Incomprehensible Horrors?) and open the door that cannot be closed? In the movie The Rock, Nicholas Cage refers to the VX poison gas threatening San Francisco as "one of those things we wish we could un-invent." He might as well have been talking about fruitcake.