Burn, Baby, Burn


That’s my birthday cake (which was awesome, by the way). See that giant candle poking out of the middle of it? That candle has become a family tradition, and no birthday is really complete without it.

I think what happened was that a bunch of years ago, someone had a birthday and there were no birthday candles to be found anywhere. Knowing my family, we were probably also doing birthday cake at 11:00 at night or some other random time and so going out to buy birthday candles was not an option. Enter the Christmas taper.

That candle is one of what was once a set of two. I think it came from one of those elementary school fundraisers where little kids talk you into spending $20 for a roll of wrapping paper, and no one’s ever sure exactly what you’re raising money for, and then you’re stuck with this ugly-ass wrapping paper that you would normally never buy under any circumstances, but it’s for the kids and so you got suckered.

The Christmas taper eventually became renamed the Birthday Candle, and now that candle is used only for birthdays and for nothing else. Somewhere along the way it got broken, and now when we put it on a cake, we have to kind of mush it together so it’ll stand upright long enough for the wish-making and the blowing-out without falling over and taking half the cake with it.

I posted a picture of the candle in use on someone else’s birthday cake a few months ago, and someone dubbed it “the stripper pole,” and now that’s usually what we call it too, when we aren’t calling it the Birthday Candle.

Thanks for all your kind wishes! I did indeed have a kickass birthday. One of my kickass birthday gifts was a digital camera I’ve been lusting after for months and months now, so prepare yourself for a Flickrtastic onslaught of possibly crappy, possibly good photos.

6 Replies to “Burn, Baby, Burn”

  1. Here’s to your accumulation of wisdom on yet another trip around Sol.

    What most people don’t think about every day is that Sol itself is in orbit around the galactic core of the Milky Way, though at 200,000 years per orbit, celebrations are rarely held. The Milky Way itself is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy, though that will likely not take place for 5 billion years (about the time our sun will shed it’s outer core burning all the planets all the way to Jupiter), but reserve your seating now.

    If that’s not enough, both galaxies are falling toward the Great Attractor, a large collection of supermassive black holes and perhaps 10 times that amount in dark matter. So thanks to Dick Cheney, we are descending into the dark side.

    No kidding (except about Cheney)…

    http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Cosmos/GtAttractor.html
    http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/gclusters/attractor.html
    http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/merger/merger.mpg (a cool simulation of the Andromeda collision)
    http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/ava/avapages/G0601andmilwy.html

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