Never let it be said that the Daily Mail does not have an accurate sense of the intellectual capabilities of its readers: “A study has found evidence of ‘alpha cavewomen’ roaming the plains and calling the shots while the menfolk slobbed at home. The discovery could put paid to the belief that cavemen were the aggressive, violent go-getters in the relationship between the sexes. It also raises the intriguing possibility that Fred Flintstone, the eternally henpecked half of the cartoon partnership with Wilma, might actually have mirrored life on Earth all those centuries ago.”

“A Catholic doctors’ association in Germany believes it can cure the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians with sugar pills — though only at their request, the group says. But the homo-homeopathy has been harshly criticized by members of its target community.”

It’s time for summer cakes! The cakes of summer, much like the boys of summer, aren’t that filling but are fruity and they live at your house for a week until you’re finally sick of them and then they get chopped up and put in trash bags. So named for the sound of Pacman, the Wocka Wocka Plumcot Yogurt Cake is verrrrryyyy loosely adapted from a plum cake by Nigel Slater. This is my standard summer cake, and it’s fantastic, if I do say so myself. I would know, I’m eating it right now. There’s just 12 easy steps!

1. Take butter out of fridge so it gets warm. Two “sticks” or one “big stick.” This is important!

2. Meanwhile, grind two handfuls of almonds in your coffee grinder or whatever, until it’s all powder.

3. Beat about 1 and a ½ of those sticks of butter, once they’re not cold, with about a cup of muscovado or brown sugar or light brown sugar or even white sugar, in that order of preference. Or you can mix and match! This is why your butter isn’t cold, so it gets all fluffy with the sugar. You can literally beat this forever basically.

4. Beat in three eggs and some vanilla. (Don’t beat this too long though.)

5. Take your ground almonds and whisk them in a bowl with a cup of flour and two teaspoons baking powder.

6. Incorporate your wet and dry ingredients!

7. And then add to the whole mess about one container of plain Old Chatham Sheepherding Company yogurt. (You may use other yogurts if you wish, I suppose, but there is no other yogurt for me.)

8. Assess your cake dough! Is it super-runny? Add more flour! Is it super-firm? Add more yogurt!

9. Have someone cut for you between 5 and 15 plumcots. (You can use plums, pluots or apricots! Or other larger stone fruits of the prunus genus! Maybe even cherries, but only if you have a cherry pitter.)

10. Cut them just in half, discarding, duh, the pits. (CAVEAT: if they’re particularly tart fruits, it’ll be a better eating experience if you cut them in slices actually. It’s rough going to stuff half a really tart baked fruit in your mouth. (I know.) So try one; they get tarter often when you cook, so err maybe on the side of smaller?)

11. Pour batter into springform pan, which you have buttered and also set a round slice of parchment paper on the bottom. Set halved plumcots face down all about the top, or slightly embed slices.

12. Put it in a 350° oven. Check after 30 minutes if your oven runs hot. Check after 40 otherwise. Often takes 50 minutes. Knife inserted in center should emerge clean. (Just like with the boys of summer.)

Also, if you want it to be Wocka Flocka Flame Plumcot Yogurt Cake, add about half a cup of booze of some sort, and maybe a little more flour to compensate. Maybe rum or brandy or something, I don’t know. Something not too overwhelming! Like, probably not schnapps, boozehound. Eat while wearing shorts.

Charles Robert Watts, percussionist for British popular music combo The Rolling Stones, turns 70 today. Here is a fun anecdote about the man from his bandmate Keith Richards, concerning an altercation between Watts and Mick Jagger: “Charlie punched him into a plate full of smoked salmon and he almost floated out the window along the table into a canal in Amsterdam. I just grabbed his leg and saved him from going out… (The fight) was about absolutely nothing. I had taken Mick out for a drink in Amsterdam, so at 5 in the morning, he came back to my room. He’s drunk by now, Mick drunk is a sight to behold. Charlie was fast asleep. Is that my drummer? Why don’t you get your arse down here? Charlie got dressed in a Savile Row suit, tie, shoes, shaved, came down, grabbed him and went boom! Don’t ever call me ‘your drummer’ again. You’re my fucking singer.” Happy birthday!

As an update to our coverage of one of America’s biggest African-American get-togethers, on Memorial Day weekend: about 60 hours after shooting the driver of a car early Monday morning, Miami Beach police found a gun in the car, as they promised they would. It was “out of plain sight,” hence why it took them… more than… two days… to find it…. inside the car. “We were told he was seen with a firearm and, sure enough, there was a firearm in the car,” said the chief of police. (That’s a real quote!)

The notoriously thorough folks at the New Yorker have sorted through our collection of profanities and when they first appeared in that esteemed periodical, and have offered a few helpful correctives. Of special interest: Mary Gaitskill, not Tad Friend, was the first person to get the common usage for fellatio into the magazine, a mistake which the publication generously forgives by noting that, “This error is more understandable. Most people would search for ‘blowjob,’ whereas New Yorker style is two words: ‘blow job.’”

BREAKING: Several sources tell me Jill Abramson will be named executive editor of the New York Times later todayThu Jun 02 14:30:53 via web

John Koblin
koblin

A new role for Bill Keller will put a woman, Jill Abramson, in the Times #1 slot for the first time. That new role seems to be: full-time writer. Oh… good.

Hey, remember the recovery from the recession? When businesses were going to make money and then the jobs would come back? Paul Krugman looks at the non-recovery of employment today. Above is the graph since 1948. There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week.

A British couple has found a way to make the stagework of Aaron Sorkin tolerable.

Today in City Hall Park — from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — advocates for adult literacy will be protesting the Mayor’s proposed budget. You should feel free to join them!

The City’s money for literacy programs is a tiny, tiny part of the budget, but it’s constantly being hacked at. All told, just $13 million in proposed cuts (in a $65.7 billion budget) impact thousands of people who are trying to master English.

The City should be throwing money at literacy, to make it the greatest city it could be. That something like a third of New York City residents aren’t fully literate in English is a waste of human capital.

And so now literacy-minded folks have to go make the case, so the City Council can restore at least some of this program money.

Last year, at budget time, of course, we looked at the importance of literacy programs. 1 in 3 New York City residents is an immigrant, and half of residents speak a first language other than English in the home. But also, nearly half of people who use adult literacy services in New York are native English speakers who have, by and large, been failed by the school system.

The proposed budget comes to $65.7 billion; it addresses the City receiving a billion less from the country and the state. The City’s official deficit is $4.6 billion.

To Bloomberg’s credit, he constantly reiterates that both the state and the federal government keep more money than they send back — and budget cuts can be viewed as entirely Albany’s fault. This is true! And state money for literacy programs is also being cut.

It’s also true that the business-friendly mayor has a role in this, due to his position that if you don’t play nice to big corporations, they’ll leave. (For where? Bethesda? Detroit? Los Angeles???) Did you know that business taxes in New York City create less than $6 billion in annual City income — only 15% of the city’s tax revenue?