Hopefully, dear reader, the weather where you are is nicer than the weather where I am. Should that be the case, mayhap you are gearing up to patio-grill some foodstuffs for dinner this evening — delicious flank steaks or cheesy broccoli in foil packets or build-your-own kebabs.

Before doing so, however, please consider abandoning your fancy foodtsuffs and your weak-ass grill in favor of building yourself a new Baseball Monster Grill using the following schematic.

The grill is portable, so that you can easily wheel it around your cul-de-sac, frightening neighborhood child and suburban rodent alike (who would likely try to steal your grill-things as you cooked them!). Use the Grill to clear the area of such pests before proceeding with preparation of the food. The wheels and handles also facilitate travel by airplane or motorbus, or a quick, evasive maneuver into an alleyway (zero turn-radius).

You might be compelled to ask, upon viewing this schematic, “Why would a baseball have a bat in its mouth?” It does not. Instead, that is a fifth of whiskey, built to the scale of the baseball’s face, fueling it with the menace necessary to frighten the aforementioned children and rodents. The whiskey also fuels the brain-flames of the Baseball Monster Grill.

Also please notice in the schematic: the Drunken Baseball Monster Grill is meant to grill in-can Chef Boyardee products and loose potato chips ONLY. Attempting to grill anything else will result in annihilative mutiny on the part of the Grill Monster. Should you bring that fresh tuna steak from Whole Foods within five feet of it, it will turn on you the way you previously turned it on the pests of the neighborhood.

This has been Your Friday Grill.

As for your Friday Bill, please allow me to (re)introduce more horror into your lives, readers: Billy Koch, a talented relief pitcher, you’ll remember, had his career ended early (at age 29) by the mysterious Morgellons disease.

This has been a very-appetizing-indeed Friday Grill & Bill.

It’s not a cake! It’s a Blue Jays donut! And not just any donut! The official donut of the Toronto Blue Jays!

Available at your local Tim Hortons, it is most refreshing when paired with this quote from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn:

“If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard–and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.”

This has been your Friday cake and quote.

Shout out to Dayn Perry. Always remember: Dayn Perry is everything, and Dayn Perry is everywhere. And thanks to @BBaxTwitts for the donuts.

It’s a cake! A Seattle Mariners cake!

I suspect a piping bag was used!

Let us pair this delicious Duncan Hines foodstuff with a quote from Franz Kafka!

“One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.”

What if the cake is poisoned! Turns out, it matters not.

Here’s a cake! A Detroit Tigers cake!

Looks delish, does it not? The Sommelier of Whimsy shall pair it with a delightful-as-a-daisy Sartre quotation from The Age of Reason, that devil-may-care romp through the sun-dappled meadows of caprice …

He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism – all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.

This has been your Morning Cake and Quote.

Here’s a cake! A New York Mets cake!

Survey it! Lovely, won’t you agree? Delightful, even! Despite the best efforts of Ikea, craftsmanship persists! This cake would go lovely with a port, or perhaps a scoop of refreshing ice cream!

It would also necessarily go with this quote from Aleksandar Hemon …

There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.

This has been Your Evening Cake and Quote.

It is established fact that Mr. Redlegs is the greatest mascot in baseball. This is established fact in large part because Mr. Redlegs looks like he brawls on riverboats. It is fitting, then, that the disembodied ball-head of Mr. Redlegs has been rendered in the timeless artistic medium of wholesome frosting:

Some things you should know about this cake:

– Lordly reader Bryan passed this along. I assume he baked, photographed and ate the cake pictured.
– Hot Lips had a birthday.
– The countertop appears to be formica.
– Surely, at some point, Pete Rose made love to Loretta Swit.

Look: A cake made to resemble one of the Brewers’ racing sausages!

On the other hand, the cake is plainly crafted as an homage to Guido, the Italian racing sausage. The problem is that Guido wears no. 3. The faux Guido made out of stupid buttercream frosting is wearing no. 1.

So nice try, “Noah.” Or should I say, “Al Qaeda.”

If there’s one thing we take very seriously  at NotGraphs, it’s bringing to your attention baked delights that are baseball-related. So, look at it. Look at that frigging baseball glove made of cupcakes. Isn’t it amazing? At first, I wasn’t even sure what to say about it. Upon feasting — pun intended — my eyes on it, I was rendered speechless. I may or may not have reached out with my right hand and touched the screen of my laptop; touched the baseball glove made of cupcakes.

(I did.)

But, really, what is there to say? It’s beautiful. It’s freedom. And surely delicious. I may or may not have dreamed of eating it last night.

(I did. And Kevin Mench. Not eating Kevin Mench, you sick bastard. I dreamed about eating the cake, and then, later on, I ran into Kevin Mench. I made sure that he knew I’ll never forgive him for breaking Roy Halladay’s leg in 2005. Strange dream, I know. Very strange. But I guess it’s about that time of year — Januarys in Canada make you question your life choices — when I begin to dream of mediocre baseball players.)

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again: I’m hungry. They’ve thought of everything.

Cupcake glove tap to this Tumblr account.

Benjamin Disraeli said that “Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.”  Golly, he makes being conservative seem like absolutely no fun.  Wouldn’t you rather greet the future with optimism and wild-eyed hope, the better to be prepared for the non-stop techno dance party that your life is destined to become?

Take this intrepid soul, who has chosen to prepare for the inevitable rise of the Astros:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet teaches us that A’s catcher Kurt Suzuki is attempting to gain weight this offseason by shoving down his gullet at least 4,000 calories each day. As Aaron pithily notes, Suzuki is being a crashing bore about the whole thing by choking down things like smoothies and turkey burgers. Clearly, Mr. Suzuki, in his bid to become larger and more in charger, needs some help.

So, in the interest of making Mr. Suzuki a more compelling Leisured Gentleman, we present these alternative routes to consuming four score and 3,920 calories in a day:

• – 34.5 Bud Light Limes (Bud Lights Lime?).
• – 61.5 shots of vodka.
• – Unlimited portions of intravenously applied Angel Dust/PCP, which might also help the hoisting gentleman in the gymnasium.
• – 2.2 pounds of deboned human flesh. To this end, some helpful Internet hotlinks!
• – By extension and in the service of a logical end-game, 2.2 pounds of deboned Nancy Grace cutlets.
• – 133.3 ladles-full of Old Country Buffet’s rabies-free chicken gravy.
• – 1.6 cans of snuff tobacco.
• – 33.3 tablespoons of motor oil vinaigrette.

So, Mr. Suzuki, as you can see there’s really no cause to soldier on with banalities like “vegetables” and “meats not likely to lead to a CDC-declared Hot Zone encircling the blast field.”