Chocolate and The Moze

I can't this day get away from me without sharing the news. Today is not only National Chocolate Cake Day, but also Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday. This means, of course, that you might want to celebrate Wolfie's birthday with a nice big chocolate cake. Mmmmmm. I'm sure our boy would approve.

We chocoholics owe our gratitude to Dr. James Baker, for making it all possible. In 1764, he figured out how to make cocoa powder from cocoa beans using two millstones.

Mozart was born Jan. 27, 1756, so he may have been around when the first chocolate cake was served to the Emperor's court. Hope so!

Lacking a whole cake, I'm going to have a cup of tea and munch a little Trader Joe's Pound Plus bittersweet dark chocolate. My absolute favorite. You can have the Godiva, Ghiarardelli and those other pricey ones. We have to drive eight hours to lay our hands on this stuff, so we make it last.

Now if I can just find a copy of my all-time favorite movie, "Amadeus."

Photo: Tom Hulse as Mozart in a still from the 1984 film "Amadeus," from a play written by Peter Shaffer  which was based on an 1897 one-act opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korshakov, Mozart and Salieri, which is in turn based on an 1830 drama of the same name by Alexander Pushkin.

Blog List, lost and found

Somehow last week I obliterated my entire blog list. I mean, EVERYBODY whose blogs I have added over the past six years. I felt awful, but haven't had time to reconstruct the list. Then I discovered just now that Blogger keeps the info even if I clumsily delete it, and when I go to my Layout it's possible to reconstruct it all without struggling all morning to remember who they were.

Some will be missing from the new list. It's not like I have "un-friended" them, it's just that if they haven't posted in over a year I suppose they have moved on and given up blogging, or they have new blogs that I'll stumble across someday.

Anyway, thanks, Blogger, for making it so easy to retrieve my blogging buddies. I was missing them, so glad to have them back.

We be stylin'

Once in a while, there's some good news online. So it was that yesterday, the New York Times offered an article about this year's minimizing of makeup: You Can Fall Out of Bed and Look Good. 

At last the world has caught up with my non-style. What took them so long?

Stiff coiffures are out, bed-hair is in. You might not be as avant-garde as the model shown here, from a British hairdressers' website.  But you get the idea. Sleek is so passé, dahlings.

I tie up my long hair (too cheap to get it cut every six weeks) in an untidy knot on top of my head when I step into the shower. Suddenly that's the new look! I can just leave it that way. I hate hairspray anyway.

Precisely-applied makeup is out. Put away all those applicators, wands, liners and brushes, and use fingertips for a smudged look. Hey, smudged is me all over!

Lipstick should look like you've been sucking on a strawberry popsicle. Maybe next we'll go for bright red tongues, too, like the Rolling Stone logo. Fashion should be fun, after all!

Foundation should only be used on those under-eye circles and other imperfections; the rest of the face should be naked. Wonderful! The bottle should last a lot longer that way.

"Eyebrows should not be trendy," the stylists announce. I feel for all the ladies who have been going to beauty shops to have their brows tweaked. My neglected ones are now the "in thing."

They may have to pass on that eyebrow trend here in Mexico; too many ladies have tweezed their natural brows away and gone with the penciled look. The style has been referred to as "Eyebrows by Sharpie." Some of them look downright scary, which may be intentional: it's meant to get across the idea the wearer is a force to be reckoned with. Don't mess with this mujer.

I'm going to bask in this trend toward imperfection while I can. For sure the pendulum will swing the other way in a few months and everyone will be back to striving for perfection, every hair in place. Then we'll get sick of that and go natural again.

But I'll just be the same me through it all. I'm no slave to fashion. I only ride that carousel horse when it comes my way.