The Sri Lankan Civil War has been in the news a lot lately, especially here in Toronto where a large number of Tamil people have been protesting daily, calling on the Canadian government and the UN to intervene. It's hard to know what to make of the situation since accurate information is very scarce and both sides have their share of atrocities. Yet the situation in Sri Lanka serves as a reminder of the balancing act we have here in Canada, where there is a sizable minority of people who want to make their own country by carving their province out. The situation in Sri Lanka is roughly the same as if the FLQ had been more effective in their initial attempts to start a civil war in Quebec.
It's very interesting to note that there are linguistic aspects to both our struggle and the one in Sri Lanka. On Language Log there is a post describing this history. It's a very interesting article. To summarize it, when Sri Lanka was under the control of the British, the civil service was run in English. American missionaries had been very successful in teaching Tamil youth English, and thus the Tamil were a big part of the civil service; only about a quarter of the people are Tamil but half the civil service was Tamil. After Sri Lanka gained its independence in 1948 there was call to change the official language of the civil service to a local language. Initially it was intended to be Sinhala and Tamil, together, but Sinhalese nationalists, assisted by numerous lay Buddhists and activist Buddhist monks, organized emotive and impressive processions demanding a Sinhala-only policy. They called Tamils parasites, said that Sinhalese and Buddhism were under threat by the Tamils, and demanded a Sinhalese-only state. The result was the passage of the Sinhala-Only Act of 1956. The Tamil responded by protesting; the protesters were attacked by Sinhala protesters, and riots ensued. Over the years, the situation further deteriorated, and even attempts to elevate the Tamil language's status in the 70s and 80s didn't solve the problem.
Everyone must read this
This is the story of Matthias Rath, a vitamin magnate who works hard in South Africa to convince people that AIDS drugs are actually poison and that their problems will all go away if they eat vitamins that he sells.
He sues Doctors without Borders, newspaper reporters, etc. He takes scientific research and abuses the conclusions so badly that the authors of the research make announcements distancing them from his bizarre nonsense. He even tried to have a community activist, who was HIV+ but refused treatment until others in the community had access to anti-retrovirals, indicted on genocide charges in The Hague.
And he is causing people to die of AIDS related illnesses due to his (and the South African Government's) insistence that AIDS isn't real.
Dr. Ben Goldacre, writer for the Guardian and a true scientist, has written a chapter about this outrageous story, but it wasn't included in his book because Rath was suing him at the time the book was published. Dr. Goldacre won the suit and now you can read it. It's long for a blog post but short for a book chapter and worth reading.
The scariest part: the rest of the nutritionism/naturopathic-medicine community still back Rath and treat him like a superstar. What is wrong with these people? People are dying.
He sues Doctors without Borders, newspaper reporters, etc. He takes scientific research and abuses the conclusions so badly that the authors of the research make announcements distancing them from his bizarre nonsense. He even tried to have a community activist, who was HIV+ but refused treatment until others in the community had access to anti-retrovirals, indicted on genocide charges in The Hague.
And he is causing people to die of AIDS related illnesses due to his (and the South African Government's) insistence that AIDS isn't real.
Dr. Ben Goldacre, writer for the Guardian and a true scientist, has written a chapter about this outrageous story, but it wasn't included in his book because Rath was suing him at the time the book was published. Dr. Goldacre won the suit and now you can read it. It's long for a blog post but short for a book chapter and worth reading.
The scariest part: the rest of the nutritionism/naturopathic-medicine community still back Rath and treat him like a superstar. What is wrong with these people? People are dying.
6243 Brickbeard's Bounty Lego Pirate Ship
This year Lego returned to the classic Pirate line, releasing a handful of new kits with pirate themes. I was pleased to see that the Canadian prices for these kits was roughly on par with the exchange rate, give or take a few bucks, and doubly pleased to see these kits on sale at Sears for 15% off (actually, all toys were on sale).
So, I picked up the 6243 Brickbeard's Bounty pirate ship. Brickbeard is the bad guy of the pirate line. He is basically your stereotypical "pirate" character; he has a hook for a hand and a peg leg and an eyepatch. He also wears a skull and crossbones hat. He comes with an assortment of pirate henchmen to raid the seas and torment the good guys.
While building this set I was often thinking back to the pirate ship my brother had as a child. His was the good guys ship and thus it was smaller than Blackbeard's ship of the day. The modern ship is bigger yet and it's interesting to see how the building techniques and the materials have advanced over the years.
For one thing there are fewer parts that are ship-specific. The mast pieces are now standard pillar pieces and the rigging is a standard ladder shape that can be easily re-used for other things. The ship itself is still made up of several large hull pieces, but these pieces are more modular than they used to be, allowing for even bigger ships to be made should you ever get your hands on two of these.
The minifigs are also significantly improved over the old days. Their torsos are now painted on both sides and the maiden minifig has a two-sided head, so that she can be either screaming or happy. There is also lots of attention to detail; one of the pirate figs even has a gold tooth.
Aside from the minifigs, the ship itself has many unremarkable pieces. This isn't a bad thing; those pieces are the versatile ones. Building it was super easy; in fact the instructions seemed especially simplistic. I guess this is aimed at the younger builders but I'm used to more complex instructions. That's ok, though; a skilled builder can put it together in about an hour and a child should be able to do it unassisted in a few hours. And it's worth the wait.
The ship is quite large and has a captain's cabin with a removable roof for easy play. There are three cannons that can fire the round 1x1 cylinder bricks, including one placed rather dubiously on the stern of the ship, right where the captain stands. I guess Lego cannon don't need to pay attention to Newton's Third Law.
Aside form the stern cannon, and the usual Lego design foibles (platforms that have no stairs to reach them, rooms with only three walls, etc), one amusing bit of nonsense is the mounted rifles. Did I say rifles? Of course these are muskets, in keeping with the era. It's a bit funny to see a musket mounted on the front of a rowboat, for example. For one thing, if a musket is pointed downwards the ammo can actually fall out. As well, a musket has only one shot in it before it must be reloaded, and this is always done with the musket in a vertical position. Therefore these mounted muskets are pretty strange.
I guess most kids won't notice but it is a bit odd, and I wish Lego could impart some historical lessons alongside the "historical" sets. The rowboat itself is also rather funny because it's rather implausible that the redcoats would be rowing up to the ship; a stealth mission might work but those white pants, bright white oars, and the frickin' lantern might be a bit of a giveaway. Plus one of the redcoats isn't armed well enough. You can always redistribute the weapons any way you like, but according to the instructions that soldier only has paddles and that mounted musket.Some other details I noticed: there are some new shades of brown in this set that I've never seen before; they are very nice shades and I hope to see more bricks in those colours; the shark piece of old has been replaced with a much bigger, meaner-looking shark; the old shark could fit a single brick in his mouth; the new shark can swallow a whole minifig. The cannons are no longer dark grey but instead a super-dark grey that is almost black. It is another new colour and I like it a lot. These pirates are particularly brazen about their treasure hoard; even the treasure chest is gold and it's stored on the top deck by the steering wheel.
My only complaints about this set are regarding how the sails are attached. The old ships used one-stud wide plates to form spars which had pegs to mount the sails. This led to a robust sail attachment system. This ship uses technic tubes for spars. This is much cheaper, and requires less building, but leads to a rather fragile sail configuration. Aside from that, my only minor nitpick is that I find the use of all these different coloured pieces here and there a bit annoying. On a set like this it would be nice if there wasn't a single blue brick or even light-grey. But true to Lego form, there are lots of odd-coloured pieces all over the place. Lego says this makes it easier to assemble the model, but I find it distracting and I wish Lego kits had more uniform colour schemes. However once the model is assembled you don't notice it too much.
Overall I recommend this kit. If I ever find time I'll dig up my brother's old ship and do a detailed comparison.
Build-a-Bear part two
Before Christmas I tried to build my own bear. The results weren't as good as I'd hoped and so I tried again later. This time things went much more smoothly, mainly because I was slightly less ambitious.
The first bear didn't turn out because the fur texture is fiendishly difficult to do well. Since this cake is all about the presentation, I decided to go with an easier fur texture and used mocha icing instead of sugar fur.
My recipe for mocha icing is as follows
This recipe makes a lot of icing but I find I use a lot when covering this bear. For one thing, there is a lot of surface area to cover. Also, if you make a mistake later on it helps to have spare icing to patch things up. Finally, there will be icing left over which can be added onto the cake pieces. This bear is quite big and the cake slices tend to not have much icing on them. It's nice to be able to add a bit of extra icing.
The standard recipe on the back of the box calls for vanilla buttercream icing to glue the cake halves together. I find that this works but it's better to use the same icing on the outside as on the inside, so that you don't have too many icing flavours on the go.
For decorating, I used some white icing for the inside of the bear's ears and some other details, and some chocolate chips melted with some butter for some of the other details. The bear turned out not bad, and all that icing goes well with the relatively dry bundt recipe.
The first bear didn't turn out because the fur texture is fiendishly difficult to do well. Since this cake is all about the presentation, I decided to go with an easier fur texture and used mocha icing instead of sugar fur.
My recipe for mocha icing is as follows
Ingredients
- 3 cups icing sugar
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter
- 2 Tbs. strong coffee
- 1 Tbs cocoa powder
Directions
- Cream butter
- Add all ingredients and blend until creamy
- Add more coffee/cocoa until the desired thickness and flavour is reached
This recipe makes a lot of icing but I find I use a lot when covering this bear. For one thing, there is a lot of surface area to cover. Also, if you make a mistake later on it helps to have spare icing to patch things up. Finally, there will be icing left over which can be added onto the cake pieces. This bear is quite big and the cake slices tend to not have much icing on them. It's nice to be able to add a bit of extra icing.
The standard recipe on the back of the box calls for vanilla buttercream icing to glue the cake halves together. I find that this works but it's better to use the same icing on the outside as on the inside, so that you don't have too many icing flavours on the go.
For decorating, I used some white icing for the inside of the bear's ears and some other details, and some chocolate chips melted with some butter for some of the other details. The bear turned out not bad, and all that icing goes well with the relatively dry bundt recipe.
Fedora 10 update
I recently posted about my installation of Fedora 10 and my thoughts about the distribution. Recently a couple of things happened that gave me new experiences to discuss.
First, I bought a PCI-Express WiFi card for my server. I used WiFi because it's not convenient for me to use wired networking anymore and the server has been down since we moved, awaiting its wireless capabilities. I carefully selected a D-Link card that is Linux compatible, and installed it. Guess what? Fedora 8 didn't recognize the card. This meant I needed a new kernel, because the kernel developers make it impossible to install new drivers without replacing the whole kernel. And when you run something like Fedora a new kernel means a new Fedora.
I'd previously told my friend not to install Fedora 10 because of the problems I'd had. Well, I disregarded my own advice and proceeded to install 10 on my server (mainly because I wanted to do an upgrade to make sure stuff still worked). Let me state this loud and clear: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UPGRADE FEDORA TO FEDORA 10. This was the worst installation procedure I've ever dealt with in my 12 years of running Linux. I expected stuff to install and work but instead I got nothing but trouble.
First, the installer doesn't tell you how to activate text mode. And the graphical mode doesn't work on my server, which is hooked up to a TV instead of a monitor. This is because the free nVidia driver is crap and I am stuck with the proprietary driver (the lesser of two evils). Since I couldn't get the installer to work I decided to try using the package updater, yum, to do the upgrade. This failed miserably: yum complained that the new packages conflicted with the old. I tried removing the old packages but yum, in its infinite wisdom, decided that since I wanted to get rid of package X, it would get rid of Y, and since I was getting rid of Y, it would get rid of ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWZ. I didn't look at the list closely enough and in the end yum got rid of itself. Yup, yum uninstalled itself, and that left me with no package management tool at all.
This meant I had to get the installer working or else there'd be no way to repair my system. It turns out that the fedora text mode is easily activated by editing the command line for the kernel and adding the word 'text'. Simple, right? Of course, they couldn't include a menu option nor could they document this like they used to on previous versions. Sigh. Well, at least I was onto something and I could get the installer working.
The installer, however, didn't do a very good job upgrading my system. After it was done running I was left with a pile of old Fedora 8 packages (and one Fedora 9 package? weird). I had expected these to be upgraded, but they weren't. Well, no problem... except that these packages conflicted with the 1.3 GB of updates I was trying to download. (I got the network card working, btw... that's another story but mainly nothing went wrong.). So I had to remove all the fc8 packages and some other things and then the update finally worked. Oh, and then I had to go and manually fix the SELinux contexts because for some reason some things weren't right. Sure, Fedora 10 has improvements in SELinux contexts, but I guess they don't test the upgrade path well, because it'd seem to me that a filesystem wtih default labels should be relabelled accordingly so that you can, for example, use SSH properly. Just saying.
Anyway, one of the other problems I had was that, for some reason, my kernel wasn't updated properly. The updated kernel was only partly installed. I tried uninstalling it and re-updating, but then when I rebooted my screen just said 'GRUB'. Grub is the "Grand Unified Boot Loader", which means it's the program that starts the computer. Unfortunately Grub was never meant to be installed by humans, and it seems even the computer gets it wrong; I had to try a bunch of things to get the darned thing working and it took several tries. Luckily I am a programmer and an experienced Linux user, and also luckily the Fedora 10 installer is also a rescue CD. Otherwise my server would have been dead. Finally I got things "working", though because I had to remove so much stuff before my server is really only half working. So much for a simple upgrade.
Anyway, my conclusion is that Fedora 10's installer needs a lot of work. I've never had so much difficulty getting an OS installed. But once Fedora 10 is installed, isn't it worth the pain?
Well, I've been very annoyed with it. This is mainly KDE 4.1's fault, becasue 4.1 had lots of problems (including being so slow I could barely stand to use it). Who is to blame for KDE 4.1 being on my computer? The KDE team, for misleading people about how good 4.1 would be, or the Fedora team, for shipping "beta" software and not shipping the good ol' 3.5? Well, that's neither here nor there anymore: I just installed the update that brings KDE 4.2 to Fedora 10. And WOW! what a difference.
First off, my desktop icons are back. Some people don't like desktop icons, but when I've been using files on my desktop for 19 years, I get a little cranky when you take them away. The KDE devs listened and brought this feature back to KDE in a non-sucky way. Also, I was able to find the option for disabling one-click activation. It's not where you'd expect; instead of being in the file manager settings, where it should be, it's in the mouse settings. So maybe this option was in 4.1? but anyway it's here and my #3 annoyance with KDE 4.1 is gone. So now my computer is fast again, my icons are back, and my clicks do what I want. If only there weren't any new bugs... but I've already found my notebook doesn't suspend properly when I close the lid. Sigh. At least that's minor and can be easily worked around.
So, to the KDE team, I say good work on 4.2; it's about time. To the Fedora team, what's with the installer? Yeesh. Messed up upgrades, broken kernel updates, screwed up SELinux contexts.... normal people would not be able to get this working. Hope Fedora 11 is better....
First, I bought a PCI-Express WiFi card for my server. I used WiFi because it's not convenient for me to use wired networking anymore and the server has been down since we moved, awaiting its wireless capabilities. I carefully selected a D-Link card that is Linux compatible, and installed it. Guess what? Fedora 8 didn't recognize the card. This meant I needed a new kernel, because the kernel developers make it impossible to install new drivers without replacing the whole kernel. And when you run something like Fedora a new kernel means a new Fedora.
I'd previously told my friend not to install Fedora 10 because of the problems I'd had. Well, I disregarded my own advice and proceeded to install 10 on my server (mainly because I wanted to do an upgrade to make sure stuff still worked). Let me state this loud and clear: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UPGRADE FEDORA TO FEDORA 10. This was the worst installation procedure I've ever dealt with in my 12 years of running Linux. I expected stuff to install and work but instead I got nothing but trouble.
First, the installer doesn't tell you how to activate text mode. And the graphical mode doesn't work on my server, which is hooked up to a TV instead of a monitor. This is because the free nVidia driver is crap and I am stuck with the proprietary driver (the lesser of two evils). Since I couldn't get the installer to work I decided to try using the package updater, yum, to do the upgrade. This failed miserably: yum complained that the new packages conflicted with the old. I tried removing the old packages but yum, in its infinite wisdom, decided that since I wanted to get rid of package X, it would get rid of Y, and since I was getting rid of Y, it would get rid of ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWZ. I didn't look at the list closely enough and in the end yum got rid of itself. Yup, yum uninstalled itself, and that left me with no package management tool at all.
This meant I had to get the installer working or else there'd be no way to repair my system. It turns out that the fedora text mode is easily activated by editing the command line for the kernel and adding the word 'text'. Simple, right? Of course, they couldn't include a menu option nor could they document this like they used to on previous versions. Sigh. Well, at least I was onto something and I could get the installer working.
The installer, however, didn't do a very good job upgrading my system. After it was done running I was left with a pile of old Fedora 8 packages (and one Fedora 9 package? weird). I had expected these to be upgraded, but they weren't. Well, no problem... except that these packages conflicted with the 1.3 GB of updates I was trying to download. (I got the network card working, btw... that's another story but mainly nothing went wrong.). So I had to remove all the fc8 packages and some other things and then the update finally worked. Oh, and then I had to go and manually fix the SELinux contexts because for some reason some things weren't right. Sure, Fedora 10 has improvements in SELinux contexts, but I guess they don't test the upgrade path well, because it'd seem to me that a filesystem wtih default labels should be relabelled accordingly so that you can, for example, use SSH properly. Just saying.
Anyway, one of the other problems I had was that, for some reason, my kernel wasn't updated properly. The updated kernel was only partly installed. I tried uninstalling it and re-updating, but then when I rebooted my screen just said 'GRUB'. Grub is the "Grand Unified Boot Loader", which means it's the program that starts the computer. Unfortunately Grub was never meant to be installed by humans, and it seems even the computer gets it wrong; I had to try a bunch of things to get the darned thing working and it took several tries. Luckily I am a programmer and an experienced Linux user, and also luckily the Fedora 10 installer is also a rescue CD. Otherwise my server would have been dead. Finally I got things "working", though because I had to remove so much stuff before my server is really only half working. So much for a simple upgrade.
Anyway, my conclusion is that Fedora 10's installer needs a lot of work. I've never had so much difficulty getting an OS installed. But once Fedora 10 is installed, isn't it worth the pain?
Well, I've been very annoyed with it. This is mainly KDE 4.1's fault, becasue 4.1 had lots of problems (including being so slow I could barely stand to use it). Who is to blame for KDE 4.1 being on my computer? The KDE team, for misleading people about how good 4.1 would be, or the Fedora team, for shipping "beta" software and not shipping the good ol' 3.5? Well, that's neither here nor there anymore: I just installed the update that brings KDE 4.2 to Fedora 10. And WOW! what a difference.
First off, my desktop icons are back. Some people don't like desktop icons, but when I've been using files on my desktop for 19 years, I get a little cranky when you take them away. The KDE devs listened and brought this feature back to KDE in a non-sucky way. Also, I was able to find the option for disabling one-click activation. It's not where you'd expect; instead of being in the file manager settings, where it should be, it's in the mouse settings. So maybe this option was in 4.1? but anyway it's here and my #3 annoyance with KDE 4.1 is gone. So now my computer is fast again, my icons are back, and my clicks do what I want. If only there weren't any new bugs... but I've already found my notebook doesn't suspend properly when I close the lid. Sigh. At least that's minor and can be easily worked around.
So, to the KDE team, I say good work on 4.2; it's about time. To the Fedora team, what's with the installer? Yeesh. Messed up upgrades, broken kernel updates, screwed up SELinux contexts.... normal people would not be able to get this working. Hope Fedora 11 is better....
Red Rocket Science
How hard is it to understand things?
I ask this because lots of people don't understand things. For example, quantum physics is hard to understand. Things can be true and false in quantum physics, and until you look at them you don't know which it will be. But before you look it is BOTH true AND false. Weird.
Today I had a run in with a Red Rocket Scientist. He was doing a quantum physics experiment on a streetcar. He was trying to be both in and out of the streetcar at the same time. Because the temperature outside was near absolute zero, the streetcar was very crowded. But this guy felt there was still room for him on the streetcar anyway. So he was standing on the step.
The driver yelled back to tell people to get off the steps or the doors won't close, and if the doors don't close the streetcar doesn't move. This guy just stood there. People started telling him he had to get off the step. Still standing there. Even the guy driving the truck, who was not even on the streetcar, but was stopped behind the open doors, was yelling at this guy to move. Nope, still standing there. I think we wasted two traffic lights before this guy finally was able to lift himself off the steps and let the doors close.
His problem, I guess, is a poor understanding of regular physics. If someone is standing somewhere, you can not also stand there. Humans take up space (some take up a lot), and there were a lot of humans* already on the streetcar. His other problem was having a total disregard for a packed streetcar full of people and all the traffic on King Street. Anyone who wasn't a completely inconsiderate jerk would have taken the next streetcar. When I got to my destination (about 3 stops after this guy's) there was another streetcar right behind mine. This jerk's cluelessness wasted many people's time but only saved him about 45 seconds.
---
* Some of the people on the streetcar may not have been human. But aliens take up space too.
I ask this because lots of people don't understand things. For example, quantum physics is hard to understand. Things can be true and false in quantum physics, and until you look at them you don't know which it will be. But before you look it is BOTH true AND false. Weird.
Today I had a run in with a Red Rocket Scientist. He was doing a quantum physics experiment on a streetcar. He was trying to be both in and out of the streetcar at the same time. Because the temperature outside was near absolute zero, the streetcar was very crowded. But this guy felt there was still room for him on the streetcar anyway. So he was standing on the step.
The driver yelled back to tell people to get off the steps or the doors won't close, and if the doors don't close the streetcar doesn't move. This guy just stood there. People started telling him he had to get off the step. Still standing there. Even the guy driving the truck, who was not even on the streetcar, but was stopped behind the open doors, was yelling at this guy to move. Nope, still standing there. I think we wasted two traffic lights before this guy finally was able to lift himself off the steps and let the doors close.
His problem, I guess, is a poor understanding of regular physics. If someone is standing somewhere, you can not also stand there. Humans take up space (some take up a lot), and there were a lot of humans* already on the streetcar. His other problem was having a total disregard for a packed streetcar full of people and all the traffic on King Street. Anyone who wasn't a completely inconsiderate jerk would have taken the next streetcar. When I got to my destination (about 3 stops after this guy's) there was another streetcar right behind mine. This jerk's cluelessness wasted many people's time but only saved him about 45 seconds.
---
* Some of the people on the streetcar may not have been human. But aliens take up space too.
Build-a-bear cake pan
I bought a Build-a-bear cake pan from Williams-Sonoma for Christmas. This was meant as a Christmas present for my wife, however because I do the baking it's really the CAKES that are the present, and thus we tried making one of these cakes over the weekend to give it a trial run before Christmas.
Things didn't start off well because the cake pan was defective. The pan's finish wasn't properly applied and had a big crack, and part of it was flaking off. I recommend that anyone planning to buy one of these carefully examine it in the store. The boxes can be opened without destroying them so the store staff shouldn't mind.
After exchanging the pan, I followed the recipe on the back of the box. The box comes with a recipe for a bundt cake that is quite easy to make. The cake tasted great, although you can use any recipe you want, as long as the cake is dense enough to stand up on its own. My only complaint is that the recipe is printed on the box, when it should be a paper insert instead. Now I have to transcribe it. I've noticed this defect with every Williams-Sonoma cake pan. I guess it saves on packaging, but please, these pans aren't cheap. At least give us a sheet of paper!
Assembling the 3-D bear isn't hard at all. After the cake has finished baking, you cool it for a few minutes in the pan, remove it from the pan, cool it some more, then put it back in the pan. This process takes a few hours in total. When the cake is fully cooled, you put it back in the pan so that you can cut off the extra that rises above the pan. Then you spread icing on half, and put the other half on top, then pop it into the fridge so that the icing can set. We had a slight problem: the cake didn't come cleanly out of the pan the second time, so one half of the bear was decapitated. Luckily we were able to repair it with some icing and skewers; in the end the damage wasn't noticeable.
Decorating the finished cake is the hard part. I had a lot of difficulty applying the glaze and the brown sugar which simulates the fur. The Williams-Sonoma website has a how-to video which shows a woman applying the "fur". I notice that her cake doesn't look as good as the one on the box (though it is far better looking than mine). In the end the fur was so difficult that I think my next cake will just use a glaze or icing fur. My "furry" bear appears to have some kind of odd patchy disease. Maybe next time I'll try to make some fondant to clothe the bear; at least then you don't need to put as much fur on.
Despite the bear's poor appearance, it was a lot of fun to make and delicious to eat. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll have perfected my technique.
Edit:
The man from Williams-Sonoma eventually did mail me the Santa Template. Stay tuned; next Christmas I'll try it out. Also, I eventually did make a new bear. It turned out better.
After exchanging the pan, I followed the recipe on the back of the box. The box comes with a recipe for a bundt cake that is quite easy to make. The cake tasted great, although you can use any recipe you want, as long as the cake is dense enough to stand up on its own. My only complaint is that the recipe is printed on the box, when it should be a paper insert instead. Now I have to transcribe it. I've noticed this defect with every Williams-Sonoma cake pan. I guess it saves on packaging, but please, these pans aren't cheap. At least give us a sheet of paper!
Assembling the 3-D bear isn't hard at all. After the cake has finished baking, you cool it for a few minutes in the pan, remove it from the pan, cool it some more, then put it back in the pan. This process takes a few hours in total. When the cake is fully cooled, you put it back in the pan so that you can cut off the extra that rises above the pan. Then you spread icing on half, and put the other half on top, then pop it into the fridge so that the icing can set. We had a slight problem: the cake didn't come cleanly out of the pan the second time, so one half of the bear was decapitated. Luckily we were able to repair it with some icing and skewers; in the end the damage wasn't noticeable.
Decorating the finished cake is the hard part. I had a lot of difficulty applying the glaze and the brown sugar which simulates the fur. The Williams-Sonoma website has a how-to video which shows a woman applying the "fur". I notice that her cake doesn't look as good as the one on the box (though it is far better looking than mine). In the end the fur was so difficult that I think my next cake will just use a glaze or icing fur. My "furry" bear appears to have some kind of odd patchy disease. Maybe next time I'll try to make some fondant to clothe the bear; at least then you don't need to put as much fur on.
Despite the bear's poor appearance, it was a lot of fun to make and delicious to eat. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll have perfected my technique.
Edit:
The man from Williams-Sonoma eventually did mail me the Santa Template. Stay tuned; next Christmas I'll try it out. Also, I eventually did make a new bear. It turned out better.
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