Who needs love when there's Law & Order?

Law & Order is my TV vice.
Yesterday I realized that it is also my brand of soap opera.
"Law & Order? A soap opera?" You ask incredulously.

I know, it seems like L&O doesn't have much in common with ubiquitous daytime TV fare such as The Bold & The Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, or All My Children. Yes, the structures and formulae are different. Soap operas are serialized - each episode picks up where the last left off. L&O is episodic - each episode is a self-contained story. (L&O does have serial strands from time to time, such as the storyline around Olivia's mother in SVU, but is by and large episodic.)

The most obvious difference, of course, seems to be one of genre. Soap operas deal in complicated romances and family secrets. Law & Order is a hybrid of crime and courtroom dramas. Both, however, are melodramas. In her essay "Melodrama Revisted," Linda Williams argues that melodrama is not a proper genre, but a trans-generic mode. The melodramatic mode, whether as it is manifest in a 1940s' Douglas Sirk pic or in Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, is largely about morality and righteous suffering. Law & Order has both of those themes in common with soap operas.

The settings of Law & Order and soap operas are also vastly different. Soap operas are set in the domestic sphere; L&O is set in the public sphere - whether the urban space of the streets of NYC or government buildings such as the police station and the courtroom. But in both instances the setting is very important. The details of the mise en scene form a shorthand for viewers. These shorthands work across series (in the case of the soap opera) and spinoffs (in the case of L&O). Props, and costumes give us familiar character types - the oily boyfriend and the scheming mother, the edgy cop and the virtuous ADA.

Formal and structural techniques are very similar between soap operas and Law & Order. Intense dialogue-driven scenes are shot with shot-reverse shot close-ups of expressive faces. Dramatic music comes in at crucial moments in both, driving up the tension.

Finally, the way the two are shown on TV are pretty similar: they're both always on.

To close, I leave you with this video of Amanda Palmer's "Leeds United," the source of this post's title:

Festive Cupcakes

I've always loved cupcakes, so I'm happy that they're so hip now. It means cupcake bakeries cropping up all over. Before today I hadn't made cupcakes in ages, so I was mostly on the eating end of the craze. But today I baked cupcakes. This is not going to be a cupcake or cooking blog (I recommend Cupcakes Take the Cake for that), but this post is going to be a play-by-play of my epicurean endeavor.

For the cake, I used this recipe for Love Potion Cupcakes. I used margarine instead of butter, and didn't add the chocolate chunks. Here's the batter:


The recipe said to put a frozen raspberry into each cupcake after pouring the batter into each cup. I tried a couple of other techniques as well - pouring the batter over the raspberry (Fig. 1), and pouring batter in, then placing the raspberry, and covering it up (Fig. 2):
Fig. 1 Fig. 2

End of phase one:


...and clean up for phase two!


I watched Law & Order while the cupcakes baked and cooled:


I wanted to decorate them to look like fireworks. I think they look kind of like Spider-man webs, but whatever. They're red, white, and blue, so that must count for something. This sequence shows the process:


This one looks more like fireworks:


Here's how they all came out!


Eating the cupcake:


They were good! I'm rather proud of how they came out. The texture of the cake is more turgid than I'm used to. The raspberry inside is a nice touch. I don't know if it will be as good when it's not still warm. Should be fine. The frosting is where the cupcake loses points. I didn't trust myself to make my own frosting; I worried I wouldn't be able to get a good consistency. But next time I'll have to give it a go.

That wraps it up!

(Yes, I ate two. :-P )