Likelihood of Success

I read this laugh-out-loud (not “LOL,” which, for me at least, almost never involves actual laughter) article in the New York Times about cake-decorating disasters, mostly proving that you can never underestimate some people’s poor taste nor estimate the level of literacy required to work in a bakery.

Much of the joy in following Cake Wrecks comes from Ms. Yates’s wry assessment of every plopped-out flower and bug-eyed snowman. She is particularly savage about punctuation mishaps, like when a baker omitted an exclamation point after the inscription, “Way To Go Bob.” Ms. Yates wrote, “Just try to read this cake without sounding sarcastic. Yeah. Exactly.” Beneath a Father’s Day cake that starkly announced “1 Dad,” the caption read, “Of all the Dads out there, you are one of them.” . . .

“The person had probably called up and said, ‘Can you put Olympic rings on my cake?’ ” Ms. Mattson explained. Instead, the edible red letters read as follows, parenthesis and quotation marks included: (“Olympics Rings”)

I say this as a former cake decorator myself, with several years of high school Carvel ice cream cake artistry very literally under my belt. Thing is, I did finish high school.