Gooey Butter Cake and NY Magazine

I had a lovely Sunday morning this past weekend.  Radar and I went for a long walk, during which I walked past Park Avenue Coffee.  K and J were so kind as to get me a gift certificate to there for my birthday which I haven't used yet, and I didn't have anything on my agenda until Sunday afternoon, so I decided to try it out.

I had already made my own pot of coffee, but I packed myself up with a magazine and book and headed back to PAC for a slice of their gooey butter cake, which has gotten rave reviews all over town.  I tried the Triple Chocolate, which was every bit as sweet and tasty as I hoped.  However I'm used to gooey butter cake that's a bit deeper and more substantial.

In an effort to savor every bite of my slice, I settled in with my magazine (a Christmas stocking stuffer subscription from E) and read a few pages between tastes.  I learned some fun things I have decided to share with you:

Women's salaries as a percentage of men's (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics):
- Chief executive: 69%
- Doctor: 79%
- College professor: 81%
- Architect: 85%
- Lawyer: 87%
- IT specialist: 106%
I'm happy to see that lawyers, conservative as we are, are not at the bottom of the list.  (You can find more such info here.)

In an article about a documentary about Beyonce's life of overachievement (made by Beyonce, though she did not also write the article about the documentary she made about herself), I especially liked this bit from the intro:
"She spent the [Super Bowl] game's halftime show striding around like a Titan, clinching her status as American pop's reigning megastar; her performance inspired more tweets per minute than the half-hour blackout its energy demands were rumored to have cause.  That rumor was a metaphor - a treat for anyone who wanted to believe Beyonce's feminine fierceness was so powerful it literally short-circuited the masculine ritual around it."
Mm hmm.

And last but not least, there was a photo of the new Giorgio Armani calfskin purse, priced at $2,280.  That's ridiculous, but so is the process that goes into making it.  From the caption:
"Each tote is crafted from 120 separate pieces by seven Italian artisans in a three-day process that involves 75 stages of dyeing, welding, galvanizing, hand-stitching, and sanding.  A rivet even a fraction of an inch out of place is grounds for scrapping the whole thing and starting over."
At least you know that when you pay for perfection, you're getting it.