Want to get your mind off the economy?

At this point, I'd really like to put myself into suspended animation until, when, until whenever.

Not that I haven't lived through crummy economies before. When I got out of business school in 1981, the unemployment rate in Massachusetts, as I recall, was around 10%.

But this seems so much worse....

Maybe it's because the US economy, for a variety of reasons - credit binge, wacko mortgages, savings-smavings attitude, citizen-as-consumer, globalization, derivatives, greed on Wall Street, greed on Main Street, rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, middle getting squeezed, all sorts of sins of the past catching up to us - is not quite as fundamentally sound as it was back in the day.

Maybe it's because fewer people have those molly-coddling pensions anymore but are, instead, on our own with roller-coaster 401 Ks. (I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not planning on taking a look anytime soon. And if anything gives pause to the "drive" to privatize Social Security, the current crisis should be it.)

Maybe it's because the world is just a boat-load more dangerous than it was then, thanks to Al Qaeda et al.

Maybe  it's because we are bombarded 24/7 with grim news - market down, lay-offs up, while in the old days, we got the economic news for 5 minutes on the nightly, and the next day in the papers. Now, the immediacy of all the info - the man and the woman in the street asking every five minutes what the market's doing - can make us all crazy.

Now that I've done exactly what I thought I wasn't going to do, i.e., keep folks thinking about the economy, let me deliver the antidote.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cake Wrecks, a site devoted to some pretty dubious looking cakes.

I wish Cake Wrecks had been around a couple of years ago, when we got a professionally-made 3-D, Tweety-bird cake for my niece Caroline.

The cake started out okay, but by the time it was transported 100 miles from Brookline to Wellfleet in the heat, well, Tweety had suffered a pretty systemic collapse.

Personally, I've never attempted to make a fancy cake. The most I've done is put green-dyed coconuts and a bunch of jelly beans around the edges of a carrot cake so that it looked Easter-ish.

So for the amateurs who've made some of these cakes, well, I'm willing to cut them plenty of slack. But many of the cakes on Cake Wrecks are professionally done - and just out and out weird.

Anyway, spend a few minutes on Cake Wrecks  - courtesy of a lead from my sister Kathleen (I think).

It will definitely take your mind off the economy.