Dire Warnings.

You know when you hear someone say something and you immediately know that everything is going to go terribly wrong?

So, I have this friend. And unlike most sentences which begin "I have this friend", they aren't pregnant, and this isn't a veiled way of me asking advice. No, seriously, I'm not pregnant. At all. No matter what you might hear. No name is given here, to protect the anonymity of the living and the dignity of the dead.

Anyway, my friend is a very nice person who I'd happily trust with a highly valuable camel, but has one terrible flaw. As terrible flaws go, it's not overly dramatic. They're not addicted to gambling, they've never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and I'm fairly sure they haven't got a heroin habit (by which I mean injecting nasty substances rather than wearing a cape and preventing supercrime. That wouldn't be a flaw, that'd just be awesome.) The flaw they do have is cooking.

Now, lots of people are just bad cooks. They cook food that tastes disgusting, or that is badly burnt, or, in extreme cases, makes restaurant critics spontaneously combust upon just smelling it. My friend, however, is not just a bad cook. They're a destructive and unpredictable cook. The food is good, when it survives unharmed, but the preparation process... Cooks cheese on toast? Kitchen accidentally set on fire, if only temporarily. There are some who say that they once managed to make a whole chicken just disappear from an oven after accidentally invoking black magic instead of preparing a marinade. I read the webcomic Questionable Content, (which is really very good, despite what I'm about to say) and back right at the very beginning, one of the characters managed to burn down their house while making toast. I used to assume it was just a badly done plot device by an inexperienced writer to get the character in question to move in with the lead.

Then I met my friend, and suddenly I'm not so sure.

But, moving on, the event which I mentioned earlier, which is so utterly terrifying?

My friend plans to cook bear shaped biscuits.

Biscuits. Shaped like bears.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. My friend is the sort of person who lives in an increasingly whacky fifties sitcom. My friend is the only person I know who could possibly end up accidentally in a gay pride march. My friend is going to make biscuits shaped like bears.

At some point or other, they will gain a soul, accidentally, in the cooking process. Tiny bearlike biscuits, beating their fists with rage on the oven door to be let out. Biscuits that bite back, launching themselves on their attackers and savaging them in a generally ursine way. Tiny biscuits with all the pent up rage and malevolent evil that lurks in a bear's black heart. With the possible exception of Paddington.

It's going to be like a heavy metal album cover telling the story of the gingerbread man. So be prepared, internet. Be prepared for a day of bears.