How To Make Clown Hats

A big hit season for Simpsons trivia gathering

Oh, you know your Simpsons , do you?

Who are Steve Bennett and Lois Sanborn, then? Can you name all five Sideshows who've appeared alongside Krusty the Clown over the years, maybe even the sixth found within the outtakes reel on the Season 7 DVD set? What are the three ingredients in the breakfast Homer “improvises” for himself while Marge is parked at the Burns Casino in the throes of a gambling addiction? And while we're on the subject, what's the name Homer gives to Marge's affliction?

Or try this one, a recent baffler from the devious minds behind Toronto's ragingly popular WooHoo! Classic Simpsons Trivia night: A sign outside the Steppin' Out Fashion Mart encourages you to “come browse through” this. What is it?

Nothing. I've got nothing. And that clearly pleases Amanda Factor.

“ ‘Come browse through our bra barrel!' ” she laughs. “I love that. I had to write a question about it.”

“Even I was stumped by this one,” concedes Andrew Ennals, the other half of the WooHoo! team. Ennals and Factor have done a pretty fair job through 630 questions to date of regularly stumping a roomful of Simpsons diehards when each monthly installments of their pub quiz rolls around.

Yes, a trip to the Gladstone for an evening of communal Simpsons geekdom can be as frustrating as it is oddly life-affirming. I went into WooHoo!'s first go-'round at the Ossington a year ago with a team of obsessives that, we thought, couldn't lose and left feeling deeply shamed by our middling collective performance. Factor and Ennals don't mess around.

“It might have thrown a few people off guard,” says Factor of that first night. “Maybe they weren't expecting it to be as in depth and as difficult as it was, but now I think they really appreciate the challenge. They really want to test their mettle.”

“Asking who the Simpsons' neighbour is isn't funny,” adds Ennals. “Our goal with how we write the questions is always to make sure that, even if you don't know the answer, you'll still enjoy it. Either the question will be funny itself, or more often the answer will make you laugh if you didn't know what it was.

“We're doing this as entertainment, in the same way that the show entertains us.”

WooHoo! is, at heart, not so much a competition as it is, as Factor puts it, “a celebration of our love of the show.” True, at the end of the night, victorious teams walk away with bragging rights and their very own carton of Lard Lad doughnuts, but the night's success mostly has to do with the crowd's shared delight in — to borrow another phrase from the show's lexicon — remembering TV.

Clown Hat Cupcake Toppers « TDD Blog

So, you’re putting together a clown or circus theme party for your child’s birthday this year? That’s going to be a whole lot of fun. Hang red and white striped banners, serve popcorn in striped boxes, and set up some fun games in the backyard. Now, on to the dessert. Cupcakes are the ideal choice for a child’s birthday party as well as for a parent who prefers easy cleanup. It’s not hard to create cupcakes with a clown or circus theme – just use colorful frosting and candy sprinkles – and top them off with a clown hat. What better way to create clown cupcakes?

You can make the cutest little clown hats for the cupcakes by using white paper funnels, made for adding fluid to automobiles. Purchase the funnels at an automotive store; they’re very cheap.

Measure down from the point to about two or three inches and cut the top off of the paper funnel. After all the tiny hats are cut you can then decide how you want to decorate them. All the hats can be the same or each can be different. Draw on them or color them with markers, stripe them with pieces of red tape, or otherwise give the hats the designs you want.

After the hats are colored you can then embellish them in different ways. Draw on polka dots or even glue small-diameter roping around the bottoms of the hats. When the hats look just like you want them to simply glue a tiny pom-pom or even a bead on top.

Regular toothpicks aren’t long enough to hold the clown hats on the cupcakes so cut pieces of wooden skewers instead. Cut them to be the length of the hat plus an inch and a half or so. Place a dot of glue on one end of the skewer and push it up through the hat, then stick it to the bottom of the pom-pom. Set the other end in the top, center of the cupcake.

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