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Takes the cake The lowdown -- Consider it a perfect storm of the city's avant-garde scene. This weekend, Load of Fun Gallery plays host to MakeBakeFakeCake. The event is a combination art exhibit and live performance showcase featuring Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey, Greggy Glitterati and the Milkmaids and members of the Wham City collective. Each piece in the exhibition must have some part that is edible. If you go -- The performances, live auction and awards start at 8 p.m. today.

WHOLEFOODSMARKET.COM/SECRETINGREDIENT "Secret Ingredient" is a weekly video podcast from Whole Foods that provides step-by-step recipes featuring a particular ingredient. Users can learn culinary techniques and tips, and the video podcasts are also available on iTunes.

?You should only get married once in your life, and there are so many beautiful dresses. It?s a problem.? Filipa Goarmon, a customer at bridal dress sale and fundraiser at the Woman?s Industrial Exchange Article, PG 1B Up Next Wednesday Back to Basics for Passover Despite matzo's burgeoning variety, there is a growing demand for genuine Passover bread, baked in haste as it was so long ago. in TASTE Thursday A different hip-hop mash-up Rap veteran Guru returns with the fourth installment of his critically acclaimed Jazzmatazz series, which melds jazz and R&B sentiments with New York hip-hop.

Good morning -- Camden Yards fans -- Be warned: That video board could end up looking like the end of The Sopranos.

Judson Laipply thinks the universality of dance - its lack of language barriers, its appeal to all ages - is what's made it so popular on the Internet. And he should know. His Evolution of Dance routine is the most popular video ever on YouTube, with 67 million views. His mildly amusing tour de farce of various dance styles dating to Elvis wasn't especially novel or extraordinary. But he posted it at an opportune moment, just as YouTube began to soar. The attention it gained cemented his status as a motivational speaker, pushing him beyond the sphere of, say, the Greg Kinnear character in Little Miss Sunshine.

Rudolph W. Giuliani is running for president, it would seem, and watching his interviews reminds you that it is quite a leap from City Hall to the White House, and that the lecture circuit is not the best preparation for higher office. Out there, Mr. Giuliani is saying the same applause lines night after night, but in a TV studio, even with the friendly folks at Fox, the lines sound over-practiced. He purses his lips, furrows his brow, juts his chin, gives his teeth-baring grin, but there isn't much evidence of thoughtfulness, which is what people are keen to hear these days, not just that a man can hit his marks.

This column reflects on what some would consider "old" news - the shootings at Virginia Tech - and I offer this observation: Reporters, editors and readers needed breathing room after this horrific event to achieve some kind of perspective on what happened there. The coverage of the worst mass shooting in American history has raised interesting questions about the direction and velocity of modern American journalism. Some readers and television viewers felt assaulted by the in-your-face presentation of the bad news - very large headlines and photos, including menacing close-ups of the shooter brandishing handguns.

People endlessly complain that Hollywood is full of dopey, superficial films bereft of anything new to say. And they're right. Anyone looking for art that is edgy or relevant - and inspires comment - is turning to Internet video, which has become the true engine driving our pop culture. Nothing demonstrates this better than the viral success of Alanis Morissette's "My Humps," which surfaced a few weeks ago on YouTube and quickly became the most popular video on the channel, attracting 5.5 million views, easily outdistancing such rivals as "Otters Holding Hands."

BAGHDAD -- A Sunni Arab insurgent group released a video yesterday that showed the military identification cards of two missing American soldiers abducted in an ambush south of Baghdad last month, and the group claimed that the two had been killed along with one other soldier. The video - from the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella insurgent group that includes al-Qaida in Mesopotamia - did not provide proof of whether the two missing soldiers were alive or dead. But an American military official with the missing soldiers' unit said the identification cards appeared to be authentic, suggesting that the group was involved in the attack.

Have you been overindulging this holiday season? It's not yet New Year's but maybe it's time to start thinking about working off the gravy and pumpkin pie. There are plenty of new DVDs that can step, dance and bend you into shape. Here are some aerobics, yoga and pilates videos we found: 1. Bollywood Burn with Hemalayaa Price: $14.99 Where to get it: acaciacatalog.com or pre-order on Amazon.com. Jan. 1, it will be available at Barnes & Noble in the Inner Harbor and elsewhere. 410-385-1709 Why we like it: This is your chance to bring out your inner Bollywood star.

The United States' first and only United Nations Citizen Ambassador lives in an apartment above her father's garage in Catonsville with a couple of Persian cats, a few sticks of furniture, cameras and several computers. She doesn't have a car, so there's no way to know if the customary diplomatic parking privileges will apply, nor do lavish cocktail parties appear to be in the offing. Still, Emily Troutman cannot help seeing her new status as an opportunity to take her international pursuits to another level, and that is apparently reward enough.

It was a confrontation between a Baltimore cop and a 14-year-old boy that millions watched on YouTube. Somebody should tell the lawyers to watch as well, because their attempts to spin this story to fit their clients' self-serving agenda of what happened back in the summer of 2007 don't quite match what's on the video. In Officer Salvatore Rivieri's version, he simply asked several teenagers to stop skateboarding at the Inner Harbor. The 14-year-old protested, held his board "in a threatening manner," pulled it to his chest and resisted.

ACORN, the embattled community organizing group with employees who were captured dispensing financial advice to a young couple posing as a pimp and prostitute, says it has filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers who secretly recorded the footage in Baltimore. In a release Wednesday evening, the national headquarters for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now announced it is seeking "an injunction against further distribution" of the video, "along with compensatory and punitive damages."

The infamous Baltimore ACORN video has become so widely viewed, and the behavior exhibited on it is so outrageous, that a criminal investigation should have been announced by someone somewhere before the first 100,000 or so YouTube hits. Too bad it took until Monday - a week and a half after the video taken at ACORN's Baltimore office was first released - for a prosecutor to step forward and do just that. Maryland Atty. Gen. Douglas F. Gansler's decision to look into the matter is welcome not only because the act of advising a pimp and prostitute, phony or not, on how to falsify income tax records merits such scrutiny, but because taping people without consent - as the filmmakers have obviously done - is a pretty clear violation of the law. Mr. Gansler has indicated that his office will investigate all of it. ACORN officials say the two employees involved were acting counter to the organization's policies (and both have since been fired)

The Maryland attorney general's office said Monday that it will investigate the local chapter of ACORN, a community organizing group that has come under fire with the release of secret recordings showing its employees advising a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Doug Gansler said the probe will "involve everything," although she declined to say whether it would include an examination of whether the recordings violated Maryland's law requiring consent from those being audiotaped.

A Baltimore judge has granted a request by The Baltimore Sun to allow a reporter to view a video recording of a juvenile court proceeding, a decision that could lead to a new policy. Circuit Judge Edward R.K. Hargadon said the state legislature has decided that juvenile delinquency hearings should be open unless there is a specific reason to close them, and he determined that the same standard should apply to viewing video recordings of such hearings. Though juvenile court records and hearing schedules in Maryland are sealed, the hearings themselves are open to the public.

The video sounds like a satire: A young man and woman, dressed as caricatures of a pimp and prostitute, walk into the Baltimore office of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and spin an outrageous story about how the woman needs help buying a house to set up as a brothel for underage Salvadoran girls - and rather than kick them to the curb, two volunteers give them advice on how to avoid paying taxes on their illicit enterprise....

Two staff members of the Baltimore office of ACORN were fired Thursday after they were captured on hidden camera appearing to give advice on evading tax laws to a man and woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute. The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him. "If they don't have Social Security numbers, you don't have to worry about them," the employee says.

The war on terror has accustomed us to the idea of constantly being watched. In airports and train stations, in schools, offices and stores and along city streets, the ubiquitous, unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras daily record our images. We're no longer unduly alarmed by the idea of police video surveillance of public spaces, or of private businesses installing security cameras to tape what's going on inside their premises. Some people feel safer knowing the authorities are watching.

As Baltimore police continued to search Wednesday for the driver of a truck that struck and killed a bicyclist this month at a downtown intersection, an attorney representing the victim's family said a surveillance video shows that the vehicle "just abruptly took a right without a turn signal," causing the collision. About 11:40 a.m. Aug. 4, John R. "Jack" Yates, 67, of Charles Village was riding south on Maryland Avenue when he got tangled in the rear wheels of the truck at West Lafayette Avenue.