Let them eat (Brontë Parsonage) cake

Something truly worth a visit to if you are nearby. From the Guardian's Northerner Blog:

The Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative may be accused of tempting fate by timing the opening week-end of their EAT! food festival to coincide with St Swithun's Day. This year the festival, which runs from Friday 13 to Sunday 29 July, fortunately includes many events that will take place indoors, as well as open-air picnics, food markets, fishing expeditions on the North Sea and at Derwent reservoir, a secret Victorian walled garden rarely open to the public, food & drink themed walking tours of the city and a street food festival.
One of the highlights of the festival has been affected by the weather, but the organisers are bullish that the giant cake being made for Cakebook Britain - the People's Picnic this Sunday will be just as successful in the dry of Gateshead stadium as it would have been in the soggier conditions of Saltwell Park. Simon Preston, director of EAT!, commented:

no one likes soggy cake. Gateshead International Stadium is the perfect wet-weather alternative and it also has excellent public transport links including its own metro stop. We must say a huge thank you to Gateshead Council for helping secure a new venue at such short notice. A little bit of rain isn't going to stop us making our edible map of Great Britain.

Members of the public and professional cake-makers have been invited to make cakes in the shape of "landmark heritage" buildings or sites anywhere in Britain. Over 60 teams of people have been busy making their cakes in a huge variety of shapes. The country has been split into 10 regions, with each region being made up of around 10 cakes (although there are, of course, far more from the North East). Familiar sights unexpectedly covered in icing sugar include Buckingham and Holyrood palaces, the White Cliffs of Dover, Snowdon railway line, Land's End, Stonehenge, the Brontë Parsonage, Catbells and Derwent Water in the Lake District, the Deep in Hull and Harlech Castle. Local attractions rendered edible include the Baltic, the Angel, Washington Old Hall, Penshaw Monument and Bede's World. A huge amount of effort is going into the making – the Bronte Parsonage cake, for example, needs 13 layers of sponge cake for the building blocks and has 11 sash windows made from boiled sweets. (Alan Sykes)

Global Times (China) announces a new ballet production of Jane Eyre by the Shanghai Ballet:

The Shanghai Ballet (SHB) will stage a modern adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre," the Shanghai Grand Theater Art Center announced Thursday.
The production, scheduled for November 18 and 19 during this year's Shanghai International Arts Festival, will feature choreography by Patrick de Bana from Germany and costumes and set design by notable French designer Jerome Kaplan, according to Xin Lili, SHB's artistic director.
"The ballet will focus on the love triangle between Rochester, Jane Eyre and Bertha, with a lot of conflict and tension," said Yu Rongjun, who wrote the script for the production.
Yu previously adapted the novel for a stage play produced by the Beijing-based National Center for the Performing Arts.
Yu revealed that the story will be transposed from 19th-century England to Shanghai in the 1940s and 1950s.
Xin said de Bana is currently working on selecting the music, with several pieces by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler in the running. (...)
"It's a bold move for us to do what has never been done in Western ballet, and we hope to see some innovation in this modern ballet," said Zhang Zhe, director of the Shanghai Grand Theater.
Overseas tours are being planned after the ballet's domestic run is over, Zhang added.

And now back to more conventional approaches to the Brontës. Several French news outlets review Jane Eyre 2011, which opens in France this month, for instance Au Féminin or Une Demoiselle à Paris, which includes a video clip.

IBN Live highlights some films from the recently deceased Indian actor and wrestler (1928-2012) Dara Singh. Among them is

Sangdil (1952): Dara Singh made his Bollywood with this film. Directed by RC Talwar, the film was based on Charlotte Brontë classic ‘Jane Eyre’.

We are no experts in Bollywood cinema but we don't remember having seen Dara Singh on Sangdil 1952. And as he was in fact in a Sangdil (no Jane Eyre related) production in 1967, we rather think that imdb and the wikipedia (from where it seems most of the press release is taken) have mixed their data. EDIT: The Times insists on Dara Singh's presence in Sangdil 1952:

During a wrestling tour in India, he was spotted by a film producer while in a ring in Calcutta and persuaded to make his first film, Sangdil, a loose adaptation of Jane Eyre, in 1952.

The Sunshine Coast Daily, discussing Fifty Shades of Grey, explains fan fiction in very simplistic terms:

The whole thing started as something called fan fiction or fandom. EL James wrote the story as a sexy version of the Twilight series and published it online.
Apparently this is common. Name a fictional character from Jane Eyre to Dr Spock and somewhere online you will find a story about them involving kinky sex. How about that? (Caroline Hutchinson)

The Rochester Business & Journal publishes tghe results of a recent poll:

Writers & Books Inc. has released the poll results for its “Top 20 Literary Characters” of all time.
Writers & Books said nearly 200 Rochester-area residents took part in the poll, submitting their five favorite characters via email and Twitter. (...)
6. Jane Eyre  (Troy L. Smith)

The Faster Times talks about the TV series Hit and Miss:

Hit and Miss has the craziest premise, and even more crazy details (Levi’s pantsing thing? Riley’s affair with the landlord? Karaoke bars???), yet everything is so calmly addressed that you just go with it. The direction is awesome, and the at-times distant camera complements the bleak Yorkshire atmosphere very well (I keep expecting the kids from Andrea Arnold’s version of “Wuthering Heights” to roll on in any minute). (Allison Surette McCarthy)

NorthJersey features a school reading list that includes Wuthering Heights while Fox has a news clip on the new, more appealing covers for the classics. The Brontë Weather Project posts about a Thornton Primary School Workshop. Beccas302 writes about Classical Comics' adaptation of Jane Eyre and Le fanas de livres writes in French about Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre; בספר ובמבחנה posts about Shirley;  Romance of Pages (in Romanian) reviews Jane Eyre; The Mystery Gazette posts about Joanna Campbell Sloan's Death of a Schoolgirl; J'écris, tu lis (in French) writes two pieces inspired by Wuthering Heights.

And via TheOneRing, we have notice this piece of Tolkien meets Brontë trivia on Elendilion. Checking some close-ups of a couple of weapon replicas from The Hobbit upcoming movie:

These close-ups are very interesting for our research. The first picture (click the photo below) shows the runic inscriptions on two Dwalin’s axes. In Angerthas Moria this inscriptions are as follows:

UMRAZ

UKhLAT

As our Special Spy reports (attention! it’s an exclusive G-i-P information!) these inscriptions are in (David Salo’s) Neo-Khuzdûl and probably mean: Grasper and Keeper (it’s a linguistic and literary pun because two Brontë Sisters’s dogs had the same names)