Not to beat a dead horse, the reason that I think the MacArthur Park metaphor is lousy is that (A) neither I nor anyone I've ever known or ever heard of has ever left a cake out in the rain, nor can I easily imagine such a thing, (B) no one who's ever baked any cakes would go into despair about losing one, (C) "I'll never have that recipe again" is completely meaningless -- there are easily millions of cake recipes, every newspaper in the world prints several every week, and none of them is worth getting hysterical about. Great metaphors, those in Homer and Virgil and a lot of other places, make you sit up and take notice because you recognize them as real, truthful, authentic, AND they evoke some other experience as well, the one for which they are a metaphor.

I agree about the teenager disaster songs, I could never stand them -- Take a message to Mary et alii. Now I'm going to deveop a rep for being a curmudgeon who only logs on to register my disagreeableness.