Bacon

Courtesy of xkcd, the Internet's other favorite thing.

Nowadays, whenever people are bored on the Internet, they entertain themselves with Stumbleupon, an application that bounces users to a random website based on a predetermined set of user interests. I’m not sure if pornography is available as one of the interests, but if it were I could see that leading to a lot of hilarious situations at work or during a lecture.

“Woah, sorry professor! I was just kind of getting tired of taking notes, so I hit the ‘Stumble’ button, and I guess I forgot that I listed ‘boner jams’ as one of the topics I was interested in. Before you judge me, take a look at this picture and tell me if it doesn’t make you just a little interested in boner jams too.”

I myself am a fan of Digg, a somewhat older version of the same idea, wherein other Internet users vote on things they find interesting, which are then listed based on their popularity. After a year or more of actively using Digg, I’ve found that while the people of the Internet can’t agree on President Obama’s birthplace or whether Halo sucks or not, there are three things which they all vote for on Digg:

1) xkcd comics
2) Pictures of cute animals
3) Anything - anything - to do with bacon.

Yes, that’s right – bacon, apparently, is the solution to all the world’s problems, something that we all can unite behind in total harmony. Hardly a week goes by that an article doesn’t appear on Digg that somehow relates to bacon – be it a trendy new restaurant that serves bacon on everything, a new recipe involving egregious amounts of bacon, or a medical study which suggests that bacon might not be the single least healthy animal product that isn’t produced in the colon.

So it should come as no surprise that I, as both an Internet user and a human being, am a huge bacon fan. Mike loves the Portland Trailblazers; I just love bacon. If I owned a pro sports franchise, I would change the mascot to bacon.

“Well, the Nets crushed the Reno Bacon today. I tell you, they’ve got absolutely no defense, but just talking about them makes me hungry.”

The Ex Girlfriend, an ardent vegan, didn’t understand this mythical substance that my friends and parents and I would rave about. To her, it was like we were raving about Frankinsense. “I don’t get it,” she used to say. “What’s so great about bacon? What’s it like?”

It was like trying to describe what’s so great about green. I mean, bacon is more or less happiness in oblong, crispy form. Sometimes, it even tastes like maple syrup. How are you supposed to quantify that in words? You can’t even describe it with pictures, although it doesn’t hurt to try:

Wut.

When I embark on my little cooking adventures, I usually don’t prepare a lot of meat – not out of any health concern, but more out of the fact that I don’t have a lot of practice cooking meat. If I undercook some vegetables due to my own inexperience, they’re just a bit crunchier than I’d like – if I undercook some meat, I have a potentially much more serious problem on my hands. I mean, raw chicken, for God’s sake. To hear my parents tell it, you’d be safer trying to fry up a nuclear missile.

Part of bacon’s allure, though, is the ease with which you can cook it, which is why I’ve found it to be a great jumping off point in my experiments with meat preparation. Bacon is so thin that you don’t have to worry about not cooking it all the way through, and it’s completely socially acceptable to burn it a little bit and still serve it. If you burn a steak, it’s burned. If you burn bacon, it’s crispy. Some people like it that way.

I’ve come to enjoy just the very act of preparing bacon – standing vigil over a pan full of crackling meat and fat, flipping it, deciding what foods in the house I should eat with my bacon (the answer, of course, is all of them). Knowing that I have the power to create my own bacon is a really liberating feeling. It’s the one kind of natural, non ready-to-eat food that you know will taste good so long as you apply heat to it for some amount of time. You don’t need to season it or add anything to it. You just throw it in a pan and let the magic happen.

I’ve eaten most of the food in the house save for my four remaining strips of bacon, and I was going to go downstairs and fry them up when I realized I had yet to write today’s blog. Hopefully that explains why you read what you just read.

The doctor told Truman Capps that he has very low blood pressure, so the idea is to do everything in his power to change that before his next appointment.