I use nothing but handmade soaps. My main soap is Aleppo soap (from Syria) with a backup soap that’s a goat milk soap (from Xinjiang). I occasionally splurge and get some “sugar soap” from Thailand.

Bacon is a subset of pork belly. I love pork belly. But there’s so many more ways to prepare it than curing it and optionally smoking it. Indeed my favourite way of eating it involves steaming it.

As for the marketing campaign, like the de Beers campaign, it dates back a lot farther than people think today. The beginnings of baconmania traces back to the 1920s. One of the pioneers of PR directed a campaign that included finding 5000 doctors willing to say that a “heavy” breakfast was healthy for you and that bacon and eggs were a perfect breakfast food. This was then presented in media as “scientific consensus” and thus began the age of bacon for breakfast.

That’s how things stood until the 1960s. Bacon and eggs was a standard breakfast food. Pork sales were doing well, and pork bellies were a nice piece of extra income. But then the reputation for red meat started to slide. By the '70s all red meats started to slide, and the added anti-fat movement cause pork sales to tank across the board. Various pork marketing boards started making deals with fast food restaurants to push bacon as a way to boost pork bellies at least. They partnered with restaurants to create recipes that involved bacon as a “versatile ingredients” instead of just breakfast food. Bacon on salads. Bacon on sandwiches. Bacon here, bacon there. And with this, paired with, naturally, a whole lot of money poured into marketing (costs split down the middle with the partnered restaurants) the beginnings of baconmania started.

By the mid-80s, with the establishment of the National Pork Board, baconmania truly took hold as said board pushed pork in all its forms (anybody remember “The Other White Meat”?) both as a “lean” alternative to beef and shoving bacon into anything imaginable (chocolate cookies, say) as some kind of “flavour treat”. This marketing campaign started to ramp up just in time for the arrival of public Internet and thus were the seeds planted for the bacon insanity today.

Baconmania is a cynically manipulated set of marketing campaigns that dates back a hundred years and is going strong, rivalling “A Diamond is Forever” for effectiveness and endurance.

I’ve played music for fun pretty much from my childhood and while now the nature of the fun is different, it is still fun and about as much fun as it used to be. (The secret in my case is to pick up new musical instruments along the way and rediscover the fun in new ways.)

It took me almost three years to work up the nerve to get past the smell and try it.

Now the smell is something I look for because I know something really good is right behind it.

Are you an ambi-turner?

I find that like most good cheeses, once you get past the smell (which can be horrifying, like in the case of Handkäse), durian is actually really tasty. Is it a taste you’re going to like? 🤷‍♀️ That’s pretty much a function of what you’ve been exposed to in life and how broad your palate is. But the taste you get from it is nothing like the smell you get from it. (Kind of like Handkäse that way.)

If you can get the fresh stuff (not frozen, not dried, not canned, etc.) give it a try for its purest experience. You can’t really judge it well from the other preparations because a lot of what gives it its complicated flavour is lost in processing.

If oppressors get offended by the oppressed talking shit and get “alienated” by it they were never going to be on the oppressed’s side anyway. I have no patience for people who look for reasons to be offended. There’s enough actually offensive stuff out there you don’t have to make shit up so that you can get “offended” (in ways that coincidentally benefit you in your perception).

I mean seriously, we’re right back at the start: Men are worried people will laugh at them. Women are worried people will kill them.

Fuck that first group.

I have had a crackpot theory since my 20s that the grand obesity epidemic of the Americas was caused by industrial food production, even of the supposed “fresh” foods. My mother has always been a gardener. When we lived in a nice bungalow in Edmonton she grew vegetables and flowers. When we lived in a short row house in Inuvik, she would garden in the very short summer and then take everything indoors using grow lamps and humidifiers to keep as much alive as she could. When we lived in an apartment block in Germany she’d purchased a bunch of planter boxes that hung on both sides of the railing to continue.

I lived my life with fresh, homegrown veg, in short. Until I left home and bought groceries from a grocery store.

What struck me most were the tomatoes. My mother’s tomatoes were smaller than grocery store “fresh” produce, but were a deep, blood red. The red continued to the inside where the grocery store ones were more yellow/orange on the interior. My mother’s tasted rich and flavourful. We’d cut them almost paper-thin to put on sandwiches and burgers, for example. The grocery store ones had almost no flavour at all. A bit sweet. A bit starchy. A hint of tartness. And that was it. To get even a ghost of the same impact my mother’s thinly-sliced ones had on things, I needed huge slices, 5mm or more thick. It was crazy.

And that’s when I got my crackpot theory that the techniques used to make large, even-looking, produce in huge quantities leached flavours out of things. The raw caloric content was roughly the same, but all the flavours were dilute. And since we evolved to desire required micronutrients by flavour, colour, aroma, etc. (lacking the ability to measure them in our bodies) the lost flavour, et al makes us eat more to get the same feeling of satisfaction.

And what happens when you eat more…?

(Now note: I identify this as a “crackpot theory”. As in I’m not saying it’s the truth simply because I lack the scientific evidence to support it and lack the time or energy to find said. I’m sticking with actual fresh, not factory fresh, produce and other foods because they taste better. I just think the issue might be a lot deeper than taste.)

Well, I’ve heard the names Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian…

P.S. Your post reeks of saying that the primary victims of patriarchy are responsible for coddling the feelings of the primary perpetrators of patriarchy. Not a fan of this attitude in the slightest.

Like, really? Pedro Pascal is -the only nice guy- in the world, every other guy is trash?

Hyperbole is a literary device that uses deliberate and extreme exaggeration to emphasize a point or create a dramatic effect.

Nobody is saying that he’s the only one. Nobody who has even an iota of ability to read critically would read it that way. The only way to read it that way is if you’re looking to be offended.

This is praise for whoever this guy is using a form of expression that has literally thousands of years of precedent. With a mild critique of how men are socialized in modern society on the side, using this hyperbolic depiction of this guy as the model of a good man.

I’m sorry it bothers you that people aren’t applying #NotAllMen to each and every criticism of men, but … it’s not going to happen. You’re going to have to just accept that people don’t write multi-myriad word essays to outline each and every exception and nuance of a situation in a god-damned meme macro!

No troubles. 🤣

That is not the message of this meme at all?

They’re not saying women won’t give up on this guy because of his arms. They’re saying his arms are that way because of him carrying the rest of men, in effect, so women don’t give up men entirely.

I’m not even sure how you could interpret that wording to mean “women want strong arms”.

I can boil it down to a single word: Empathy.

They smell … like … glassy-fried onions mixed with a strong French cheese to my nose. And they taste like a cream custard with a few different savoury notes I can’t really explain clearly.

I used shampoos and body washes. I had all the problems you cited. I switched to soap. They all went away. (“Body wash”, you see, is not soap. Nor is shampoo. Nor are “beauty bars” or any of the other terms the “beauty” industry foists off on us as cleansing products.

The issue, it turns out, is that most “cleansing” products are sodium or potassium (I forget which) laurel sulfate at their core (something that’s easier to make at industrial scale and to attach additives like scents and such), and that stuff is horrifically bad for skin in a wide variety of ways. All the other crap we add like “moisturizers” and “conditioners” and “rinses” and such is there to undo the damage that the cleaning product caused in the first place.

Soap (real soap) is chemically very different and doesn’t have the drying and damaging impact on skin that laurel sulfate does.

And same with the Korean girl K-pop bands, though with some of their fans I get a real sense of skincrawl.

Bacon.

I mean I get it. We studied the marketing campaign that led to baconmania in class. It’s one of the greatest marketing campaigns of all time, right up there with “A Diamond is Forever” from de Beers.

However in the end, bacon is … OK. But there’s many better ways to use pork bellies than turning them into bacon. Especially the over-processed stuff that’s used on foods in restaurants.

Can I massacre you with hugs for this? 'Cause that’s the only impulse I have for your saying it.

(I agree, if you haven’t spotted this. 😉)

Deodorant rocks are alum crystal. Alum powder is the same stuff ground down to a powder. It is a deodorant, not an anti perspirant. You do not stop sweating when you use alum. It just kills the bacteria that cause the odour (which is why you can use it to temporarily clear the gamy scent of clothing as well).