Porkspotting
That ‘bacon is the new black’ meme I’ve been trying to get going is well and truly off and running. First up, from Chicago, city of broad shoulders, big butts and superlative cured pork products, comes country fried bacon:
At Risque Cafe, 3419 N. Clark, country-fried bacon ($6) is on the appetizer menu. Raw bacon strips are put in an egg wash, dredged in a heavily peppered flour and then deep fried in vegetable oil, says chef Andrew Niemeyer.
A white gravy is served on the side.
The author of that article even wrote ‘bacon is the new black’ – and now bacon has become so popular, it even ran for office last week:
Of course bacon won. I tell you, it’s a movement. More pork-spotting as and when it appears.
Wingnuts In The Workhouse
Things are getting a little bit Dickensian for some wingnut bloggers.
Roy Edroso at Alicublog writes the sad story of the crash and burn of a wingnut blogger post-election: after having placed his faith (and his family’s future security) in the simple business formula of repeating rightwing talking points online like a parrot in return for ‘donations’ from readers, blogger Kim DuToit is surprised that his plan failed. But how could such a moneymaking scheme ever possibly have failed?
So strong was this blogger’s belief that blogging would rescue him from a life of wage-slave misery and potentially degrading manual toil (isn’t that what the bleks are for?), South African import DuToit spent seven fruitless years pursuing his dream of national punditry, during which time all it gave him was gout:
I hadn’t thought about Kim du Toit — celebrated author of “The Pussification of the American Male” and other two-fisted screeds on self-reliance — for quite some time when pure, blind luck led me to this fascinating essay by his wife, explaining why Mr. du Toit will soon cease blogging, despite an alleged flood of reader protests: “The truth is folks, we can’t afford it.”
Astonishingly, blogging has not been the bonanza the du Toits might have wished for, and as Mr. du Toit is unable to “contribute to our financial requirements” with a more traditional job because of his gout, times have grown hard. Mrs. du Toit cashed in her IRA last year, but that money was all spent on a “last hurrah around the world with our kids,” lap-band surgery for their daughter, household repairs, and servers for Mr. du Toit’s blogging.
“We’ve staid-off bankruptcy, but just barely,” says Mrs. du Toit. “The truth is, we spoke to an attorney about bankruptcy, but we’d be forced into a two year commitment of repayment, not debt forgiveness, and the kid’s college would be the expense we’d have to stop under that scenario.”
Let me get this straight.
After deliberately getting themselves into humongous debt and deliberately wasting what few assets they had on a] personal pleasure and b] a business that had yet to show any return (other than the aforementioned gout), these people now want the whole lot written off and show no intent to repay anything at all? There’s conservative self-reliance and pioneer moral fibre for you.
“So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began to contract a quantity of debt.”
Dickens, Great Expectations
A commenter to the post likens the DuToits to Dickens’ Veneerings; I think Dickens would have recognised them as more general but no less self-interested types. They’re Pecksniffian sanctimonious hypocrites (“Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there”) whilst and at one and the same time they’re Mr Micawbers, with their an unshakeable faith in a providential turning up of something: but most of all what they are is Pip from Great Expectations, with his secret grandiosity and feelings of entitlement but without the charm.
We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.
Great Expectations
I wonder how many more smalltime wingnut bloggers are getting a visist from the skeleton truth about now? Dare I mention Pyjamas Media?
I might feel a bit sorry for the deluded idiots. Yes, even the DuToits: they thought the Republican reich would last forever, they thought that if they could just be strident enough, loyal enough and vicious enough that the rightwing media gravy train would slow down specially for them, just in time to catch their free ride to fame, fortune and future Fox punditry.
I might feel sorry for them, but I don’t. That’s because this yummy schadenfreude is so delicious. Please sir, can I have some more?
The Moment The World Changed
Daughter Malia congratulates her dad as it’s announced he’s won the presidency:
From the Obama family’s Flickr photostream of election night via The Guardian.
You Say ASBO, I Say Eugenics
The Dutch Labour party have placed a bill before parliament that would force women judged ‘unfit mothers’ to take court-ordered contraception:
Women in the Netherlands deemed “unfit mothers” may soon be forced to take contraception, if a draft bill currently before the Dutch parliament is passed. The bill “targets women who have been the subject of judicial intervention due to their bad parenting,” says its author, a member of the Netherlands’ socialist Labour Party.
Under the proposed legislation, a woman judged unfit who refuses to take contraception and becomes pregnant would have her child taken away at birth. The infant then would be placed in a foster home.
[…]
Disabled mothers already face a worldwide uphill battle for the right to bear children. Earlier this year, “K.E.J.,” a woman with developmental disabilities, was taken to court by her own aunt, who wanted K.E.J. to be sterilized against her will. K.E.J. won her court battle. But would a woman with similar disabilities be judged unfit under the proposed Dutch system? What about a woman who could not care for a child due to a mental illness like post-partum depression, but who has entered a treatment program and wants to try again?
The bill does not appear to include any prohibitions against discrimination based on disability, except that parents who have not yet raised a child and been judged unfit based on the way in which they parented that child would not be affected. Therefore, women would not be put on court-ordered contraception before having their first child.