Posting has been light the last couple weeks as I've been putting together the 2010 Boston Bacon & Beer Festival with SoWa Sundays. One of the other things I do besides Unlikely Words is @eatBoston, a local food and restaurant information source. I like to put on events with Boston area restaurants every couple months.

It's probably an impossible task, but I'd like to shift the direction of the bacon meme. It's tired. In order to do this, I asked some of Boston's best restaurants to offer a unique take on bacon. Along with some great local and craft breweries, there will also be butchery demonstrations showing attendees where bacon comes from. And what's a festival without music? The event sold out over 1300 tickets 3 weeks ahead of the event and there will be no tickets available at the door. Chris Piascik did the poster above along with some other designs.

For a full list of the restaurants and breweries, you can visit the info page.

A couple weeks ago, The New York Times wisely introduced Article Skimmer as an additional way for readers to interact with the news. It's fast, intuitive, and easy to use. I put this in the solidly innovative column that I've seen a bunch of from the Times over the last year or so.

But then let me introduce Skimmer's Bacon topic. I've been trying to think of a way to kill the bacon meme since January or so, but the New York Times just did it for me. I'm tired of the internet that allows lazy marketers to layer whatever they want with bacon and score cheap internet traffic. That's not an internet I want to live in, and I don't think that's the internet you want either.

I can't help but think the bacon topic is aimed at this cheap internet traffic and by catering to it, the New York Times has debased itself. Who do they think they are, really? They could have maintained their stodgy standoffishness, but by rolling around the mud with the pigs...well, let's just say that 'arbiter of cool' The New York Times is not. To say nothing of the fact that if you're a meme, and people send around links about you, and then everyone on the internet is talking about you, and then The Paper of Record talks about you, you're not a meme anymore. You've baconed the Times or some other cute play on jumping the shark. It should be noted for the record that, for the sake of my argument, I've ignored the likely scenario that the Topics on Skimmer are automatically created based on what the readers are searching for and reading. If that's not how Topics get created, well that's just sad. (Thanks, Aaron!)

Click image to enlarge.

This is an oldie, but goodie. Put a frozen strip of bacon into your Wake N Bacon. 10 minutes before you need to wake up, it starts cooking so you can wake up to the tasty aroma of bacon (and smell like bacon for the rest of your life)!
Thanks, Chris.

"Elaborate Bacon: Piece in heart, Fragrance in mouth." (Thanks, Karmen!)

Not only does this cake have chocolate and bacon, but it has beer and, well, cake. (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Like the Bacon Bra, but even less safe for work, and somehow billed as th ultimate Super Bowl food (huh?), the bacon bikini. (Thanks, Matt!)

One last bacon post for the day. A bbq bacon sausage. You just have to click the link to understand how it all works. It's glorious. And disgusting.

Another birthday present, another bacon related treat. I haven't had it yet, but I bet it tastes syrupy and smoky. We'll see how it goes. Thanks, Ally!

Here is a wiki for The Holy Church of Bacon complete with a list to quite a few bacon blogs and places for all your bacon merch needs.

A friend gave me bacon mints for my birthday. While expected just a bacon flavored candy, I was surprised to find so much more. There's actually some mint in there - smoky, salty mint. Thanks, Will!