The Followspot

Blogrolls, foodie sites and Lewis Black rants about milk and water

Ellen has suggested we put up blogrolls so I've been assembling a list that she would call a proper gallimaufry. Everybody has the NYTimes, Digby, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and the rest of the usual suspects. But how many include a blog dedicated to the finer points of pizzaria pizza by the slice?  Or Bear's Battlestar Blog, written by Bear McCreary, the composer of Battlestar Galactica's music?

I have a lot of sites bookmarked. A lot. I visit most of them only rarely, if at all, so it's been fun to rummage through the forgotten stuff in the attic. I'm including several sites on the blogroll because they're worth a look-see.

You can tell a lot about a person by the stuff he or she keeps -- hidden in the closet, stuffed in a totebag, ripening in the back of the fridge or populating a bloated Favorites folder. So it's rather personal to admit that along with dozens of news and political commentary sites, I've bookmarked loads of recipe/foodie sites, obsessive fandom television sites, and a hodge-podge of quirky backwaters I've stumbled upon that were somehow amusing or profound. The signs of an undisciplined mind and too much food and sloth are revealed. Sigh. 

Which brings me to this gem I found while rummaging around (Warning: NSFW due to very naughty language and a lot of it.):

Pity the Porcus

It is the pig's sad fate to be so very succulent and fragrantly irresistable. As Emeril says, "It's a pork fat thing."

Today's NYTimes reports on a recipe that's been sweeping the Internets. I must have been sleeping or otherwise occupied to have missed this:

This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness.

Oh my. Is this merely another instance of America's dedication to excess, to following our jaded appetites down the porcine path to obesity? Or is it a four-pound meat anchor that comforts us in stormy economic seas? Does it even taste good? Who cares? It's bacon, dadgummit.

Do be sure to read the Times piece, including the slide show (!) and the step-by-step path the recipe took to internet notoriety. Five thousand calories, 500 grams of fat and 390,000+ page views. That's some pig.