Maybe these will help me deal with the day side of my fucking insomnia.

We invented the Maple Bacon Lollipop, and now we’ve improved it: we’ve made it the bacon-y equivalent of an energy drink, adding two cups worth of caffeine to the already time-tested wonder of organic, sustainably farmed bacon and delicious Vermont maple syrup.

We stand in awe, heady with the thrill of maple bacon discovery, and cold munchin’ on a lollipop.

An even more perfect gift for the sweet-toothed pork aficionado in your life.

Get your Caffeinated Maple-Bacon Lollipops here.

Yeah! What that subject line said!

A to-be-published meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition supports my view that animal fat is nowhere as bad as we’ve been told a thousand times. It says:

During 5–23 y of follow-up of 347,747 subjects, . . . intake of [more] saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease], stroke, or CVD [cardiovascular disease]. The pooled relative risk estimates that compared extreme quantiles of saturated fat intake were 1.07 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.19; P = 0.22) for CHD, 0.81 (95% CI: 0.62, 1.05; P = 0.11) for stroke, and 1.00 (95% CI: 0.89, 1.11; P = 0.95) for CVD.

Emphasis added. One aspect of the results suggested that studies that found an positive association (more fat, more disease) were more likely to be published than those that didn’t find an association or found a negative association. Which means these numbers may underestimate the good effects.

I scrubbed this from this dude Seth’s Blog.

I kinda want to celebrate by eating my neighbors dog!

Today is day one of what will be a 1.75 day fast. I’ll eat some dinner tomorrow night, something light, but after not eating all day today and tomorrow it will taste amazing. After tomorrow then I’ll be eating macrobiotic food until Friday and organic fruit if I want a snack between meals. Instead of coffee I can have green tea. I’m worried the lack of coffee is going to be one of the more challenging parts of this fast this time as I’m incredibly busy launching a site for a client right now and I’ve acquired a pretty strong daily appetite for a delicious cup of dark roast with at least one extraction in it. But I’ll survive probably.

To properly prepare for today’s fast AJ & I had New York Strip for dinner last night served with a couple bottles of the OA IPA. The IPA was a great success this time, we sparged thoroughly and properly giving the heavy hop load of the beer a sweet, rich bodied malt counterpart.

But the real star of the meal was the 6oz of New York Strip loin. I cooked it on the stove as I didn’t feel like dealing with the cold to use the grill, but even still, it was cooked to a glowing pink perfection each bite feeling like my tongue was being worked over by a swarm of highly trained, fat and salt sex-worker ninjas.

Every bite I thought it impossible to reach greater thresholds of pleasure, but then, on the next successive piece, there I was, perched on top a mountain of my previous delights and ascending even higher like some wild-eyed fatso straddling a rocketship of gristle into the milkiest parts of our universe’s bosom… My eyes rolled around in my head as my chewing slowed to a deep massage allowing the tides of thick flavor to properly bathe across my tongue. After a long minute of total submersion I’d remember that oxygen excites the senses and, at least according to most physicians, I need to breathe in order to continue enjoying red meat on this planet. Blast!

As I opened my eyes back into this world of conflicts you could imagine my relief to see that there was still more of that holy bovine stretched in grand sacrifice across my dinner plate. Bless that wonderful beast for offering me these pleasures, and waiting so patiently for me to make my next bloody move.

Such a simple meal: a well marbled cut of beast, a small red potato, complimented with a home made high-hop brew. Clearly, when programmed correctly, pleasures in this life do not need to be overly complex.

Don’t lose hope dear internetting ones, we still have every intention of launching the full Outsider’s Almanac website in the near future, it just won’t be quite as soon as we had hoped. We’re pretty insanely busy these days, between writing projects, client needs, body/mind/spirit rehabbing and the pursuit of winter in it’s many splendered and distracting forms, but you should expect to see the site live by around April 1st, 2010.

We’ve got our sites on making Outsider’s Almanac the most exhaustive and user friendly site for all Outsider activities by combining tutorials with expert articles, videos, web based and mobile communication apps, up-to-the-minute live and critical information on sites and conditions, gear reviews, site reviews, events, and so much more.

Like you, we love the Outside, it’s beautiful out here, and boy is it easy to get distracted. We wouldn’t want it any other way.

Film maker, OA Woody Creek correspondent and all around American Hero Wayne Ewing sent me an article today about a new movement taking foot in the shadows of New York City. Self-proclaimed urban cavemen sustain themselves solely on red meat and some vegetables and fruits. In addition, they eat in a manner that would mimic the hunting and gathering of that time, gorging on red meat and then fasting for one, two or three days. Their thought is that primitive man – though he was typically lucky to live to 30 – was in much better shape than the pudgy, modern, air conditioned nightmares that haunt the earth presently.

“Mr. De Vany’s blog promotes what he calls Evolutionary Fitness. Like his disciples in New York, he believes that ancient humans could perform physical feats that would awe the gym rats of today.

His followers believe that he too is capable of fearsome feats. When Mr. Durant told a gathering of New York cavemen that he had seen Mr. De Vany at a seminar in Las Vegas, Matthew Sanocki, 34, asked if Mr. De Vany looked as muscular in the flesh as in pictures on his blog.

“He looks great,” Mr. Durant said. “You feel like he could, at a moment’s notice, charge at you and trample you.”

Already, the New York cavemen are getting attention from the patriarchs of the paleo movement. One such figure, Erwan Le Corre, a Frenchman whom the magazine Men’s Health said “may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet,” stopped by Mr. Durant’s while visiting the city in December. The men sealed their friendship with what both described as a bare-chested — and in Mr. Le Corre’s case, barefoot — run across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on a frigid night.”

It’s not a rare occurance any more to find a stark reminder in just about every populated pocket of this tumbling rock that pretty much everyone drawing air these days is out of their friggin’ minds, though I am encouraged by the particular brand of crazy these cavemen are bringing to the table. It’s almost like, quietly, in a distinctly macho manner, old mother gaia is blushingly making amends for all the lame vegans skulking about our fair neighborhoods.

Ah, what balance emerges when the collective consciousness gets goose pimples from vertigo.

Read the whole article here.

If you look close I think you can see god there towards the bottom.

If the Vatican knows what’s good for them they’ll follow the lead of Michael Jackson and Burning Man among others and hire Mark Ryden to update their iconography.

While sitting at work today I, as is usual, began daydreaming about all of the fun things I will soon be doing that don’t have anything to do with work.  Which led me pleasantly, to the upcoming weekend and our annual excursion to the Music Box Massacre, a 24 hr horror movie fest held each year at The Music Box Theater here in Chicago.

This years line up is full of several delightfully gory flicks, but I am especially looking forward to Roger Corman’s:  A Bucket of Blood.  Here’s the premise, as described by our friends at The Music Box:

A busboy longs to be an artist and tries his hand at sculpting. When he accidentally kills a cat and covers it with clay, it becomes a celebrated work of art. Soon Walter has moved on to killing people and is the hit of the local art scene. Roger Corman’s little gem of black comedy has become a true cult classic.

This got me to wondering about meat sculpture.  Just what are the artists of today and tomorrow doing with those different delightful and coveted cuts of flesh?  Who among looks at dinner and sees a medium?  I am happy to report that there is much being done in the way of meat art. The contemporary scene seems as varied as the times and land in which we live.  It goes from the overtly political:

To the religious:

The functional:

I’m sure that works…right.

Even Interiors:

My tastes generally run nearer the outsider end of things.  I like the idea of a bored archeology major smoking too much dope and turning his munchies into a tribute to past cultures:

And for those of you who enjoy seeing that which can not be unseen, I direct you to Meatplug.

Ok, not entirely, but, according to a recent study at the University of Porto in Portugal, marinating your steak in beer for six hours before cooking it reduces the alleged cancer causing heterocyclic amines (HAs) by up to 90%.

Of course, these HAs are typically created when you cook your steak medium or well-done and I can’t think for the life of me why you would do such a terrible thing. Oh, and, in this study, they pan fried their steak and didn’t grill it, another fairly confounding decision amongst decisions. Oh, right, and also? Heterocyclic amines are such a statistically small cause of stomach cancer it’s really not even something you need to bother spending any time worrying about.

But, hey, did I mention? Beer!

“Mark your calendars for Sunday, October 11, 2009. The Hoosier Mountain Bike Association is pleased to announce the 5th Annual Brown County Breakdown – HMBA Epic Ride. Come support the HMBA for our biggest fundraising event, and enjoy an epic ride on beautiful trails within one of the largest and best-preserved contiguous hardwood forests in the Midwest. It isn’t a race, it’s just a great ride in the woods with a few hundred of your closest friends! The ride begins and ends at beautiful Brown County State Park near Nashville, Indiana. We have a full weekend of events planned, so please join us on Saturday, October 10 as well.”

I’m gonna try and get my Tasajara functional again and head down for this ride. They’ve got a hog roast the night of the event that I’d like to hit up as well. We’ll see, it’s about a 4 hour drive, but it looks like it would be worth it.

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I’m kind of getting bored with this fad of bacon-everythings, though I try to not let this cloud my interest in one of the most beautiful parts of that amazing magical beast, the pig. In fact, I’m sitting down to a delicious bacon and sunny-side up egg breakfast as I write this.

So Chicago is hosting Baconfest Chicago at the Publican, what a surprise. If you’ve got $75 to burn on your desire to leg hump machismo in this fashion you will get:

• 10 bacon dishes by 10 bacon loving chefs

• 10 beer tastings to go along with your 10 bacon dishes

Meh.

I’m probably a little grumpy this morning, but this here Baconfest Chicago strikes me as eminently boring. Now a bacon fashion show or even bacon shoes? Now, you’ve got my attention.

My breakfast is getting cold.