Admit it. Bacon is awesome.

Bacon is unique. There are no nicknames for bacon. No substitutes.  No common  slang terms. No shortcuts. Bacon is, quite simply, just bacon. Period.

I’ve heard bacon referred to as “meat candy” – but that is a description, not a nickname. As a nickname, “meat candy” is unworkable.

Try going to your local butcher and ask the big dude behind the counter (the one with the cleaver):

“Hiya, mate, how’s about giving me a kilo of meat candy?”

See how that works out for you. I think I’ll just stick to calling it bacon.

Awesome and tasty as bacon may be, it makes one butt-ugly design element. The sad truth is that bacon related products almost always look cheesy.

Poor bacon.

How can anything so wonderful be so darn unattractive? This is a question I often ask myself. I have spent countless sleepless nights agonizing over how I can announce my love of bacon to the world without looking like a total tool. I searched far and wide looking for the answer. I climbed mountains. I crossed deserts. I forded raging rivers. I spent weeks alone sitting on the gnarled branch  of a misshapen tree on the edge of the desolate and foreboding Mongolian Death Plateau.

The answer was there. I knew it. Taunting me… eluding me… just out of my grasp. Then one day, it hit me. The number 42 of bacon … an epiphany. The ANSWER.

“This ends now!” I shouted to the bleak, foreboding landscape that spread before me like a corpse-strewn threshold to an evil, baconless, post-apocalyptic gateway to hell itself. I fell from my tree and crawled on my hands and knees in search of the nearest civilized outpost. I was dehydrated, bruised and bleeding – on the very edge of death. I had the answer, but it was too late. I could go no further. I laid down to die – and the aching regret of my life ending this way, with the holy grail of bacon-lovers everywhere firmly within my grasp, was too much for me to bear. I slipped into a horrific screaming nightmare of panic, pain and rage.

Bacon. Just bacon. Period. Bacon t-shirt for sale.

And then there was nothing.

I woke several days later on a foul smelling bed of half-cured yak hide in the yurt of a concerned looking Mongolian nomad. He gave me a goat intestine filled rancid yak cheese to eat and he let me rest. When he came back in much later, I had regained my composure and, although we had no language in common, we used hand gestures and grunts to communicate. He let me know I was safe and I let him know I liked bacon. I then asked him the question that had been tormenting me since I awoke:

“Do you have WiFi?”

I asked this by picking up a nearby yak bone and screaming “WiFi! WiFi!  WiFi!  WiFi!” while running around and waving it in half circles like a WiFi signal strength icon. International geekspeak.

To make a (very) long story short, he did (and a damn good connection at that considering that he lived in yurt on a Death Plateau). I was able to connect to my design server and create the ultimate bacon-related product. One with all the class, sophistication and understated elegance that bacon deserves. Something that bacon lovers everywhere can use and display with pride.

I had intended to only write a a few sentences about this, but I sort of got carried away. Bacon does that to me. I had managed to keep my tendency to write bacon-prose under control for a very long time – until I recently fell off the bacon wagon. I intend to add to my bacon product line just as soon as I  find my way back from the Mongolian Death Plateau. I may just dedicate my whole life to this.

More bacon stuff