How could y'all forget THIS one:

" B L I S S "

OMG, I fuggin' hate when I hear a corny-ass burner use that word.... it totally loses its value & grace.

Do you know the probable backstory on that one? The bacon fixation was relatively unknown in 2001 - I managed to get through an entire week at Black Rock without encountering a single pan of the stuff.

But ... in 2002, a particular user of ePlaya who has guilty of the heinous crime of having had an original thought with prior in-kid approval started work on an essay about the adaptation of one's cooking to the demands of a desert environment. This essay never got beyond the early draft stage, according to the author, because the hostility he soon got from the Burning Man community was great enough that he saw no reason to go out of his way to serve it, but the part that he did right brought up the issue of the importance of minimizing the consumption of diuretics in an environment in which one tends to be at least a little bit dehydrated. This came up as a side issue in his writing, not as a revelation because, like many of us, he assumed that the concept of avoiding salty food when one was thirsty would be a no-brainer for all involved. Who would do otherwise?

Answer: drug addled morons seeking to score points with their groupthinking friends. What had been mentioned in passing in a discussion of the difficulties of doing food preservation in a wetter climate in preparation for a trip to a drier one was grabbed onto as a chance to engage in political oneupsmanship, in a crude attempt to undercut the credibility of the essay's author, and make points with the in-kids who were dragging his pseudonymous name through the mud at that point. It takes a special kind of toadie to make himself ill in the middle of a desert just to win points that way, but such toadies could be found in abundance on the old ePlaya. Soon one could find posts telling the reader about the vital importance of eating large amounts of salty food while out in the desert, third string regulars talking about how much better their bodies felt after filling up on "desert food" like olives, blissfully oblivious to the fact that actual Middle Easterners are seldom known to make meals of olives, pickled lemons or any other such food - that these things are eaten in small quantity as appetizers, relishes or seasonings.

No matter. As one might expect from a group of true believers whose "official philosophy" denied that physical reality existed as anything but an arbitrary social construct, they made no effort to become better informed, with the result that we had a pool of idiots going out into an environment that will tend to promote dehydration, guzzling foods that would promote it some more and add to the salinity of their blood. Thus began the salty food fad, of which the bacon thing is a spinoff, one which offers those following such rewards as the presence of large amounts of fat to haul back out, the moop creating possibilities of a spill, a hard, sticky hard to remove animal fat to get off one's pans in a place where there are no real sinks and one may end up wearing some of that fat until one gets home a week later, ...

What more could one ask for? I'll expand on this when I get back, but I have to run because the store is about to close.

i fully intend to manifest abundant games of yoni beanbag toss with my magickal guru at his holy ashram in the near future, so i have no need for such folly.

I wish! or maybe not.... what about UNIVERSE, benevolent universe my ass.

Belly dancing is an attempt by fat chicks (usually goth) to try to look sexy.

--S