All Things Bacon!

One of the founding father of the scientific method, Francis Bacon (22 Jan 1561 – 9 April 1626) was a lawyer, Member of Parliament, Queen's Council, and astonishingly prolific writer. He also loved his chickens! He asked the question: If salt can preserve meat, why not snow? It freezes things, makes them extremely cold, so perhaps can slow down the decomposition of meat. What happened next is open to conjecture. Scholars argue whether Bacon jumped from a moving carriage to seize a duck walking along the side of the road (unlikely), or ran outside and bought and killed a chicken (probable). However, they do agree he stuffed a domestic bird with snow to test his theory of preservation. He then caught a chill which brought on bronchitis, and he died at the Earl of Arundel’s house nearby on April 9, 1626. Francis Bacon died stuffing a chicken!

Francis Bacon (Irish-born British Expressionist painter, 1909-1992). Bacon was one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The imagery is stark. Screaming faces. Tortured bodies, slippery and raw. Fresh meat. His subjects are often trapped in existential frames - cubes, boxes, or on stages, lit like circus freaks. Consider Bacon's famous and moving Triptych--May-June 1973. In the central panel is a figure shadowed in a doorway. It is framed on one side by a hunched figure collapsing fetus-like on a toilet, on the other someone (or something) is vomiting into a sink. Like any other great tripyich painter of Europe, from Rubens to Bosch, Bacon knows how to put on a show. And much of what he does is a form of conjuring, of magic, relying to a great extent on improvisation, working without preliminary studies. He smeared paint acoss his canvases with thick brushes, pieces of cardboard, rags, his bare hands, using expressive deformations to extract every nuance of tension and emotion. But what is often overlooked is Bacon's skills as a colourist. He employs the most delicate of shades, the softest pastels, adjacent to shocking reds, cobalts, inky blacks. In a period dominated by abstract art, it is worth remembering the savage beauty in Bacon the figurative painter.

In the end Bacon had an asthma attack, his heart stopped, and he died in Madrid, Spain, on April 28, 1992.

To "bring home the bacon" is to earn money, especially money to feed one's family. But what is the origin of this phrase? Many scholars believe it derives from the story of the "Dunmow Flitch".

Place - village of Little Dunmow, Essex. Year - 1104. A local couple were so devoted to each other that the local Prior of Little Dunmow rewarded them with a "flitch", or side, of bacon. It must have been quite an event since Chaucer refers to the flitch in the Canterbury Tales - "But never for us the flitch of bacon though, / That some may win in Essex at Dunmow". A tradition soon arose: a side of bacon promised to any married man who could swear before the congregation and God that he had not argued with his wife for a year and a day.
It still continues in nearby Great Dunmow, Essex, where the Festival of the Flitch is held every four years.

Porky Pig was once a Looney Tunes star. We might now associate him with timidity and gullible innocence, but in the late 1930s he was a leading man. Only later did he become the perennial co-star and straight man, appearing with Daffy and Sylvester in multiple cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. Indeed, his trademark stutter was originally voiced by Joe Dougherty who himself suffered from the speech condition! But while Joe couldn't control his stutter, which resulted in production cost blowouts, Mel Blanc could. Mel took over in Porky's Duck Hunt, which aslo debuted another of Blanc's audio creations: Daffy Duck.