BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON. BACON. BACON

BACON, BACON: HOW DO I LOVE THEE.  LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

1.    Served with eggs and grits

2.    On top of buttered toast

3.    With pancakes and jam

4.    Add to flavor beans

5.    Use the grease when frying

6.    Grease sopped up with toast

7.    Sprinkled on your salad

8.    Eat instead of salad

9.    Good for fishing bait (also attracts log head turtles and alligators)

10.                       Used for baiting bear

11.                       An aphrodisiac for men

12.                       Add to any sandwich

13.                       White bread mayonnaise and bacon

14.                       Crumbled on baked fish

15.                       The base of good corn chowder

16.                       Eaten before sex

17.                       Eaten after sex

18.                       Bacon grease and sex (use your imagination)

19.                       Hell, I have just made a transition from one favorite food to the next: I don’t think I can continue.

Here is a recipe from a nineteen century cook book for corn chowder.  I have cooked this on the back of a woodstove and it is delicious.

Recipe from the Farmers Cottage at the Norland's Living History museum in Livermore, Maine

·       One large onion diced

·       Six thick pieces of bacon cubed (slab bacon)

·       2 cups of diced potatoes

·       1 tsp of salt (I omitted the salt.)

·       Two cups of fresh corn

·       Two cups of boiling water

·       Two cups of milk

·       Pepper to taste

Fry the bacon and sauté the onions until done.   Add water and potatoes and salt

When potatoes are tender add corn and milk.   Bring just to a scalding point – do not boil

Serve hot with corn bread.

YUM YUM!

OLD TIME SOUTHERN CORNBREAD

Here is my recipe for southern cornbread.  In the deep south in the 40’s and 50’s most people didn’t add sugar to their cornbread.  

2 cups of yellow cornmeal

2 cup of white flower

2 tsp of salt

2 tsp of baking powder

1 tsp of baking soda

¼ cup of lard

2 eggs

2 cups of milk

Combine milk, eggs and lard.  Stir in other ingredients - mixing only until moist. Bake in a large greased pan at 400 degrees until brown – about thirty minutes.  Slather with real butter and eat hot. 

the Ol’Buzzard

ZEN

the Ol'Buzzard

IN DEFENSE OF WALMART*

Walmart is like cell phones: a visit to Walmart is distasteful but a fact of modern life.   People complain about the low salaries and the way Walmart treats their workers; but people know the salary scale when they apply for the job – and most people initially are happy to get it.    Walmart, like McDonald's, offers jobs to unskilled workers – workers who are not qualified for any other jobs.   If you have salable skills, you are not looking for a career at Walmart.  Instead of blaming Walmart for their salary scale, how about blame the Senate and Congress for failing to pass a livable minimum wage law.  

A man that lives near me works at Walmart.   He is over fifty and for years worked as a manual laborer for a construction company in the summer and drew unemployment during the winter.    He lost his eye and injured his back working construction doing shovel and grunt work.  He now works at Walmart and his major complaint seems to be that they don’t lay him off during the winter so he can draw unemployment. 

The reality is that most Walmart workers would be unemployed in our small community if we didn't have a Walmart. 

People are gullible and willing to believe things without weighing the factors, and people like to complain.   We complain about the weather, our spouses, our children, our neighbors – the list is unending – just check out my blog: probably ninety percent of my post (as are yours) are complaints.   And we like to complain about Walmart.

My wife and I shop at Walmart.   We probably save about fifty dollars a month by shopping there; and, on a fixed income fifty dollars, to us, is a lot of money.  We don’t buy everything at Walmart, but we regularly buy can goods, cleaning products, appliances, beer, liquor and paper products.   There was an old general store in Maine that posted the sign: If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.   And that pretty much defines Walmart.  From car products to electronics – from bird feeders to candles – you have pretty much one stop shopping. 

We complain that Walmart carries Chinese junk – but get real – many of the products in your life were made in China.  If your phone and computer were not made in china, their components were.  Inside the labels of clothing from L.L. Beans and the sports gear at Cabela's you will find the label made in China.  Many of your cars parts were milled in Chinese factories. 

We have a Walmart and we still have a vibrant little town.  Some of the mom and pop stores closed, and that seems a shame; but mom and pop stores, like dial telephones, are a relic of the past.   No one complained when our little movie house closed and a multiplex opened – like accepting cell phones – we move on.

You get the best prices and the greatest selection at Walmart – and if they don’t have it you probably don’t need it.

the Ol’Buzzard    

A LAMENT TO CELL PHONES

According to the Divine Comedy (The Inferno) the eighth circle of hell is full of lawyers.   But, in keeping up with the new technology I feel that at least the fifth circle of hell should have a place for the people who can’t unplug from their cell phones. 

Back in December we finally traded in our old truck for a new fuel efficient car.  The payments stroke us but it needed doing so that my wife will have dependable transportation when I am gone - and this is the last one.   Then two months ago some woman ran into the back of our new car while I was stopped at a stop light.   She was in her late forties and texting to her daughter.  

I am super conscious now of people riding around with a cell phone held up to their ear.   If you drive around your town and watch, at least twenty-percent of the people are talking on cell phones while they are driving in traffic.  If you go into the grocery store, or walk around Wal*Mart you will see people on their cell phones.   Kids walking down the street are talking on their cell phones.   

Phones ring and people talk on their cells at restaurants.   Recently, at a local restaurant six middle aged people at the same table were laughing because they were texting each other, while from a nearby booth we had to listen to a woman talking to friend on her cell. 

 Yesterday my wife and I went to a playhouse.  Before the play started the MC asked everyone to turn off their cell phones - but an hour into the play we had to listen to some elderly woman’s favorite tune digitally explode on her cell phone.   I won’t even mention the school age kids that seem to have a cell phone implanted onto the side of their head. 

What the fuck is this that we cant unplug from our telephones for a couple of hours to sit in a play or a movie or a restaurant.

In the fifth circle of hell I would have cell phones implanted on both ears of the abusers; and every three minutes, twenty-four hours a day, the phone would ring playing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkuries, followed by a recording warning you that your credit card might be overdrawn. 

the Ol’Buzzard hates cell phones.

IT IS BUG SEASON HERE IN MAINE

I have lived in the south and I have lived in the Arctic, but there is no place I have found that can compare to bug season in rural Maine.  

Let me qualify: in the towns and cities where lawns are kept mowed the bugs are a nuisance and a distraction, but in the bush – the rural woods and lakes and streams - bug season in Maine is a condition that sends large men, covered in repellent, running for the safety of their tents or vehicles.

Bugs come in cycles here in Maine: there are deer flies, black flies, horse flies, midges, mosquitoes and no-seeums.   The flies bite and sting and buzz around your head and are a pain in the ass; the mosquitoes rise up from the swampy and shady areas and leave bites that itch for the better part of a day; the midges are small gnats that swarm around you head, get into your ears, nose and mouth and leave whelps the size of your thumb nail; but, by far the worst bite comes from the no-seeum. 

I looked up no-seeum on the internet and found that every site I checked confused no-seeums with midges.   The only conclusion is that all the experts that posted on no-seeums have never lived in rural Maine, and don’t know what they are talking about. 

No-seeums are flying venomous creatures that are so small they can enter through a window screen.   Most of the times you can’t see them: thus the name of no-seeums.   But if the light is right they will look like a small bit of floating cigarette ash.   You mainly know about them once you have been bitten.  They can leave a burning, itching, inflamed knot about the size of a bisected golf ball that will remain a torment for a couple of days.  

I swear that if no-seeums were the size of black flies there would be no human life in northern Maine.

Here in northern Maine we have four seasons: snow season, mud season, bug season and fall.  If you intend to hike or camp in northern rural Maine I would suggest you choose fall.

the Ol’Buzzard

LET'S EVERYONE HANG A PICTURE OF AN OIL DISASTER ON OUR WALLS

now to  post.

The oil companies must be gleeful the San Francisco plane crash took the spotlight off the oil spill on the border of Maine and Quebec.




Early Saturday morning a train pulling 73 oil tanker cars derailed and exploded in the small community of Lac Megantic, Quebec. The explosions and fire caused by the derailment destroyed most of the downtown. In the community of 6000 - 2000 people had to be evacuated. There were approximately 30 downtown buildings incinerated and the death count is now five with around forty people still missing. Fire departments in Canada and from Maine, including trucks from our community, responded to the emergency. The oil has entered both the lake and the local river, but at this time the oil clean-up is a low priority.



The oil was drilled in North Dakota and on its way to New Brunswick via Maine. There is a proposal now in the process for an oil pipeline to run from North Dakota, across eastern Canada, through Maine to the terminal in New Brunswick.



This is one of those damned if you do and damned if you don’t situations: the oil will be pumped and will be transported to the refineries as long as there is a demand and there is profit to be made. If the oil pipeline is defeated, the oil will be transported by train, tanker trucks, barges and oil tankers.

RAIN IN MAINE AND RACOONS



We have had over a week of continual rain here in western Maine. Perhaps I should contemplate building an ark. But then, I don’t have the longevity of Noah. According to the Bible Noah lived to an age of nine-hundred and fifty years – he didn’t start building the ark until he was six hundred years old and it took him one hundred and twenty years. Even disregarding collecting two animals of every species in the world including insects; this is a story that would be too weird for the Brothers Grimm.

I marvel how gullible people can become when it comes to religions: Jesus walking on water – the bread and fishes, and Mohammed flying to Jerusalem on the back of a horse.

Yesterday I discovered the monster that has been steeling my bird feeders. Three feeders in the past two weeks have disappeared. Yesterday the last feeder was missing from a tree behind the house, but due to the heavy rains we have been experiencing the culprit left a visible trail to follow through the alders and ferns. About twenty-five yards into the rough I found the discarded feeder and the trail continued on deeper into the brush. The ground was too wet to distinguish tracks, but I eliminated bear because even in the mush a bear would have left a heavy tread.



I have a feeder mounted in a chimney block that is too heave to move; so last evening I loaded it up with sun flower seeds. Being in my seventh decade I get up through the night about every three hours to pee and last night I made it a point to switch on the spotlights mounted on the back of the house. Sure enough a big raccoon was sitting on the feeder trying to get the top off.

I could - I am quite capable - but I don’t kill animals any more. Steeling food is the nature of a raccoon and I hold him no malice. Even though I have lost about thirty dollars worth of feeders, I have to admit I have enjoyed the mystery and speculation, trying to determine what type of animals would tear down feeders wired to tree limbs and actually haul them away.

Now I have to find out if I can outsmart a raccoon.

the Ol'Buzzard