In the run-up to the launch of the USS Eighty-Three Thousand, JB and I had a conversation about Bacon. Not “bacon” – the delicious pork product and breakfast staple that has been valued by cultures around the globe for ages – but …::**Bacon**::…, the captial-B food-fetish that I – like just about everyone else who has a computer and likes to eat – has been reading and blogging about incessantly for the last couple of years. Its ubiquity and the unalloyed enthusiasm for it on the web has made me wary of devoting posts to it – even though I do love it so. I told JB, over bloody marys and andouille hash at Jane’s, that I would try to limit any mention of the stuff on The83k to ingredient lists and the occasional drooly tribute.

And then I saw the Flaming Bacon Lance of Death on BoingBoing.

Just to be clear – I consider prosciutto to be part of the HAM family. And while they’re both cured pork products, I think most people can tell the difference. But who the hell cares. This guy is cutting sheet metal with PORK. And cucumbers. And beef jerky. To those of you who shake your head and ask “Why?” I say this: We choose to make a torch out of Italian ham. We choose to make a torch out of Italian ham in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are awesome.

Good morning.

-Theo

BB Video: The Flaming Bacon Lance of Death, from Theo Gray’s book “Mad Science”

P.S. It was not without a certain amount of glee that I discovered the pork pyro responsible for this is a Popular Science columnist named Theo.