Last weekend, I blew my palate across the sky in a shower of beautiful sparks. I’m not talking about sucking on a Roman Candle, either. I’m talking about drinking bacon-infused vodka.

My friend Rob had some around his house that a chef friend had made. It’s smoky, a little greasy but not in a bad way. Like, kinda slippery-tasting. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to gargle with or drink out of a full pint glass. But it would make the mother of all Bloody Marys (Maries?) for a hangover breakfast drink. Or sipped straight, stirred with a slice of avocado.

Here’s a recipe that I found for the stuff — could make for a great Christmas gift, too.

And before people start cutting their eyes and warming up the snark for the comments, just remember: I know that bacon’s a big Internet meme right now. Possibly cliche, even. But there’s a good reason for it:

Bacon is awesome. End of story.

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I’m back in Norfolk visiting my family for Easter weekend. And man, is it ever different than New York. I snapped this photo of a banner hanging from a restaurant that pretty much sums the difference up perfectly:

For those of you that are reading this in text-only form, it reads: “Listen Less to the News, Spend Money and Support America, And We Will All Be OK!”

Wouldn’t it be great if that’s really all it took, just that one sign! Apparently the owner of San Antonio Sam’s (the restaurant where the sign is hanging) had this banner made up special, just to let Norfolk know how to get out of this mess.

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I’ll be telling a story onstage at the legendary Stonewall Inn next Wednesday night, if any of you are so inclined. This is perfect, actually — I have a big show coming up in late March, and this should be a perfect short-term deadline to write the story, test it out, and generally get my shit together.

The show is with Peter Aguero’s BTK band. I know Peter from The Moth and other live story shows in New York — here’s a bit of copy about him and the band:
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Last weekend I saw a haircut ugly and evil enough to impregnate a nun just so it could kick her down a set of steep stairs. I’ve seen some stupid haircuts in my day, rocked more than a few regrettable ‘dos my damn self. My own hair in high school was shaven on the sides and back and semi-sorta-not-really-at-all long on the top in a ‘do that would have looked like a brain handle had I been able to pull it into a ponytail. I used to wonder why girls didn’t take me seriously.

I used to pour concrete with a man whose braided mullet hung low enough to tickle the tanned top third of his ever-exposed ass. I’ve seen cuts on the subway here in New York that I found personally offensive, hairdos whose cheeky chunkiness screamed of disposable income, willful ignorance and a powerfully asexual aesthetic retardation.

I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where ironic commentary on the fashion choices of the American working class has collapsed in on itself warping into a white dwarf shaped like a Mobius strip: a one-sided form that slows down light and the passage of time so aggressively that silver tights underneath ’70s running shorts seem like a good idea.

But I have never seen any shit like this.

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The cast and crew of NBC’s “30 Rock” performed live to a standing-room only audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre last night. According to writer/actress/nerd goddess Tina Fey in a brief pre-show monologue, every penny of the proceeds benefited the show’s PAs, who have been out of work since the beginning of the ongoing writer’s strike.

Please don’t leak any of the story or jokes to the Internet,

Fey asked,

because, y’know, this show is like ‘Heroes’ and we don’t want to ruin it for everyone else. Also, all of you who bought tickets to this show off of Craigslist for hundreds of dollars are suckers … this is going to be on TV for free in a few weeks. We hope …

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You think you know what’s right and what’s wrong, think you got it all figured out when it comes to video game etiquette and music and style, and then one night winds everything up like a tangled nest of clock springs and throws all your tools right off the bench.

I was teaching some friends the finer points of Big Buck Hunter II at the East River on Saturday night. The bar was packed and the game was old and fast, blurry deer rocketing around the screen which would’ve been hard enough except we’d been impairing our hand-eye coordination around the corner for a few hours, too.

You’ve got to stand back a bit from the machine just to give it a fair go, and it was right as I was trying to explain that the bucks usually hide behind the does and sometimes you’ve gotta give a blast into the air to get things moving that this dude tried to walk between the machine and the little neon plastic shotgun.

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My old boss used to say that “perfection is the enemy of good,” meaning that perfectionism stops a lot of good things from happening. That’s the case with this post I’ve been working on about the greatest bar in the USA. I made myself late to work this morning trying to get the photos together. Rather than be all high-maintenance and hold out, I’m just going to post the two best images from my trip to that bar:

That’s me in the background:

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