This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Poor Hormel. That's the meat-packing company that invented the canned luncheon meat in the late 1930's whose brand name has become iconic: Spam. I googled Spam and found out all kinds of cool stuff. For example, there is a kind of spam sushi, called spam musubi, popular in Hawaii. Then there is Spam Spread, which is reportedlyhalal, which means kosher for Muslims. Who knew? Spam, of course, is the internet nickname for unsolicited, unwanted, and deservedly deprecated email concerning strategies for enlarging the membrum virilis, keeping said membra viriles in a state of precoital readiness, and, for those who are unconcerned about the state of their membrum virilis, or have no such membrum, mortgages. Oh, yes, and get-rich-quick schemes out of Nigeria. But I digress. Why? Because I am not intending to write about Spam here. I am writing about bacn.
Bacn? Yup. The omitted "o" distinguishes it from the salty and delicious pork product that goes famously with eggs. Pancetta, they call it in Italy. And Canadians produce "Canadian bacon," although it's not the same thing. (Do Canadians just call Canadian bacon "bacon" and refer to the Anglo-American kind as "Anglo-American bacon?" An interesting question, but yet another digression, because the subject here is not bacon but bacn.)
The bacn concept emerged in October, 2007 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at a geek meet called PodCamp Pittsburgh 08. Bacn was defined concisely: email you want -- but not right now.
Wow. There's all that bacn on my computer , and I never even knew what it is called. I just checked my inbox and I have 295 unread messages. Bacn. I have already read the messages I wanted to read. Will I ever read the bacn? Will I ever delete it or transfer it to another folder? I don't know. But I could use Mac Mail's smart mailbox feature to store bacn in a bacn folder. If I wanted to. Do I? I don't know.
Bacn, of course, is merely a subset of a topic that's very hot on the Internet right now: information overload. The very fact that bacn is wanted, but its reading is to be deferred, puts it solidly in the overload category. I've written about information overload, as have many others. Furthermore (that's a grammatically correct way of beginning a sentence with the conjuction "and") I am increasing the information overload by the very act of writing this blogpost. One must never forget, however, that one man's noise is another man's signal. Or, as one might say, one man's spam is another man's bacn.
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