Mr. Brain's blog.

In the Daily Bleat (www.lileks.com) today, Lileks linked to Mr. Brain's Pork Faggots Web site (www.mrbrainsfaggots.com), at which you find information on pork faggots, which are essentially meatballs in sauce -- and called that only in Britain. Well, I don't know that for a fact: there could be faggots in Australia and New Zealand; meatball faggots, that is.

I ought to e-mail my Australian friends -- hey, blokes, do you eat faggots in Oz?

Haw, haw. Haven't had this much fun with that word since junior high. No, wait, I didn't have fun with that word in junior high -- it was an all-purpose term of abuse that didn't seem to have much to do with sexuality, and I was on the receiving end of it all too often. This tended to fade as I passed into high school, though I do remember one occasion early in the 9th grade in which a girl in one of my classes, whom I sat next to, got it in her head somehow that I was going to touch her. I wasn't, but it didn't stop her from bleating out: "Keep your faggot hands off me!" Go figure.

Mr. Brain's Web site says:
"Mr Brain's is all about traditional, no fuss food.
We pride ourselves on using the finest pork and pork liver for our faggots, topped with a generous serving of delicious West Country sauce. It's no wonder 100 million faggots are eaten in the UK every year!"

I was amused by this, but it wasn't new to me. Which points to one of the reasons I like to get out & go places. Yuriko and I spent most of December 1994 staying at a flat in Ealing, a district in the western part of greater London. We had a kitchen, and often shopped at a nearby grocery store. Overseas grocery stores offer no end of interesting things to see (so do domestic ones, if I'm in the right frame of mind). In the Ealing store I discovered pork faggots in the frozen food section -- though I don't remember if they were Mr. Brain's brand. We bought some and ate them. Not bad for British cuisine.

It's a fine thing to see the great sites -- in the case of London, Parliament, St. Paul's, Buckingham Palace, etc. But traveling is also about embracing the details.