Move over, bacon!
[Sizzlean®¹ television commercial]
I am a field agent for the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of
the government that collects biological information from dead and stranded
marine mammals (under the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program).
A few weeks ago I got a call about a dead dolphin on a beach south of San
Francisco. Normally, if it’s fresh, we haul it off the beach and bring
it back to the lab. Unfortunately, what was called in as a six-foot dolphin
turned out to be an eleven-foot, 700lb adult male bottlenose dolphin. The
beach had no truck access, and it was way too large to be carried off intact.
So, the only alternative was to remove it in sections, hauling each large
chunk up a cliff and into the van. My associate and I set into the precise
methods of field dissection. One of the first steps was to remove the large
dorsal swimming muscles on each side. I cut into the anterior torso, slicing
down to the tail, and freed the 60lb muscle. It was a deep red with long
muscle fibers glistening through the foggy morning. Just before I flipped
it out of the carcass with both hands, I yelled “Move over, bacon!”,
and with a loud, wet slap, the long muscle smacked against the wet sand2.
In the distance I heard some guy laughing.
– Brody Culpepper (May 16, 2000)
Big Daddy Kane also asked bacon to reposition itself in the song “Cause I can do it right”:
Move over bacon there’s somethin meatier
A natural born lover with love to give free to ya
Meatier, so all you bacon lovers move over
Cause I’m so smooth they should call me
Blackanova
1 The primary selling point of Sizzlean (Sizzlean Reduced-Fat Sugar-Cured Beef Bacon Substitute Breakfast Strips 2000) was the taste of bacon (really beef) without all the fat. The problem with this is that the main selling point of bacon is the delicious, mouth-watering succulent tasty sexy bacon fat. Sort of like trying to sell a car without an engine or bacon fat. Eventually bacon got sick of moving over and shoved Sizzlean right out of your local multinational supermarket conglomerate and into the Failed Product Museum. [Information provided by the National Bacon Fat & Good Grooming Council GmbH]
2 In the commercial, when the mother/kids/family chants “move over bacon,” the strips of bacon magically levitate out of the skillet and the Sizzlean floats right in. It’s an important visual, one that I was able to duplicate by manually levitating the big chunk of dolphin out of the body and on to the beach. Get it?
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