It's time to break the Feats of Meat stranglehold on this site with an actual Pants Pants Pants update!

Tomorrow, at the House of Shields, we're going to throw down. We've got John Staedler coming into town to play, we've got multiple friends' birthdays to celebrate, and we've got the Patented Pants Pants Pants Party Set all ready to go. We may even have a surprise or two in store for you.

Please come out tomorrow, it will be lots o' fun. It also may be our last show for a bit as we recede back into our laboratories to craft songs for a new album we'll hopefully be recording in the coming months.

The show starts at nine, and apparently must be done by midnight (although you're going to stay and party), and it's a weekend show! Finally. We'd love to see all of your smiling faces there.

PANTS PARTY!

Wim Delvoye creates some pretty mind blowing and disturbing art. This Neatorama post details his work including a poop machine, tattooing pigs, and a bunch of other poop related works.

You'll also notice something in that post that is of much more interest to Feats of Meat: COLD CUT FLOOR!



The visual beauty of the italian sub is highly underrated, and I think these "floor tiles" illustrate why. Just look at that beautiful color! Feats of Meat readers, I expect all of you to spend the weekend ripping up your carpet to see if there is deli meat underneath.



Now there are reports out there that these tiles are not actually meat, but in fact printed on aluminum. This would be a sad fact, but it leaves the door open for one of you out there to make yourself the first ever genuine meat floor. I mean, unless you don't want to greatly increase the value of your home.

If you don't install a meat floor in your home you obviously hate money and thus hate America. Your penance will be to create an American flag out of cold cuts.

Ok, this will be our last feat of meat for today. I hope this blast has made up for the relative radio silence around here lately.

We're closing with something simple. But it's the simplest things that often bring us the most joy here at Feats of Meat. I give you Sausage Baked Inside of Bread:

Our friend and Feats of Meat hero Benjamin McGriff sent us this amazing article from our very own San Francisco Chronicle. Sadly there is no photographic evidence, but I do feel the need to post the text of the article in its entirety for posterity's sake:

Fresno man arrested in spice, sausage attacks

Fresno County authorities have arrested a man they say broke into the home of two farmworkers, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.

Fresno County sheriff's Lt. Ian Burrimond says the suspect, 22-year-old Antonio Vasquez of Fresno, was found hiding in a nearby field wearing only a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks.

The victims told deputies they awoke Saturday morning to the stranger applying spices to one of them and striking the other with an 8-inch sausage.

Burrimond said money allegedly stolen in the burglary was recovered. The sausage was tossed away by the fleeing suspect and eaten by a dog.

Frankly, I'm extremely disappointed with the Chron on this one. Where's the follow up? I have so many questions! What was in the spice rub? What kind of sausage are we talking here? Was the perp armed with any other sort of condiments, cutlery, etc? Why did he choose the victim he did for the spice rub down? Why didn't they stop the dog from eating evidence? Where's the in depth interview with this man? I need to know what his plan was here.

It may be time to form the Feats of Meat Investigative Truth Squad. ON TO FRESNO!

The aforementioned blog post sent in to us by an alert Feats of Meat aficionado turned out to be the gift that kept on giving. In addition to alerting us to the Hot Beef Sundae, as well as something called "Pizza on a Stick," And I Am Not Lying included a reference to a feat of meat from over a year ago that has sadly just come to our attention:

THE PIZZA TOPPED WITH MCDONALD'S!



Man, I could really go for a pizza right now. But I also really want Chicken McNuggets. And fries. And a cheeseburger..... Honestly, I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking:







And I Am Not Lying has quickly cemented itself as a Feats of Meat favorite. Thanks so much for alerting us to these wonders. The Feats of Meat test kitchen is going to be busy....

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of Feats of Meat sent me a link to this.



It's a Hot Beef Sundae! No longer just a euphemism for some sort of disgusting sexual maneuver, it's now also apparently a delicious looking dish that you can get at some random food truck in Nebraska. What's in a Hot Beef Sundae? I'm glad you asked:



The Feats of Meat test kitchen is already on the case. At some point in the near future, you can count of documentation of our own attempt a crafting a hot beef sundae. We will, of course, be adding sausage sprinkles.

It has been way too long since our last Feats of Meat post. I am terribly sorry about this, there is no excuse. I will now try to make up for this fact by blasting out a bunch of new feats all at once in a vain attempt to win back your affections. We'll start with the bacon alarm clock:



In high school back in Virginia, I used to set my alarm clock to "radio," turn it up really loud, place it across the room, and turn the station to the worst morning radio show on earth (The John Boy and Billy Show, which some of you southerners may be familiar with, and thus agree with my assessment). The idea was that there was no way I would be able to tolerate listening to this shit for even a few seconds, and this would force me to get up, go across the room, and turn it off. Then, PRESTO! I'm awake.

As I've gotten older, I've realized that, while effective, this is a very negative way to start your day. I've since transitioned to more tolerable radio right next to the bed, which I would qualify as a more neutral method of waking up each morning.

But now technology has finally given all of us a way to wake up in the most pleasant way possible: to the smell of bacon. It's the Wake 'n Bacon!



All you do is place a few slices of frozen bacon in the basket when you go to sleep. The bacon thaws as you sleep, and then, ten minutes before the time you've set the alarm, it turns on the heat lamp to start cooking the bacon. Ten minutes later, as you finally awaken to perhaps the greatest smell on earth, your bacon is ready for consumption! It sure beats the hell out of the George Foreman method.

I don't think this thing is available to the general public...YET. It just makes me happy that there's at least one of these in the world. Once these start showing up at Target, I think the world will have a lot more morning people. Thank you, Wake 'n Bacon inventors, THANK YOU.

Last night we went to Bottom of the Hill to see Xiu Xiu. They've been touring with some pretty strange characters: Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone, Prurient, and Evangelista.

We missed Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone, an experimental viola and guitar duo, but made it in time to see Prurient, a noise "artist" who faces the back of the stage armed with a pair of microphones and a very small amp. He seemed to be trying to achieve the most ear-splitting and gut-rumbling sounds possible, which is fine, I suppose. Some people are more about getting you to feel the music rather than hear it, but it certainly thinned the crowd. I find it personally sort of annoying that in order to fully experience such a set, you have to sacrifice being able to really hear any of the following sets. I compromised. I stuck some napkins in my ears and waited for something interesting to happen. Nothing did. The set, however was blessedly short.

Evangelista was next, and they easily took up the remainder of Prurient's set just by standing around on the stage and talking. I've never seen a band take so long to set up. Evangelista's lead singer is the Geraldine Fibber's Carla Bozulich, and she clearly felt constrained by her role as a supporting act. She's gone from industrial rock to alt-country, and now she's doing gothic stuff, but it's like she jumped on the gothic train going backwards. The whole set filled me with a sort of uncomfortable nostalgia. Some of things I heard last night were "Thank you, Beezlebub!" and "There is one word which has not yet dried completely upon our parched lips. The word is...love! Can you say it with me? Love!" I was looking around to see what decade it was when, to my horror, I saw Miss Bozulich come down off the stage.

Now, this is something you may not know about me, but I am something of a magnet for performers who leave the confines of the stage. I was pretty far back in the crowd, though, and I thought, "There's no way her microphone will reach all the way back here." As it turns out, however, with help from the audience, it reached exactly far enough for her to grab me around the shoulders and press the microphone into my boobs (she's significantly shorter than me) and sing her next verse into my chest while the crowd parted around us. She smelled god-awful (hey, last day of touring--I've been there) and I wanted to punt her back on to the stage, but she had a lot of really obnoxious, heckling fans in the audience so I just bore it out.

Another thing you might not know about me: I am something of a magnet for six foot+ fans who come late and need someone to stand in front of. This is especially true if said fan has a big-ass messenger bag slung behind him, and even truer if they have a really long ponytail and/or are amateur flash photographers. I battled with two of these last night. Always a good time.

At last, Xiu Xiu took the stage, looking a little worse for the wear. A whiny Evangelista fan shouted up at them, "You're quiet!" "You're not," retorted Jamie Stewart. A snappy and appropriate comeback, to be sure, but not as good (according to the Aristocrat) as last time, when he told the opening heckler, "Stop being an asshole, right now."

The set was not as good (or as long) as the last show they played at BOTH. It featured heavily from the new album and was generally more rhythmically consistent and accessible than usual. Nevertheless, it is always great to see Xiu Xiu live. Each one of them is a virtuoso in their own right: Jamie, as a lyricist and performer of true passion and energy; Caralee as a musician who rarely plays fewer than two instruments at a time, and Ches as a percussionist who seems to play every piece in his six-foot-tall, 40-piece kit (half of them gongs) at the same time. Once I could have sworn he was playing with a whisk and a basting brush.

All in all, definitely worth it, but it was a lot to go through to see a fairly short Xiu Xiu set. I will seriously consider the number (and members, and fans) of the opening bands before going again.

Are you looking forward to your long labor day weekend? Do you wish there was some way you could keep that labor day party train rolling just ONE more day? Yes you do, and we have your solution. We'll be playing at one of our favorite venues in the city, Cafe du Nord, on Tuesday September 2nd. And we'll be going on first, at 9pm sharp, so all you early birds who haven't been able to make our past few shows due to their late weeknight start time can join in the fun too!

However, be forewarned, you're not going to want to leave when we're done. We're playing with two other sweet local bands: The Chop!, who will be celebrating the release of their new cd (and giving out said cd to everyone who comes through the door!), and The Guitar Zeros, who do things with guitar hero controllers that will blow your mind (seriously, check out this video, I've been dying to see these guys play for a long time now).

So, needless to say, we're super psyched for this show. You should be too.

You may remember Josephine Lowry from her amazing hot dog dioramas. Well, Josephine did not stop there. She has once again left us speechless, this time with a sausage log cabin:



Yes. As always, it's the detailing that puts this over the top. The bacon curtains are very impressive. I love how she pre shaped the bacon into "drawn" curtains:



I like the waffle roof too, though I think I would have used pork chops. But who am I to tell Joesphine how to do her job. Bravo again Ms. Lowry, you continue to set the bar higher and higher.