Bacon is a meat product prepared from a pig and usually cured. It is first cured using large quantities of salt, either in a brine or in a dry packing; the result is fresh bacon (also known as green bacon). Fresh bacon may then be further dried for weeks or months in cold air, or it may be boiled or smoked. Fresh and dried bacon is typically cooked before eating, often by frying. Boiled bacon is ready to eat, as is some smoked bacon, but may be cooked further before eating.
Bacon is prepared from several different cuts of meat. It is usually made from side and back cuts of pork, except in the United States and Canada, where it is most commonly prepared from pork belly (typically referred to as "streaky", "fatty", or "American style" outside of the US and Canada). The side cut has more meat and less fat than the belly. Bacon may be prepared from either of two distinct back cuts: fatback, which is almost pure fat, and pork loin, which is very lean. Bacon-cured pork loin is known as back bacon.
Bacon is a 2014 album by Russian-American rock band Igor & the Red Elvises.
Bacon, sometimes called American Euchre, is a trick-taking card game which resembles a simplified version of Euchre. It differs from Euchre in that it uses a full 52-card Anglo-American deck, has a slightly modified scoring system and trump selection system, uses a normalized card ordering to make it easier to learn, and adds the aspect of permission. It originated in the mid-to-late 1900s and is somewhat popular in the Eastern United States. It is one of the simpler trick-taking games and is a good game for introducing the concept of trumps to inexperienced players.
The object of Bacon is to be the first player to reach a predetermined threshold of points, usually 10 or 15. Players work together with their partner, who sits across from them, to collect more tricks than their opponents. In each hand, the team that wins the majority of the 5 tricks receives 1 point, or 2 if all 5 tricks are won. The score received by a team is doubled if they were not the team to declare trump or if one of the team members won the tricks "alone" (see below).
Murasaki refers to both the heroine of the Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), and the book's author, Murasaki Shikibu. In both cases the name is a pseudonym, and the real names are unknown.
In the court manners of the time (the Heian Period), it was considered unacceptably familiar and vulgar, to freely address people by their personal name, or even by their clan's name. As a result, the real name of the author is lost, and she was called Murasaki Shikibu: Murasaki after the heroine she invented; Shikibu after her father's official rank. The author Murasaki was an aristocrat, the daughter of a provincial governor who probably belonged to a minor branch of the mighty Fujiwara clan. She served as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Shoshi (a daughter of the powerful Fujiwara Michinaga), and was a literary contemporary and rival of Sei Shōnagon.
When Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, she followed the customs of her class and time, so that most of the characters in the novel are never identified by name, but rather by either their rank and title (in the case of male persons), rank and title of their male relatives (in the case of female persons), or after the name of their habitation (in the case of the great court ladies). Thus in the case of Murasaki, the lady in the novel, the author often calls her "The Lady of the West Wing". This "Lady of the West Wing" is commonly named Murasaki in commentaries and translations. Today, this serves to make the novel more easily comprehensible to those unfamiliar with Heian era court manners and titles, but we know that the author's contemporaries already referred to this character by this name - and nicknamed the author after her.
Murasaki is the main character in The Tale of Genji.
Murasaki may also refer to:
Murasaki is a 1992 "shared universe" hard science fiction novel in six parts to which Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress and Frederik Pohl each contributed one chapter; it was edited by Robert Silverberg. It is the first anthology of this type to be entirely conceived and written by winners of the Nebula Award.
The scenery is set in a fictional double planet system in orbit around an actually existing red dwarf star (HD36395; also known as Gliese 205 and Wolf 1453), about 20 light years from our solar system. Because the system had been first explored by a Japanese robot interstellar probe the star has been given the proper name Murasaki (after the famous Japanese writer, Murasaki Shikibu). The larger of the two planets is Genji, named after Hikaru Genji, the hero of her novel Genji Monogatari; the smaller one is named Chujo, after Genji's close friend Tō no Chūjō.
Poul Anderson, who had a degree in physics, worked out the physical framework for the anthology based on the characteristics of HD36395 as they were known in the early 1990s: one third of Earth Sun's mass, 82% of its diameter, spectral type M1 with a photosphere temperature of 3,400 K and a maximum emission in the near infrared. (The star is in fact very similar to Gliese 581, now known to have a planetary system.)