1054: The bacon
| The Bacon |
 Title text: Normally pronounced 'THEH-buh-kon', I assume. |
Explanation
This comic plays off the American colloquialism "bring home the bacon", which generally means to work hard and bring money home to your family to put food on the table.
White Hat seems to actually be saying "thebacon", and is thus calm because his wife gives him drugs. Vicodin is a very common painkiller, that can become a drug of abuse.
According to Wikipedia:thebacon, Randall seems to be mistaken in (gasp) three places:
- The proper name is dihydrocodeinone enol acetate.
- It is a semisynthetic opioid.
- The pronunciation is /ˈθiːbəkɒn/ (thee-buh-kon).
Transcript
- White Hat: I'm out of work, but I'm not stressed about it because my wife is a pharmacist and she brings home thebacon.
- Caption: Only later did I learn that "thebacon" is the common name for Dihydrocodeine Enol Acetate, a synthetic opioid similar to Vicodin.
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Vicodin is good stuff. You should try coding on Vicodin, it feels great. Davidy22[talk] 13:54, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
A doc White Hat's wife will not have her job for long. 108.162.245.69 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
Suggest marking as incomplete. Source is Wikipedia? Is there someone who has more familiarity with opioids who can comment? And what's the purpose of the title text? Stating it's incorrect does very little to explain the joke (which I don't really get). Wikiiscool123 (talk) 12:30, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
It is just me or the title comic is showing as The窶叡acon for someone else? 172.68.25.39 20:23, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
The title is showing The bacon for me. Is the title showing different unicode characters to different people? [Gopher] 15 Dec 2019
I suspect the above two users were experiencing their browser making an incorrect assumption about the page's character encoding. The title uses the unicode "thin space" (U+2009) which is three bytes of UTF-8, all with their highest bit set. In Windows-1252, these three bytes correspond to  . In Shift JIS, a byte with the highest bit set begins a two-byte sequence, so in this case those three bytes combined with the following "b" from "bacon" produce the two characters 窶叡. The comic presumably uses the thin space in the first place as a compromise between "The bacon" and "Thebacon". Socksbuny (talk) 00:18, 15 May 2026 (UTC) Add comment
