Swine are sentimentalists in this essential sense – they are thoroughly soaked and swept away merely by the scents that awash their snouts. And it is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy turnips.

the Porcine Oracle

I am continually grateful that knowledgeable hard-working people take their personal time to create tutorials, detailed posts, and instructional articles that help total strangers succeed.

the Porkopolis.org editor

Today, Porkopolis.org has upgraded to the newest version – 3.0 – of WordPress. This is after a phenomenal 3,000,000 other folks, and an undetermined number of pigs, have already done so since the June 17th release date.

Porkopolis.org initially added a blog section in 2008, powered by WordPress and in 2009 I converted the entire Porkopolis.org site over to a CMS powered by WordPress with a theme adapted from the Sandbox.

WordPress gives its users deep flexibility and empowerment, belied by overt simplicity and intuitiveness. Is that a compliment? Well, yes! My admiration for this creation is extreme. Bravo Matt and all the 218 WordPress contributors!

And, as I have said before about maintaining Porkopolis.org, I have had some help… Everything I know I learned from some very clever folks – Sages and Pilgrims – who have written books or web-based instructions that have been my education.

And I must also credit the WordPress disciples who fueled all my recent cajiggering by creating themes, plug-ins, widgets and scripts that they were willing to share.

Thank you all! You are the fittest hogs at the trough. With your help I remain true to the Circean Muse’s honor and the web continues to be less a Paris and more a Porkopolis.

We’ve always been English and we’ll always be English; and it’s precisely because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundians!

Mrs. Pemberton (played by Betty Warren) in Passport to Pimlico

We will perhaps forever debate the true aerodynamic potential of pigs; but here is a quite enjoyable 60-year-old example of pigs carried aloft and then allowed to descend gracefully back to earth via parachute.

I recently had the pleasure of viewing a VHS copy of the 1949 Ealing Studios comedy, Passport to Pimlico, secured through my local library. The film recounts the common experiences of the London neighborhood of Pimlico where mostly working class people who have survived wartime bombing are now muddling through the shortages and rationing of England’s grim post WWII period.

Then, during a long hot post-war summer, the explosion of a previously unexploded Luftwaffe bomb reveals a buried cache of medieval treasure in the resulting crater. Included is a parchment scroll authenticated as a royal charter of King Edward IV of England (1442-1483), who secretly ceded the Pimlico area to Charles VII (1403-1461), the last Duke of Burgundy, as a refuge after the Burgundian Wars where the Duke was presumed killed.

On finding the document, the Pimlico residents reason that their neighborhood still remains part of the Duchy of Burgundy even into the twentieth century. And because they are no longer technically on British soil, they declare their independence from the repressive paraphernalia of post-war restrictions, rationing, and taxes.

As the traditional encapsulation of the consequences such events might say, “hilarity ensues…” This is a quintessentially English film. And, it is actually an investigation of Englishness, perhaps best summarized by the film’s most famous line, used to open this post.

Expressed with pride and good-humored intent, Englishness here is a bit of latent anarchy and disregard for authority coupled with working-class stubbornness, community spirit and ability to pull together in the face of a common threat. Without cynicism, the story characterizes the pride, dignity and hopes many British people felt in the post-war period.

And the pigs? Well you’ll have to wait to the climactic confrontation between Plucky Little Burgundy and Whitehall. As negations with Her Majesty’s Government go nowhere, a state of siege is declared on Pimlico.

Yet Londoners flock to their fellows aid and “Bundles to Burgundy” is the inevitable newspaper headline. Their fellow Londoners recognize in the disenfranchised people of Pimlico their own indomitable spirit in the pursuit of simple fairness. A mobilized citizenry then mount a Berlin Blockade style airlift and food parcels and pigs descend into Pimlico from planes and helicopters.

Literally, Pigs in Blankets

Or shear swine, all cry and no wool;

- Samuel Butler. Hudibras, pt. I, canto I, l. 852

To “shear your pig” is a common euphemism for an act of futility. As most any farmer will tell you, you’ll get a lot of noise for very little wool if you try to shear most any pig.

And, as noted above, no less an authority than the English writer, artist and satirist, Samuel Butler (1835-1902), has even weighed in on the shearing of pigs. Clearly Butler’s travels never took him near to the Curly Coat pigs of Lincolnshire in the east of England, or to Austria and Hungary, home of the of Mangalitza pigs. Warm sweaters could easily be knitted from the sheared “wool” of these pigs, they are literally, pigs in blankets.

Big, Fat and Rather Sheepish

Seen from a ways off Mangalitza pigs bear a striking resemblance to sheep – a big fat sheep. A casual glance from a non-husbandman and you would have no idea that they are pigs, that is until you get a view of their snouts. Then you see they are pigs, not posers.

It can be presumed that their curly, woolly hair has these pigs occasionally feeling a bit sheepish. But it also makes them very hardy, helping them to survive in the harsh, damp and cold winters of their native lands. Also, their thick hair and underlying black skin protect them from summer sunburn.

Extinction and Renaissance

Today, the Mangalitza breed is rare, even in its native Hungary and Austria. It is very similar to England’s Lincolnshire Curly Coat breed. That English sheep-pig was once a common sight, but it became extinct in 1972.

Lincolnshire Curly Coat (ca. 1920)

In the early 1900s through the 1920’s, England exported hundreds of Lincolnshire Curly Coats to Austria and Hungary. The Hungarians used the Lincolnshire Curly Coat to cross with their very similar native curly coated pig, the Mangalitza, and the resultant cross was nicknamed the ‘Lincolista’.

Since 2006 efforts by several English breeding groups and zoos have succeeded in bringing some of the cross-bred Mangalitza pigs into England. Now there are long-term plans to create several sustainable herds and an English renaissance for the Lincolnshire Curly Coat pig.

Colorful, Hair and Lardy

Mangalitza pigs in England today are worth around five times the value of a standard farm-raised pig. Their meat is lardier than the current breeds in England, with a nutty flavor. This makes them highly valued for use in Parma-style ham cuts, like prosciutto, an uncooked smoked ham. Their meat also lends itself equally to more traditional ‘English’ sausages and flavorsome bacon.

The Mangalitza pigs are bred in three colors, bright red, blonde and black with a cream stomach. The original Lincolnshire Curly Coats were traditionally shorn once a year and the wool used to make men’s sweaters – a nice item to be wearing on a chilly morning while enjoying some of that flavorsome bacon… Hair from the Mangalitza pigs is particularly popular now in the US as it retains air bubbles under water, making it ideal for tying fishing flies.

Porcine Optimism

Samuel Butler, and many a pessimist will assert that it seems that every man must have a clip at his own particular pig, and cannot be made to believe that, like every other time, it will yield him nothing but noise and bristles.

If you know a bit about pigs, you would never expected silence in your piggery, nor would you ever consider shearing your pigs. Yet here we have pigs eminently worth shearing, and I’ll bet you want one of those pig ‘wool’ sweaters…

Today preservation programs for Mangalitza pigs and dedicated breeders associations are in place in Switzerland, France, England, the United States and other countries. So perhaps the optimists have won out. And these things are so darn cute, too. Look for them in more zoos, animal parks, and in theme farms in all these countries. Their woolly coats are a security blanket.

Baaaaa...

In the Porkopolis.org Library, poetry updates for mid-April include: an eccentric Anglican; a moveable feast; diction adapted to a certain class of readers; lawyers, not pigs in time of famine; hogs and men hunted and penned in an inglorious spot; and lastly, perpetual promises, but to no good ends.

The poet Robert Peters discusses Gyp, the big black pig of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875) an eccentric Anglican clergyman.

The Art Museum has added Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Land of Cockaigne.” This painting’s special moveable feast, a ready-to-eat pig, also attracts Robert Peters’ attention.

For the poet Hale Chatfield, Porky Pig is the point of departure for a look at the perpetual promise and beautiful hopelessness of language and life.

Nathaniel Cotton, M.D., a mental health practitioner and poet of the eighteenth century, reflects that “once a hog, and always so” with a certain level diction adapted to the class of readers whom he was most anxious to please.

John Courtenay contemplates poetically how a Pope who asked for swine from Naples in a time of famine was offered lawyers instead, as they had a surplus of the latter, and dressed “in robes most decorus…”

In a sonnet, Claude McKay states, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot” and set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance.

The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, says, “The Mount Rushmore of Warner Bros. cartoons would be composed of the not-so-solemn faces of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and the token human, Elmer Fudd.”

And finally, David Slavitt tells us how some pigs in Poland get to wear burlap suits, but to no good end; and he wonders if those of among us, hoping for a reward in the hereafter, might just fare the same.