"Report: Cops Look for Sausage"

Well, the Italian Sausage has gone AWOL.

You know, I really hope that Randall Simon is somehow involved. That would rock! (And in case you're wondering, Simon's claim to fame is this incident.)

Update (2/28/13): Well, the missing link has now been found. This article includes the following superb line: Bartender Jen Mohney told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that two men -- one wearing a hoodie pulled over his face -- brought the $3,000, 7-foot-long Italian Sausage costume into the bar, dropped it onto a stool and told her, "You did not see anything." Seriously, that ought to be the first line of a novel!

Caltech SausageFest

Caltech has made it official: They're going to have a SausageFest.

Funny, I thought that they've been having one for years.

Tales from the arXiv: Mastication of Fish Sausage

Not only is this abstract "awesome", but I think that the authors might have an Ig Nobel prize in their future... In particular, I'd like to point out the last sentence: In order to explain this structure, we propose a mastication model for fish sausage based on stochastic processes.

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arXiv:1002.0404 (*cross-listing*)
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 07:17:47 GMT (878kb)

Title: Fragmentation of a viscoelastic food by human mastication
Authors: Naoki Kobayashi, Kaoru Kohyama, Kouichi Shiozawa
Categories: physics.data-an cond-mat.stat-mech physics.bio-ph
Comments: JPSJ3, 4 pages, 8 figures
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Fragment-size distributions have been studied experimentally in masticated viscoelastic food (fish sausage).The mastication experiment in seven subjects was examined. We classified the obtained results into two groups, namely, a single lognormal distribution group and a lognormal distribution with exponential tail group. The facts suggest that the individual variability might affect the fragmentation pattern when the food sample has a much more complicated physical property. In particular, the latter result (lognormal distribution with exponential tail) indicates that the fragmentation pattern by human mastication for fish sausage is different from the fragmentation pattern for raw carrot shown in our previous study. The excellent data fitting by the lognormal distribution with exponential tail implies that the fragmentation process has a size-segregation-structure between large and small parts.In order
to explain this structure, we propose a mastication model for fish sausage based on stochastic processes.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0404 , 878kb)