Friday, June 07, 2002

INSITEVIEW Proprietor and homeboy Tom Shugart blogged on the brat... For the non sausage and fried potato people among us let me 'splain:  The bratwurst (affectionately known as the brat and pronounced to rhyme with COT, not with CAT) is the State Sausage in Wisconsin.  Pictured above are a dozen varieties of bratwurst manufactured by Usinger's sausage (Milwaukee).  This is just the tip of meatberg.  Usingers is just one of eleventy-seven different meat packing companies manufacturing brats in Wisconsin.  The best bratwurst in my opinion are Johnsonville brats (Sheboygan).  The reason they are the best is because they are made with meat that has not yet died... pre-rigor they call it in the trade.  The protein in Johnsonville brats is so fresh that rigor mortis has not yet set in.  Yum yum.  The best brats also have a consistent "bite" because they are no longer made by stuffing ground and seasoned pork into a length of fairly clean sheep intestine.  Rather, they have a synthetic protein casing that is probably not bad for you at all. Tom is right that State Street Brats continues to serve a consistently great bratwurst.  I was in school at UW Madison longer ago than I care to think.  The place was called the Brat Haus in those days, and the beer and sausage haven't changed much (although the menu is a little more diverse today, which is to say that brats are not the only food items served). 2:10:07 PM

AKMA is the man... Maybe I can get him signed up for a Sandhill Trek interview this summer.  Right now he has a "Blog in Prog" about identity - not the dry digital identity functional concepts that Norlin touts, but the juicier stuff:  the  "what's a person made of" stuff.  I'm struggling with a dimension of this in the Interviews.  Some of us need to be held, but how does this come across as an identifying characteristic?  And why should it dominate?  How much emphasis should it have in the context of all the other interesting characteristics that feed the flames of the person's identity. Some of us open up easily from the very center of our beings, but have a tough time filling in the peripheral information that will help a friend relate. Some of us can be marvelously circumspect about intimate, personal matters without being the least bit coy. After working with three wonderful women, I thought I had better get some gender balance going or this would start to look a lot like the Play-geezer Interviews.  And there are men out there who are just as sensitive and compelling as the women of Blogaria.  Some of these men have consented to be interviewed. Maybe some of the answers to the questions about identity that AKMA is asking will be inferentially clear from the content of the interviews we are accumulating online here at Sandhill Trek. A lot of maybes today.  I wish Jeneane's friends had stayed away one day longer so we could have rounded out her interview nicely in time for her birthday on Sunday. 1:13:17 PM