So I was going through my usual Saturday ritual of grocery shopping with my oldest son ... this is one of my favorite activities of the week because we usually visit two or three stores and have a nice long talk about anything and everything. Anyway, we were checking out at Harmon's on 800 North in Orem, and it happened that the store was having a "birthday celebration" and that they were giving out prizes! When they announced that the customers at Checkout #8 were the winners, well, I could hardly contain myself because we were standing at Checkout #8! But I became convinced that something truly cosmic was happening when they presented us with our prize: a package of brats and a block of cheddar cheese! We weren't even wearing our Wisconsin gear!

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I arrived in Madison today for the Wisconsin Contracts Conference, which started this afternoon and continues tomorrow. As my flight flew over the isthmus, I looked down on the city and spotted the familiar landmarks. Despite the cold and the snow, this has been a wonderful homecoming, catching up with my former colleagues.

The conference launched with a presentation by Beth Mertz on her book, The Language of Law School, which is based on a study of eight first-year Contracts courses. Beth is a linguist, and she examines the ways in which people are translated into legal roles and their actions are translated into legal categories in the law school classroom. Beth describes the effect of this translation as follows:

The legal language taught in the United States ... has a double edge. On the one hand, the approach to legal reading found in law school classrooms offers students a potentially liberating opportunity to step into an impersonal, abstract, and objective approach to human conflict. On the other hand, erasing (or marginalizing) many of the concrete social and contextual features of these conflicts can direct attention away from grounded moral understandings, which some critics believe are crucial to achieving justice. Moreover, this step out of social context and emotion provides the law with a cloak of apparent neutrality, which can conceal the ways that law participates in and supports unjust aspects of capitalist societies. This approach also gives the appearance of dealing with concrete and specific aspects of each conflict, thereby hiding the ways that legal approaches exclude  from systematic consideration the very details and contexts that many would deem important for making just moral assessments.

The Wisconsin contracts materials are designed to provide some of that additional context, which is why the book is noticeably heavy on facts. As John Kidwell noted in his opening remarks to the conference, "facts matter." But which facts -- out of all those available -- are worthy of attention?

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I used to make fun of places like Tennessee, Delaware, and Oregon for their inability to cope with winter weather. This would never happen in Wisconsin. So much for that myth.

During last week's big storm, I was getting email messages about the University of Wisconsin closing, and I was stunned. They never close the University!

But I had no idea that some people were stuck in traffic for more than 12 hours:

The State Patrol said it became aware there was a serious problem around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. The fact that there were no major crashes delayed the response, Collins said.

The National Guard deployed a helicopter just before 11 p.m. to survey the extent of the traffic jam.

Sixty-eight National Guard soldiers, with help from state and county law enforcement and emergency management officials, distributed 7,000 bottles of water and 420 meals to stranded motorists throughout the night.

As traffic remained stalled past midnight, many truck drivers went to sleep, further delaying the effort to keep traffic flowing. Emergency officials had to knock on truck cabins to alert drivers that the road ahead was clear.

The National Guard helicopter surveyed the scene again at 4 a.m. and traffic was still blocked by stalled cars. Another sweep at 8 a.m. found traffic was moving, though very slowly.

There were no serious crashes or injuries resulting from the traffic jam.

Wow. This just shatters my image of my home state.

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Last night I attended the University of Wisconsin Varsity Band's Annual Spring Concert in the Kohl Center. When my friend Paul Hunter invited me, I had no idea what I was getting into, but it was a blast. Seriously, I haven't had that much fun in a long time. There was nothing subtle in this concert, just two hours of brass, percussion, and pyrotechnics. Band Director Michael Leckrone is insane, and he had everyone in the place dancing and singing. It also explained a lot about certain members of the Alumni Band.

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I think that's how my children will remember the Blizzard of 2007. Church was cancelled, and Mother Nature created a six-foot snow drift beside our garage. Two of my children spotted an opportunity.

My wife later helped the children build "Snowhenge," a supernatural monument, which doubled as a resting place.

We don't own a snow blower, so we clear our driveway the old fashioned way.

My oldest son shoveled the driveway three times in 24 hours. That pile of snow is mostly his work.

Of course, he had a bit of help from his old man.

At the end of the day, after spending about ten hours in the snow, two of my children discovered a 15-foot luge course on one of the drifts, which they attacked heartily on their backs without a sled. For a child, it doesn't get much better than this.

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Tomorrow's high in Madison is projected at 23° F, but I will miss Madison's balminess. I will be in LA, presenting a paper at Steve Bainbridge's Corporate Governance Colloquium.

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Syttende Mai means May 17th in Norwegian. This day is also known as Norwegian Constitution Day.

The short version: on that day in 1814, Norway adopted its own constitution after living under Danish rule for 500 or so years.

The longer version: after the Napoleonic War, a humbled Denmark gave Norway to Sweden, but Norway didn't want to go to Sweden so Norway adopted a constitution and declared its independence, which Sweden rejected, so they went to war, but they eventually decided to live in peace as separate kingdoms under a common king (Sweden's, of course), with Norway gaining true independence only after many years (in 1905). Whew!

Anyway, the Norwegians still celebrate May 17, and as a half-blooded Norsk (my mother is all Norwegian), I felt obliged to take my family to the Syttende Mai Festival in Stoughton, Wisconsin (just south of Madison). May 17 fell on a Wednesday this year, so the party was moved to the weekend. We weren't able to stay long, but actually, it was sort of dull, so we were happy to leave. But we did manage to find some cheese at the festival (this is, after all, still Wisconsin).

And if you are wondering, they were squeaky. Just like they are supposed to be.

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Madison was recently named the most romantic city in the United States.

Really? Romantic!?

Perhaps the judges hadn't seen this, or Boulder surely would have won the honor.

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Eat your heart out, Steve Bainbridge! We are enjoying another winter storm here in Madison. All of this snow has put me in a snowmobiling mood. Yesterday, I checked rental prices on snowmobiles. Look for a report just after Christmas.

Writing the word "snowmobiles" triggered a strange childhood memory. When I was in grade school, my teacher had all of us stand in groups based on our brand loyalty. Ski-Doo kids over here, Arctic Cat kids over there, etc. The point of that exercise has been lost to my memory, but I remember that Anthony Larson was the only person in the Rupp group. Anthony was always a little different.

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Fast Company is trying to locate hubs for the "creative class" (Richard Florida's term), and Madison is one of those hubs:

A progressive-minded enclave where unemployment is a rock-bottom 2.5% and the creative class continues to expand at an average of 7.8% a year. Madison owes much of its success to the 26,000 people who work in high-tech fields--a number that's growing every year. The vast majority of Wisconsin's recent $750 million biotech initiative will wind up here.

Madison was one of only two cities on the list located east of the Mississippi. The other: Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

Thanks to Allison Christians for the pointer.

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Where is the best place in the world to live? The Economist purports to have the answer (Ireland). My co-blogger Frank McIntyre explains some of the problems with the methodology, but I am undaunted. Below is a list of the best places in the United States where I have lived (with "lived" being anyplace where I have resided long enough to receive snail mail), ranked according to my own very subjective standards of livability and attempting to control for my job/school satisfaction in the particular locale (e.g., I had great job/school satisfaction in the three lowest-ranked locations):

1. Madison, Wisconsin
2. Lake Oswego, Oregon
3. Provo, Utah
4. Wilmington, Delaware
5. Salt Lake City, Utah
6. Newport Beach, California
7. Tempe, Arizona
8. University City, Missouri
9. Burk, Virginia
10. Osseo, Wisconsin
11. Nashville, Tennessee
12. Cleveland, Ohio
13. Chicago, Illinois
14. Houston, Texas
15. Lafayette, Louisiana

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New Glarus, Wisconsin reminds me of my own hometown of Osseo, except with a Swiss theme rather than a Norwegian theme. The Sugar River Cycling Trail runs through New Glarus, and on Memorial Day my wife and I took our youngest children on a short ride. It's a very flat, smooth trail built on an old railroad bed, just right for young children. After the ride, I gathered these photos (click for a better view) of the distinctively painted cows that populate the town. Apparently, there are 15 cows in all, but I found only 11 before my wife started asking whether I had lost my mind. I usually like to stop whatever I am doing when she asks that, as the answer is not clear. Still, I wonder what the other four cows look like ...

Oh, I just remembered to point out that the 12th picture does not contain a cow, but shows my three youngest children enjoying ice cream under a lilac tree.

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No record for brat consumption this time. The Brat Fest sold 181,710 brats, just short of last year's Memorial Day record of  189,432. Excuses abound. The one reason not mentioned, but that seems the most likely source of the dropoff to me: parking was a nightmare.

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These are photos from the Brat Fest in Madison. As you can see (click the collage to get a larger version), the organizers are shooting for a new record of 200,000 brats this year, and they had reached 40,120 when we entered the grounds just before noon today. (The old record is 189,432.) They have a good chance of reaching the new record if the weather cooperates because the new site will draw larger crowds with a lot of extra activities, such as rock climbing (that's my son), a petting zoo, four "moon walk" rides, and a live band.

Notice the line for the vegetarian brats ... or rather, the absence of a line. This is at the lunch hour! Compare that to the 12 lines for regular brats. As my daughter said, if you are going to brat fest, why eat vegetarian?

The Wienermobile survived a close call in the Madion City Council and made its annual appearance at the Brat Fest.

The other shots include behind the scenes grilling and wrapping. And one of the "world's longest condiment table" (80 feet), which includes a selection of mustards -- Dusseldorf, garlic, Italian herb, and traditional yellow. By the way, if you want to eat brats like a local, sauerkraut and mustard are the condiments of choice. Leave the ketchup for the hot dogs.

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Every Memorial Day and Labor day weekend, Madisonians enjoy the World's Largest Brat Fest, and my family is usually well-represented among those preparing the brats. My wife was grilling today, and my two oldest children will be working most of the day tomorrow and Monday. I may even make an appearance over the grill on Monday, all in service of a good cause: volunteers earn money for scout troops and other charities. If you are in the area, stop by the Alliance Energy Center. This year, they even have vegetarian brats for the first time!

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This is a silly story, but I just had to share. If you want to find a local business using Google Maps, here's how:

Use Google Maps to search within an area or neighborhood. It works like this: Say you want to find free wifi hotspots. Type in "free wifi" and the zip code, and the free hotspots appear at various locations on your map, with phone numbers for each location appearing on the right side of the page.

What if you wanted to find a brothel? Same procedure. Here are the results for Madison, which include the UW Anthropology Department and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Hmm.

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I am not sure how I missed this glowing story on Madison from last Sunday's Washington Post. Madison wins all kinds of awards, but this writer wants to crown Madison the King of Quirks. Some highlights:

• Michael Feldman: "From the air, it looks like a giant sinus cavity, with Madison as the septum."
• "I approach Ralph Barten of Ladysmith, Wis., who is representing the Wisconsin Coalition of Blind Hunters. Sure, people who are blind can hunt in Wisconsin, Barten tells me. In fact, he says, last year the state legalized the use of laser pointers on guns and bows for blind hunters."
• "Madison was already a Midwest center for arts and culture when native son W. Jerome Frautschi and his wife Pleasant Rowland, creator of the American Girl dolls, decided to donate a record-breaking $200 million to expand the downtown center. The completed first phase includes a 2,257-seat, state-of-the-art performing arts theater with walls and panels that shift and move by computer, to maximize acoustics for various types of performances. When the second phase is finished next spring, the center will house nine resident arts groups, including an opera company, a ballet company, a symphony orchestra, a chamber orchestra and theater companies. The addition, designed by architect Cesar Pelli, comes highly acclaimed. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians who performed there proclaimed it better than any hall they'd ever played."
• "We walk into the Rathskeller in the student union, where student agitators used to hatch their protest schemes. The walls are a sooty, nicotine brown. 'They thought the walls were stained with cigarette smoke, but they cleaned them and found out the paint was actually that color,' says Feldman. 'You used to be able to smoke pot here; now you can't smoke cigarettes.'"
• "The next day, on my own, I take Feldman's advice to check out the university milking barns to see cows that have portholes in their stomachs so that students can study their digestive systems. Seems cruel, but the cows appear content and perfectly normal, except for the see-through stomachs. A pre-vet student says that if I wait while she returns some foals to pasture, she'll open the porthole and give me a closer look. Really, I've seen enough."

I have seen everything the writer talked about in the story, except the inside of the concert hall. (Note to self: make plans for a concert!) When I toured the dairy, my guide stuck his whole arm up a cow's rectum to demonstrate something, I have forgotten what. The worst part was looking at him after the arm came out!

Thanks to my colleague Alta Charo for the pointer.

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The term skyscraper was coined in the 1880s, when the tallest buildings were 20-or-so stories. So it isn't such a stretch to called the proposed 27-story Archipelago Village Madison's first "skyscraper." The idea of a building that tall will offend some Madisonians -- and would require a change in the state law that limits buildings within one mile of the State Capitol to 187.2 feet  --  but Ann Althouse is eager for some upscale shopping!

Tall buildings are best situated by other tall buildings. Skyscapers standing apart look lonely and sometimes ominous. Apparently, the architects on this project agree, and they have designed the building with "varied rooflines meant to look like buildings built over time." Still, my guess is that the people of Madison will find the concentration a bit much in a city that still has a lot of room for expansion with smaller projects.

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These are the sorts of days we apologize for when recruiting new faculty from California to Madison. Ann has photos of the early morning snow. I am out in the country -- prairie land -- and the snow is flying horizontally by my windows. On the back deck, snow is swirling around in mini-tornadoes. Two- to three-foot drifts make my backyard look like a white ocean. The roads have just been plowed, but we won't see them for long in these conditions. As long as the electricity stays on and my internet connection holds, I am happy to camp out here.

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"Homebound" is a funny word. It can mean "moving or traveling homeward," but it can also mean "restricted or confined to home." Whenever I hear Vanessa Carlton sing A Thousand Miles, I get this mixed image in my brain.

Anyway, one of the great things about living in Wisconsin is that the weather occasionally shuts everyone down. Makes us homebound. Now, I realize that this can be threatening to some people, particularly those in need of emergency services, and I don't want to be insensitive. But I love the feeling of being shut in my house for a day or two. (When I was a child, I thought tornadoes were particularly exciting, until one of them destroyed our barn.) Today is shaping up as just such a day.

We drove on icy roads on our way back from the Outback Bowl Party, and the weather has just gotten worse. Apparently, some official entity has issued a travel advisory for our area, so I can look forward to an errand-free evening.

By the way, Ann proclaimed that the first precipitation of the year in Madison was hail, but way out here in Middleton we are having freezing rain. Check the difference between this and hail or sleet.

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While Christine is basking in the (relative) warmth of the Atlantic on the Outer Banks, I will be holding down the fort here in Madison.

"Zero" was the temperature as I drove to work today. That's cold. Until this week, temperatures in Madison have been relatively mild, by my standards. When the mercury is in the 20s or 30s, no problem. When they reach the teens, I find it a bit brisk. But temperatures in the single digits are painful.

At that point, my behavior starts to change. If I am driving, my main concern becomes finding a parking spot that minimizes the distance between my car and the closest building. If I am walking, like I was just now on State Street, closer stores become more attractive stores. The law school building is only about halfway up Bascom Hill, but I was so busy trying to shield my face from the cold that I was puffing like a race horse at the end of the Kentucky Derby by the time I reached the entrance. According to weather.com, the official temperature in Madison is 7°F, but it feels like -4°F. Ouch!

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The best lasagne ever comes in a tin from Gino's Italian Deli in Middleton, Wisconsin. I am not making this up. I am certain that someone from New York will email me to disagree, but until you've tasted Gino's, hold your tongue. I tried it for the first time a few weeks ago, and my children have already accused me of offering to buy Gino's whenever we have no other dinner plans.

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Good move. It could be up and running by next year. For my prior posts on wireless internet in Madison, see here and here.

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I had a conversation this past week with a local player in the entrepreneurial community about Madison's hopes for growing an indigenous biotechnology community. This was perhaps the most sobering assessment I have yet heard of Madison's prospects. This fellow, relying on experience in other tech centers, including Silicon Valley, said that the only chance for Madison to become a biotechnology industrial district was to lure an established company here through tax credits. The thought underlying this plan is that, more than anything, startup companies need managerial talent, and managerial talent is best found inside successful behemoths. Madison has business ideas, but few seasoned managers.

I think this path would be a mistake.

Quick, can you name any existing technology industrial district that was successfully formed in this way? Perhaps the closest is the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, which benefitted greatly from attracting IBM and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the mid-1960s. But the first major IPO from the Triangle was Red Hat in 1999, and the principals in that company had nothing to do with IBM. My impression is that much of the recent success of the Triangle is directly traceable to the excitement created by Red Hat.

Existing technology industrial districts were home grown. Silicon Vally: HP; Boston: DEC; Seattle: Microsoft; etc. People who recognize this keep looking for the home run in Madison, but the nature of the biotech businesses here may make that difficult. Most local companies are in diagnostics, which does not attract big money, even though it may require a substantial investment. The real returns are to be found in therapeutics -- which is riskier than diagnostics. Moreover, the time until super-profitability for such companies may be measured in decades, not years.

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Earlier this week, I spoke with Phil Greenwood, who is one of the driving forces behind the innovative M.S. in Biotech program here at the University of Wisconsin. I will be teaching a unit on entrepreneurial finance this fall to second-year students in the program, and I am very excited to be involved. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the local environment for biotechnology companies, and Phil opined, "We really need a home run." This has become the accepted wisdom in Madison. If we could just have one huge biotech success -- something that would create a lot of wealth in the community -- then other successes would follow.

Many had thought that Third Wave was going to be that home run, but it has turned out to be a double, I think. Promega is another company that is often mentioned with a faint sense of regret. Not that the company has been a failure, but that people keep hoping for more. The company that now seems to be the darling of all those who are looking for the home run is TomoTherapy. Who knows? The real home run may today be a small company, or just an idea in Hector DeLuca's laboratory.

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This is hard to believe, but today I made my first trip ever to the Dane County Farmer's Market on Capitol Square in Madison. By the time I arrived with my three youngest children, it was packed. People were walking around the square in a tight formation; but for the setting, they would have looked like prisoners of war on a long march. So we nudged our way in and were carried off in the current of humanity.

The booths were colorful with diverse offerings, include the largest green onions and the largest single zucchini I have ever seen. Vendors also sold flowers, cheese, organic vegetables, apples, fresh pasta, exotic meats (ostrich and buffalo), and political propoganda (mostly Kerry-Edwards, though I was asked to sign a petition to get an anti-war candidate on the ballot in Wisconsin). I overheard a man who said that he had been craving carrots. I have never craved carrots and cannot imagine what that would feel like.

It would have been uncomfortable being in such close quarters, except that everyone was in a great mood and being very polite. My children wanted some corn on the cob, so we bought a dozen ears, as well as some Paula Red apples. And some aged cheddar, of course.

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Continuing the Wisconsin theme of the last few posts, another Wisconsin State Journal article described a recent meeting of local business, government and community leaders to create an economic development plan.

This is what they came up with, accompanied by some of my editorial comments in bold:

* Business recruitment and retention -- creating a climate to help existing companies grow and to attract other businesses. That includes Madison's effort to find out what the city can do to improve its relationship with businesses.

[Here's a suggestion: disband the City Council! Ok, that won't work, but if you really want to attract and grow businesses, you will need to change the SOP (uh, standard operating procedure, for those who didn't grow up in my house).]

* Work force -- keeping local talent here, for instance, by connecting UW-Madison graduates to job openings.

[It's not clear to me why you need a special effort here. If you build it, they will come.]

* "Branding" the Madison area and marketing it -- for example, by highlighting "the wonderful health-care facilities that we have here and targeting folks that would be interested in that," Alexander said.

[Madison is already branded, and I don't mean this in a snarky way. People already know that it is a great place to live. This is not a problem.]

* Making sure that as the area grows, its quality of life is not diminished.

[Doh!]

* Examining Madison's relationship with other communities, such as Milwaukee and the local suburbs. Alexander said the area must "make sure Madison and Verona and Middleton and Fitchburg aren't competing against one another but they're working together to compete" against other communities.

[Regional cooperation is a good thing. I live in Middleton, it is booming, and most of us feel like we are part of Madison.]

I am not sure about the value of discussion groups like this one. I suppose that talking about concern for businesses places that on everyone's plate, but I am skeptical about the prospect of getting concrete policy actions from such a group.

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That was the front-page headline in the Wisconsin State Journal. The story reported that high school seniors in Wisconsin and Minnesota tied for the highest composite ACT scores in the nation. For Wisconsin, this is the 12th straight year at the top. Just in case you coastal dwellers had any illusions about where the smartest people in the country are to be found.

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Forbes {registration required} recently ranked Madison the "best metro area to launch a business or a career". The big difference maker? Education.

In a subsequent article, Forbes called Madison a "Miracle In the Midwest," and a "Hotbed Of Biocapitalism." It offers a nice description of the business landscape:

This hotbed of radicalism has grown into a seedbed of biocapitalism, propelling the region to the number one slot on our list of Best Places for Business and Careers. Scientists are developing artificial skin (at a company called Stratatech), vitamin D therapies for patients with chronic kidney disease (Bone Care International) and proteins that inhibit cancer-cell development (Quintessence Biosciences). Such biotech ventures cluster around the university and nearby Milwaukee, home of the Medical College of Wisconsin and a unit of GE Healthcare (2003 revenues: $10 billion), which acquired Lunar, a Madison maker of bone densitometers and ultrasound equipment, in 2000. Some 120 technology companies employing 8,000 people have sprung up in Madison during the past decade. Average annual salary: $60,000.

Unemployment runs at 2%, compared with 5.5% for the entire state, which has lost 54,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001. Brains power the Madison economy: The university, which employs 17,000 souls but has helped create 70,000 jobs in Madison, generates $4.7 billion a year in direct and indirect output, reports NorthStar Economics. The city has the highest concentration of advanced degrees in the country--2% of the population. And it has long been a haven for postgraduates who resort to driving cabs and delivering pizzas just to stay in Madison, drawn in part by year-round lakefront recreation, endless bike paths and a hyperactive schedule of performing arts. A growing magnet for retirees, entrepreneurs and university alumni, Madison has seen a gentle 23% rise in median home prices, to $163,000, since 1997.

It snows in May sometimes, but Madison is pretty cool in other ways, too.

Thanks to Ann for the pointer. (I am a little embarrassed that Anne Ann beat me to this business related story, but I don't read Forbes regularly, and she got the story from the local paper, about which I am sporadic.)

UPDATE: Ann might be interested to know that Ann is the #48 most common female name in the United States, while Anne ranks #85. Why am I so inclined to spell her name with an "e" on the end? Because of Anne of Green Gables, of course.

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And not just a little bit. This is a genuine, mid-winter snowfall. If this were December 24, I would think that it's magical, but on May 2, it's just annoying. This is a picture of some tulips in my backyard. Maybe Bainbridge was right, after all.

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Middleton lies just on the western edge of Madison. While Madison is pretty cramped, Middleton is in the midst of a building boom. New roads, new housing, and lots of new businesses. The new shopping center is Greenway Station, which is a middle American playground. Sharper Image, Galyens Sporting Goods, Ann Taylor, Bombay Company, and lots of new chain resaurants, including Macaroni Grill, Big Bowl (Asian), and Bear Rock Cafe (nice new concept). The newest addition to the still-unfinished development is Cheeseburger in Paradise. I suppose that I like Jimmy Buffet as well as the next guy, but this restaurant has flopped with my family.

It started last week, when my wife tried to get dinner with some of our children. (Where was I? Probably with the other children ...) Anyway, after being ignored and insulted by the wait staff -- not uncommon treatment for families with young children, which have a deserved reputation for being small tippers -- my wife left and had a very tasty meal at the Panchero's Mexican Grill, vowing never to return to CIP.

Well, since the family is out of town for their spring break (which doesn't match mine ... don't get me started!), I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to try CIP. Although I was seated immediately (single man, wearing a suit ... "Sure, we have room."), CIP was otherwise a disaster. Slow service, bad-tasting food, and a distracting decor. It was sort of a cross between a bad sports bar (the television in front of me played an infomercial for the entire length of my meal) and a Joe's Crab Shack. The food is unimaginative, and my pork sandwich was simply not good. I definitely should have tried the cheeseburger, but it was just a cheeseburger:

Cheeseburger in Paradise "I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French-fried potatoes." We can handle that. We put everything Jimmy likes onto 100% pure fresh ground choice beef and also top with Cheddar and American cheeses, with a big kosher dill pickle on the side.

This is your "signature item"? A burger with cheese, lettuce, tomato, and Heinz 57? Back to the drawing board, Jimmy.

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Several regular readers of this blog have contacted me to say that they like reading stories about Madison. These are people who lived in Madison at some point and enjoyed it. (Doesn't everyone who lives in Madison enjoy it?) Anyway, with that last post I inaugurated a new category called "Life in Madison," and I will attempt to share tidbits from time to time. Even if you have never lived here, I hope you will find something redeeming in the stories.

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In my ode to bakeries last week, I somehow failed to mention two local bakeries: Scott's Pastry Shoppe and Clasen's European Bakery. Scott's cake doughnuts -- especially their seasonal flavors, like pumpkin -- are as good as any you will every eat. Clasan's does fancier things, including breakfast pastries. Next week, I am looking forward to a King Cake from Clasen's for Mardi Gras.

By the way, in hunting for websites for Scott's and Clasen's, I found that top-rated bakery by Madison Magazine is Lane's Bakery. Obviously, I'm still new to the area. The good news is that it looks like we've found the destination for our field trip for this weekend!

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