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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