Every now and again someone will ask why this site is named the Dancing Sausage Web Journal. Sometimes they don't, and they just assume it has something to do with an epic wang, or something. There used to be a short explanation on the site; it didn't survive the move from Evan's server, but hey, I actually back things up sometimes...

Here's the original statement about the site, possibly modified once not long after it was named -- I don't think the barm-and-swossidge references were in the first draft.

"The name Dancing Sausage refers to my experience as one of the 600-some-odd people arrested against our constitutional rights on April 15, 2000 at a protest in Washington, DC. As I was processed into jail I felt more like a piece of meat than a citizen. A sausage. I sat in jail for some eight hours, my hands restrained in plastic zip-ties, and all I wanted to do was dance.

It's a more general observation on life, too, I guess. We are nothing but meat, doomed eventually to decay. We move thoughtlessly, but with passion.

The piglet, the stick, the barm-- the swossidge. Juicy, oh so terbel juicy. Ah putcha putcha way."

I should note in choosing the name I was also acutely aware that I didn't want to refer to much of anything else directly. I was so tired of blogs named for song lyrics, even if they were They Might Be Giants quotes. I like that "Dancing Sausage" came out. It could be the name of a pub someplace.

I seem to keep coming back to the same things. Tonight I realized that part of my objection to "space" as it's been discussed in my Digital Geographies and Virtual Space class -- i.e., only the culturally-constructed elements of space -- may in part be traced back to that night sleeping near an open commode on a cold, dirty terrazzo floor with my left wrist zip-tied to my right knee. The rest of it can probably be traced to the first time I saw swing dancers perform an aerial.