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7 Great Sausage Events
1. COMIC SAUSAGE

Epicharmus, a Greek dramatist who lived during the golden age of Sophocles and Aeschylus, wrote a comedy titled Orya (`The Sausage') around 500 BC. Because the play exists today only as a fragment, we will never know exactly what the Greeks thought was funny about sausage.

2. HEATHEN SAUSAGE

The ancient Romans were so fond of pork sausage spiced with pine nuts and pepper that the dish became a staple of the annual Lupercalian and Floralian festivals. Since these pagan celebrations usually degenerated into orgiastic rites, the early Christians looked upon them with disapproval. When Constantine the Great, a Christian, became emperor in 324 AD, he outlawed the production and consumption of the sinful sausage. But the Romans refused to cooperate and developed a flourishing black market in sausage. They continued to eat the bootlegged delicacies throughout the reigns of several Christian emperors until the ban was finally lifted.

3. FATAL SAUSAGE

At a simple peasant meal in Wildbad, Germany, in 1793, 13 people shared a single sausage. Within hours they became seriously ill, and six of them died. Their disease became known as botulism - a word coined from the Latin for sausage, botulus. The powerfully toxic bacteria Clostridium botulinum inside the sausage could have been easily killed by boiling it for two minutes. Once in the body, botulism toxins attack the nervous system, causing paralysis of all muscles, which brings on death by suffocation.

4. HUMAN SAUSAGE

Adolph Luetgert, a Chicago sausage maker, was so fond of entertaining his mistresses that he had a bed installed in his factory. Louisa Luetgert was aware of her husband's infidelities and, in 1897, their marriage took a dramatic turn for the worse. Louisa subsequently disappeared, and when the police arrived to search Luetgert's factory, they found human teeth and bones - as well as two gold rings engraved `L.L'. - at the bottom of a sausage vat. During his well-publicised trial, Luetgert maintained his innocence, but he was convicted of murder and spent the rest of his life in prison.

5. MUCKRAKING SAUSAGE

Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards and meat industry, contained shocking descriptions: `There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage . . . there would be meat stored in great piles . . . thousands of rats would race about on it . . . these rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together'. Americans were deeply alarmed by the filth described, and in the same year the book was published, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

6. INSOLENT SAUSAGE

In October, 1981, Joseph Guillou, an engineer on the Moroccan tanker Al Ghassani, was arrested, fined £50, and sentenced to two years in jail for insulting Morocco's King Hassan. Guillou's offence was hanging a sausage on the hook normally reserved for a portrait of the monarch. A sausage, said Guillou, was `more useful than a picture of the king'.

7. VICTIM SAUSAGE

During home games at Miller Park, the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team holds `sausage races' in which people costumed as different types of sausages run around the park between innings. During a game on July 9, 2003, as the runners passed the visiting team's dugout, Randall Simon, the first baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, struck the Italian sausage, Mandy Block, with his bat, knocking her to the ground. After the game, Simon was handcuffed by Milwaukee County sheriff's deputies, taken to a police station, and fined $432 for disorderly conduct.