The wrong kind of sausage festival

Dear readers, I have two pieces of sad news. The first is that I have just broken up with my partner of many years. This is, of course, sad news for me, but it's great news for anyone that wanted to date her and was worried that I'd knife them in some kind of soft, important body part. Potential suitors, your important and unimportant body parts are safe from me.

The second piece of sad news relates to the town of Rossland. You see, adding another single man to this town means the sausage factor here is just that little bit higher. The town is now teetering on a statistical precipice beyond which no place that isn't a gay bar should ever go. If so much as a minivan full of single men should drive down the main street of town, our sausage ratio will be tipped over the edge and the entire town will turn into an enormous cylinder of dubiously nutritional "meat".

The sausage factor that I'm referring to has two forms. The first compares the number of men to the number of women in a region. A high factor means lots of men, and not many women. But often the more telling statistic is a sausage factor among single folk.

Sausage factors that indicate a predominance of men compared to women seem to be a feature of ski resort life. At Broken River, the absence of women was so acute that the unofficial slogan of the ski hill was "Not Gay", and the story of The Time The Guy From Mt Cheeseman Stole Our Woman was still told in vivid detail some weeks after the unfortunate lady was whisked away by the bearded patroller from the ski hill next door.

In Rossland, the pool of people is much larger, but the sausage ratio (especially when limited to single folk) still seems to be stubbornly low. It is not clear from casual observation whether there actually are any single women in Rossland at all. However, casual observation will immediately reveal a plethora of single men. And their beards. Of course, my addition to the pool of single men is of statistical value only. I do not represent any competition for those men looking to leave their current sociological category, either by pairing with hypothetical single women, or (in especially desperate times) with each other.