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a reporter from Canada. “Canada!” she snorts. “What do Canadians know about news? MOOSE LOST,
    MOOSE FOUND. MORE SNOW.”
    Anyway … the lost moose. It was made of fibreglass, about seven feet tall and six feet long, Terry Tilleson told us, and had been fastened to the front door of the local Moose Lodge right under the security light—only it wasn’t there any longer. Not only that, it was the second time the moose had gone AWOL, so someone in Menomonie had a thing for that particular ungulate. We were sorry about his missing moose, of course, but at the same time, we were quite taken with the name Menomonie, and since it
was
a moose and all that had taken us there, we wondered if Menomonie might not be the right place to anoint as our American Reading.
    Senior producer Marie Clark decided to put the question to our audience. They could nominate alternatives to Menomonie if they wished, and then we’d have one of those totally spurious web elections to determine the winner. In the end, it came down to four places: Peoria, Illinois; Normal, Illinois; Peculiar, Missouri; and Menomonie. Producer Max Paris did the counting, and on June 25, 2002, Barbara Budd proclaimed Menomonie the new official centre of the wacky universe in the U.S., with 41 percent of the vote. Luckily for her, it’s easier to pronounce than it is to spell.
    But you know, Menomonie never caught on quite the way Reading did, much to the Reading Man’s sorrow, no doubt.We might have fought harder for Menomonie if we’d known then what I’ve since learned. While trying to nail down the correct spelling of the place, I found that the beautiful
city
of Menomonie (population fifteen thousand) is located partially within the
town
of Menomonie in Dunn County, northwest Wisconsin—NOT to be confused (though it’s bound to be, isn’t it?) with Menomonee Falls, which is incorporated as a
village
and contains thirty-two thousand people, in north
east
Wisconsin, although it’s north
west
of Milwaukee. Wherever and whatever it is, Menomonie sounds like our kind of place.
    Don’t ask me if they ever found their moose; I don’t know. One thing I should add, though, is that in September 2000, I had my own Big Cabbage moment: Barbara Everingham in Wasilla, Alaska, told me about winning a local Big Cabbage contest with a specimen that weighed 105.6 pounds (47.9 kilos for the metric crowd). I was surprised that they could grow such big vegetables in the short growing season they had, but she reminded me that they also had sun 24 hours a day during the summer.
    FYI, the Big Cabbage world record holder is Bernard Lavery, formerly of Llanharry, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Wales, who grew a plant that weighed 124 pounds in 1989. In the account he posted on the Internet, Dr. Lavery says it would have weighed more but the movers kept losing pieces of it as they were hauling it to Alton Towers, 210 miles away, where the Worldwide Giant Vegetable Championships were being held that year.
    So all in all, it was a disastrous harvest. Although I broke the world record, I should have chalked up one of at least
150
lb. The huge cabbage ended up in a sorry state, with thousands of visitors poking at it over the four days that it was on exhibition. At the end of the show, I gave bits and pieces of it away as souvenirs to whoever wanted it.
    This cabbage abuse seems to have soured Dr. Lavery on growing big vegetables. According to his posting, he subsequently went to work for Sheik Zayed in Abu Dhabi and then settled in Sutton St. Edmund in Lincolnshire, England, where he grows “a few pumpkins and sunflowers for the children.”
    As of this writing, Barb Everingham’s cabbage still holds the state record in Alaska—and she didn’t feed it anything special.

FOUR
Tim and Colin and Julie and Yulya
Radio that takes hot air to new heights
    I t’s May 2004, and Canadian adventurer Colin Angus is telling us about a little trip he’s planning to make from Vancouver to Moscow with