G-4 Tech TV has started re-running episodes of The Man Show, which I don't quite get because the show has little to do with technology, video games or anything else to do with the channel. G-4s also been running episodes of Star Trek the next Generation and that makes some sort of sense because it's science fiction and there is technology featured - fake technology, but technology none the less. This, I guess, is much in line with the MTV program philosophy where the music channel features little music.
So, I was watching one of these episodes of The Man Show where the hosts Adam and Jimmy were going through a museum of creepy types of men when they got to the Strip Club DJ. This guy was in his booth announcing strippers when he said: 'Cinammon from Menomonie Wisconsin.' Hey, that's my home town! They just said the name of my home town, though why they would use it is beyond me, other than they must actually know somebody from these parts.
This isn't the first time Menomonie has made the news, either. About a year ago author Neil Gaiman was shown in USA today standing in front of his house in Menomonie Wisconsin. I can't say I recognize the place, although I think it was actually out of town a few miles. Neil Gaiman is primarily a graphic novelist but I have also seen his name on regular novels and Just by coincidence I happened to see him on the History Channel talking about comics.
I've never met him and as far as him being a writer and me being a writer, well, we're in entirely different leagues. (hint. I don't count as big league).
Recently Menomonie made the news when a back-up pharmacist at K-Mart (I believe) refused to fill the prescription of a University Student on a Week end. He did that because of his religious beliefs, but he went a step beyond just not filling the prescription and confiscated the prescription so that poor girl was then left in the position of either not having sex that week end (doubtful) or having unprotected sex (I'd put my money on this one). If she did have a baby I hope she named it after the self-righteous pharmacist who was responsible.
Menomonie doesn't generally make national news for good reasons. A few years earlier than this (I know, my time line is pretty vague) a student at the University here - the University of Wisconsin Stout - went on a mad bombing spree across the country. He was planting bombs in mail boxes and stuff and his goal was to make a smiley face of his atrocities across the map of the United States. Cute. Except for the suffering and horror he caused.
Menomonie has made the news a few times because of Stout. I'll give you a quick plug here: The University of Wisconsin Stout is the largest undergraduate university of industrial education in the world and the only university to win the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Excellence. And my father was a professor there.
About twenty years back Stout's school of Home Economics' Hotel Restaurant Management Program was experimenting with a prototype of a burger flipper. That thing made it into three national magazines - at least - I think they were NewsWeek, Discover and probably Time. It was in one of these little blurbs in each one and every magazine got the name of the school wrong, the University of Menomonie (wrong), the University of Wisconsin in Menomonie (wrong) and I can't remember what the third one was, but it was also wrong. I know there's such a thing as facts checkers, but I guess they must be too busy to - I don't know - check facts.
Once when major league football players were on strike NBC came to Menomonie and covered one of our local college games. It was a really pretty Fall day with the leaves all golden and red and yellow. Stout at that time had a very good football team for it's division, ranked number one in the nation. The coach had invented something called the Radar defense where the linemen would start out at the beginning of the play not bent over, but upright in a sort of attentive crouch. The Radar defense worked wonderfully though, of course, it was just a matter of time before everyone figured out how to beat it, which they must have since you don't see anybody anywhere doing the Radar defense.
So, Stout won that game with it's unbeatable Radar defense and that coach went someplace else for more money and Stout has had a mediocre football team ever since.
What you need to know about Menomonie is that it is, in fact, in Wisconsin. It is not Menomonee Michigan and pretty much anyone who lives here can tell you stories about mixed up travel plans because that Menomonee is bigger and better known and travel agents outside of Wisconsin have been known to argue and tell residents here that they don't know which state they live in. When I was in the reserves, my plane trips for active duty were arranged by one of these lowest bid contractors. Two years in a row they had the tickets messed up, going from Escanaba one year and Milwaukee the next. The first one I was able to catch in time, the second one I didn't discover until I was at the airport because the blurry type on the ticket made Milwaukee indistinguishable from Minneapolis - the airport I was actually at.
In these days of the internet I imagine that doesn't happen so much anymore. In fact, I kind of wonder what could be left of the travel agent industry because mostly what they did and had was that computer and the ability to get tickets. Everybody has a computer so why do we need them?
If you happen to be in Menomonie and see me on the street, feel free to stop and talk. I probably won't be all that busy. You can recognize me because I'll be the guy wearing the Packer coat.
That's a joke. Everybody will be wearing a Packer coat.
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