Idyll Banter: Top Guns Choose Their Big Cheese

While the world was focused on the World Cup and national soccer supremacy this summer, the most intense competition of any sort may actually have been occurring off the coast of Washington state at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. It was there in July where cheeses from Vermont and Wisconsin went head-to-head in a "cheese-off," with the winners getting bragging rights and the losers getting angioplasties.

I am honestly not sure why so many Americans watched the World Cup, which was only going to wound our national pride, when we could have brought our vuvuzela horns to Whidbey Island and cheered on our cheddars. (The vuvuzela is a plastic horn that sounds like a giant, flesh-eating killer bee; it is every mosquito that has kept you awake on a hot summer night.) After all, Americans consume a whooping 34 pounds of cheese per person every year, though that figure is misleading: If you remove me from the data, the number falls to about seven. I like my cheese.

The "cheese-off" was triggered by Lt. Scott Maynes, a 27-year-old Electronic Counter Measures Officer aboard EA-6B Prowlers. (To put that in English, he is sort of like the guy who sits behind Tom Cruise in the movie, Top Gun.) Maynes grew up in Springfield and South Burlington.

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