Word: epernay
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Just as good earth and climate around Epernay, France, provide nature's ideal spot for nurturing champagne grapes, the Midwest's long growing season, heavy spring or summer rains and rich, two-foot-deep topsoil are perfect for grain cultivation. Kansas and Oklahoma are wheat country. Just north in the hardy soil of Illinois and Iowa lie the great corn belt and vast fields of soybeans. Farther north, in the Dakotas and Minnesota, grow wheat, soybeans, sugar beets. Here is the richest farm land east of Eden, where the biblical seven years of bountiful harvests are usually followed...
They usually get their wish. The co author of that salacious little novel Candy was billed as Maxwell Kenton until he was unmasked as Terry Southern. Mark Epernay was supposed to have written the pseudoscientific McLandress Dimension, a book measuring the ego capacity of prominent people...
Winemakers in Reims, Epernay, Tours-sur-Marne and other towns in the Champagne district of France last week observed a familiar three-century tradition. In antiseptic rooms, committees of tasters eyed, sniffed and sipped six-month-old white wine, neatly spit out each taste into marble basins. Testing 25 to 45 varieties, they matched the acidity of one with the sweetness of another, the weakness of one with another's strong alcoholic body. When they were done, the formula had been arrived at by which such famous champagne houses as Krug, Mumm, Moët et Chandon...
...there is much in The McLandress Dimension which will appeal to Harvard readers. Mr. Epernay obviously knows a great deal about the University. He speaks of but does not name a certain Harvard professor of Comparative Literature who has a community-wide reputation for absent-mindedness and a penchant for sloppy dressing. He suggests also that if a list of the guests at a faculty cocktail party and a tally of their drinks could be rushed to the Harvard-M.I.T. computer center by 8 P.M., by 8:02 he could determine the exact pattern of conversation, argument, and sexual...
Indeed, with such a wealth of reference Harvardiana, some brash readers have gone so far as to suggest that Mark Epernay, described on the cover-flap as "evidently a distinguished observer of politico-economic trends," is really the pseudonym of a Harvard professor. A few have even had the gall to mention--or, rather, whisper--the name of John Kenneth Galbraith. But that is patently ridiculous. Harvard professors are far too intellectual and have too many hour exams to mark, government officials to consult, and ambassadorial duties to attend to, to have the inclination or the time to write facetous...