Two-time Olympic gold medalist Seth Wescott of Carrabassett Valley has been accorded the highest honor a male athlete can receive.

Wescott has been asked to pose nude in Playgirl.

OK, I admit I completely made that up. Male Winter Olympic winners are almost never asked to take it all off for skin magazines. First of all, there’s too much to take off. By the time they finish stripping down four or five layers, the readers have all fallen asleep. Second, once flesh is actually exposed, it tends to be kind of white, pasty, and unappealing. And finally, there’s the tendency toward furriness. It’s an understandable genetic adaptation in biathletes and Canadians. But it’s distracting in a foldout.

Nevertheless, Wescott has achieved lasting recognition. He’s going to appear on a cereal box.

Not nude, of course. That’s just not the kind of thing you want to see at the table first thing in the morning.

Wheaties, the cereal in question, is known as “The Breakfast Of Champions,” because that sounds better than “The Breakfast Of People Who Like To Eat Flakes That Taste Like They Were Chipped Off The Wallboard.” In addition to Wescott, Olympic winners Lindsey Vonn (who really did pose with almost no clothes on in Sports Illustrated’s 2010 swimsuit issue) and Shaun White (who is legally required to wear extra clothing whenever he goes out in public) will also get cereal fame.

By the way, for you cynics who don’t believe that getting chosen to appear on a cereal box is anything less than achieving instant immortality, keep in mind that there are people out there who, at this very moment, are seeking rare cereal boxes to collect and trade with their incredibly geeky friends.

Already, a pristine Wescott container is worth more than a vintage box of Post Pink Panther Flakes (“Pink Frosted”) from the 1970s.

Jeez, maybe nude photos of Seth wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

Not to change the subject, but there are other things to make fun of this week. Such as the annual Maine rites of spring. Which, in much of the state, have arrived uncommonly early.

In southern Maine, flowers are sprouting. In northern Maine, soggy gravel roads are being posted against heavy truck traffic.

And in the mysterious plot of land known as the “Turner Triangle” (the area around Turner – home of the Turner beast, which turned out to be a dog – Greene, and Leeds, where the tectonic plates sometimes intersect with the astral plain to form a harmonic convergence of intensive stupidity), it’s time for the annual Bigfoot migration.

In early February, a man in Leeds reported seeing a hairy, seven-foot-tall creature walking across Line Road in Leeds. A footprint found in the snow indicated the creature had feet fourteen to sixteen inches long, making it almost impossible for it to find stylish shoes.

Particularly at the kinds of stores you find in the Turner Triangle.

In no way do I think the sighting of this creature is connected to rumors in the area of photo shoots of Olympic athletes for future Wheaties boxes. Although the description does fit several players on the Russian hockey team.

You can check for yourself. They’re posing nude in this month’s issue of Playbeast.

For true weirdness, one cannot linger in Leeds, tarry in Turner, or goof off in Greene. In those places, the oddities are all alleged to be from this planet. But in Cobscook Bay, the native population is under assault by extraterrestrial forces:

Moon snails.

According to the Bangor Daily News, virtually all the clams in the area have been eaten by these insidious creatures or else shipped back to their evil masters hidden in their bunkers deep beneath the lunar surface.

Moon snails are hated by everyone. Except the French, who consider them a great delicacy and refer to them as escargot de lune (literally: “Wheaties”). So, the solution seems simple:

Import thousands of French citizens, and release them on the flats. We might want to make sure they have plenty of melted butter and chopped garlic, too. Within days, the moon snail population will be decimated, after which we’ll put these brave French heroes in space ships and send them to the moon, where they’ll finish off the Emperor of the Moon Snails and his fiendish court of vampire mollusks.

We should make sure the rockets are adequately stocked with cognac for the digestif. They’ll need something to settle their stomachs after eating a crater full of alien snails.

There is, however, another possible solution. Moon snails fear only one thing on Earth as much as the French.

Seth Wescott.

Laugh if you will, but if he lands on you with that snowboard, it’s going to hurt, shell or no shell.

Still, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect Wescott to single-handedly wipe out the moon-snail hoards. So, we’ll have to turn to the thing the creatures fear second to the French and Olympic snowboardcross champions. And that is:

Gaboon vipers.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a very realistic alternative, because these poisonous snakes live in sub-Saharan Africa and rarely visit the United States, mostly because they’re on the no-fly list.

But now there’s evidence the Gaboon vipers have heard of our plight with the moon snails and are coming to our rescue. How else are we to explain the discovery of a dead snake of that very species on a trail behind a movie theater in Saco.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, why would a deadly, five-foot-long Gaboon viper be going to the movies when there are currently no major motion pictures playing in Saco that feature snakes in significant roles. I mean aside from Mel Gibson.

The answer is, That snake wasn’t out for a night on the town – you know, fang a couple of rodents and suck down a brew, then take in a flick. That snake was headed for Lubec to battle the moon snails. Somehow, word leaked out, and he (I’m arbitrarily assuming it was a male viper, although if you want to check, feel free) was waylaid by agents of the moon snail emperor.

We can only hope that reinforcements will arrive soon to avenge him.

Hang on Cobscook Bay clamdiggers.

Although, once Trader Joe’s opens its first Maine store in Portland, we can just get our clams there.

I wonder if they’ll have Wheaties.

Al Diamon is planning to skip breakfast to answer e-mails sent to aldiamon@herniahill.net

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