STAN FREBERG HERE...Your Normal Mushroom/Tunnel Project
Stan Freberg here. You remember the underground "supercollider" tunnel? Project went kaput. Now a man wants to grow mushrooms in the abandoned tunnel. Sounds like your normal "mushrooms in the abandoned supercollider tunnel project." Be right back. [:60 SPOT BREAK]
Freberg here. In Ft. Worth, Texas, a petroleum engineer has his eye on 5 miles of dark, dank tunnels, where scientists had once contemplated smashing atoms. But Noriz Vachiste doesn't want it for science--he wants to harvest white button mushrooms.
Vachiste, president of a Texas firm that owns a Colorado mushroom farm, says the underground remnants of the uncompleted superconducting supercollider, south of Dallas, are prime turf for fungus, which is what a mushroom is. Shouldn't that be fungi?
The 5 mile stretch of tunnel is 200 feet underground and sealed with concrete. The Energy Department is considering abandoning the tunnels and letting them fill up with water. "That'd be a great waste of resources," says Vachiste, who sees his mushroom bunker disappearing. I say, "How about just reactivating the supercollider?" Thousands of jobs were lost when Congress killed that project.
Wait a minute--how about building a recording studio is the tunnels? Think of the echo chamber possibilities! I don't think record artists would mind co-existing with a mushroom farm, hallucigenically speaking; eat a few in between takes. "Far out, man!"
Stan Freberg here.
Copyright (C)1997, Stan Freberg/Freberg, Ltd. (but not very) Distributed by Dick Brescia Associates and Radio Spirits, Inc.