Ran across Les Hook and Nova Kim from the “northeast Kingdom of Vermont” at the New Amsterdam Market in New York yesterday. I did a double-take when I saw the packages marked “Wild Vermont Lobster.” Ain’t no ocean there, folks.

Of course, what they were selling was “lobster” mushrooms, harvested by hand and dried. Does anyone know if these things actually taste like lobster, or where the name comes from? I’d like to try a sushi roll made with them. Not sure about a lobster roll.

Looking at Les made me wonder why they didn’t film Lord of the Rings in said “northeast Kingdom.”

By the way, that stream of donuts coming out of Les’s ear is actually a decoratively strung row of the Finnish rye bread ruis leipä, being sold at the booth behind Les by Simo Kuusisto of Nordic Breads.

Ruis leipä is sort of the “Popeye’s spinach” of Finland, guaranteed to fill you with vigor and health, and I’ve downed many a loaf on my frequent trips to Finland. A phrase in Finnish to indicate a person who’s strong, ruista raansteessa, translates literally as having “rye in the wrist.”

I ended up leaving the market without any lobster, mushroomed or otherwise, but I did depart with an entire bag stuffed full of ruis leipä, so I expect to post a picture of my bulging wrist muscles shortly.

I haven’t received this much hate mail since I wrote about stabbing of lobsters with large kitchen knives. The other day I dashed off a little article for the CSMonitor’s weekly edition about how nice it is that people in Nordic countries such as Finland get free health care and top-notch universal public education. The angry letters started pouring in. Many of them accused me of being a communist and asked me to leave the United States. One blogger said I was ‘just as evil as Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.’ (I made the effort to write back to some of my correspondents to explain that actually, I know something about communism.)

My little article was the #1 most-read article on CSMonitor’s site for several days, receiving tens of thousands of hits, being featured prominently on Yahoo.news, and getting linked all over the place. I guess it says something about the state of public services in the U.S. that my simple observations struck such a nerve.

Michael Moore apparently thought so; he listed the piece on his “Must Read” list. Great—now the hate mailers are probably pinning my face to their dartboards, not realizing that I’ve written critically of big government, too.

Meanwhile, there was an interesting letter to the editor from an American musician living in Finland saying he fears the U.S. and Finland are crossing in the night—that younger Finns are becoming much more materialistic and want Finland to be more like America’s “broken example.”