“Whoever that bra belonged to was of large proportions,” Mr. LeTendre said. “It was huge.”

This episode raises a number of troubling questions, including:

* They were trawling for dead trout?

* Is that sporting?

* Could it possibly be that the zebra mussels have become carniverous and ate the original bra occupant?

* Has anybody seen Dolly Parton in person recently?

In an effort to get to the bottom of this, I called the research station and grilled Gerard LeTendre.

“Is it true,” I said, “that you have a large brassiere under observation?”

“It’s really just in a box in my office,” he said. “The newspaper made it sound like we have it in an aquarium.”

He also said they still don’t know who owns the bra.

“We know it’s a four-hook bra,” he said. “But it didn’t belong to a large person. It was just a very well-endowed person.

He said that many people have offered suggestions about what to do with the bra, including “holding a Cinderella-type contest to see who it fits.”

For now, however, the mystery remains unsolved. Meanwhile, the zebra mussels continue to multiply. Even as you read these words, a huge colony of them could be clustering ominously around a Sears catalog that fell overboard, nudging it open to the foundation-garments section. It is a chilling thought, and until the authorities come up with a plan of action, I am urging everybody to take the sensible precaution of developing a nervous facial tic. Also, if you must wear a brassiere, please wear it on the outside, where the Department of Environmental Conservation can keep an eye on it. Thank you.

Reader Alert

This section contains several true-life adventures, including the incident wherein Calvin Trillin and I came within inches of being savagely attacked by a dangerous and heavily armed criminal. Or possibly not. (I should note for the record that Trillin claims he acted much more heroically than the way he is depicted in this column; my feeling about that is, if he wants to appear heroic, he should write his own column about it.)

This section also contains the column I wrote about my first encounter with the world-famous Lawn Rangers precision lawnmower drill team of Arcola, Illinois. Since then I’ve returned to Arcola twice to march with this proud unit in the annual Broom Corn parade, a wonderful small-town, heartland event that features a tremendous outpouring of what can only be described as “beer.”

Crime Busters

Somebody has got to do something about crime in the streets. Every day it seems as though there are more criminals running loose out there, and the quality of their work is pathetic.

I base this statement on a crime experience I had recently in the streets of New York City while visiting Calvin Trillin, who lives in New York and divides his time pretty much equally between being a well-known writer and trying to park his car. This experience, which I am not making up, occurred as we were returning to Calvin’s house at about 1 A.M. after an evening of business-related nonpersonal tax-deductible literary research. Just as we reached his door, a criminal appeared from out of the darkness and attempted to rob us. Up to that point, I have no criticism of the criminal’s technique. He had done an excellent job of victim selection: In terms of physical courage, Calvin and I were probably the two biggest weenies abroad in Manhattan at that hour. A competent criminal, armed with any plausible weapon, including a set of nail clippers, could have had us immediately begging for mercy and handing over our wallets and promising to raise additional cash first thin in the morning by applying for second mortgages.

But this criminal had a terrible plan of action. He had both hands in his jacket pockets, and he was thrusting the jacket material out toward us, the way the bad guy’s jacket sticks out on TV when he has a gun in his pocket and he doesn’t want everybody to see it. Clearly Calvin and I were supposed to think that the criminal had two guns pointing at us.

Here’s what the criminal said: “I’ll blow both of your heads off.”

Later on, in our detailed post-crime critique, Calvin and I found numerous flaws in this approach. For one thing, if the criminal really had two guns, why on earth would he hide them? As Calvin pointed out: “You would definitely want to show your guns to a couple of schlubs like us.”

Also, two guns was definitely overkill. According to my calculations, two guns figures out to one gun per hand, which raises the question: How was the criminal planning to take our wallets? Was he going to ask us to hold one of his guns for him? Was he going to have us stick the wallets in his mouth? If so, he would have had trouble giving us our post-robbery instructions, such as “Don’t try following me!” or “Don’t try anything funny!”

CRIMINAL (with his hands in his pockets and our wallets in his mouth): Donghh ghry angyghing ghunny! ME: What CRIMINAL (getting angry): DONGHH GHRY ANGYGHING GHUNNY! CALVIN: I think he’s saying “Don’t I have a big tummy.” ME (hastily): No! You’re very sueve! Really! Sir!

But the criminal’s silliest move, in my opinion, was threatening to blow both of our heads off. That would be an absurd waste of bullets. A much more efficient way to gain our cooperation would have been to simply blow Calvin’s head off. I would then have cooperatively handed over Calvin’s wallet.

So it was a very poorly planned robbery. I would like to say that Calvin and I, even as we were staring down the menacing barrels of the criminal’s jacket pockets, instantly detected all the flaws with our computerlike brains. But frankly, due to the amount of literary research we had done that evening, our brains were not so much in computer mode as in Hubble Space Telescope mode, if you get my drift.

Nevertheless, I’m very proud of how we handled the situation. Actually, it was Calvin who took charge. You never really know what kind of gumption a man has, what kind of spine, what kind of plain old-fashioned “guts,” until you see how he handles himself when the chips are down and all the marbles are on the line. Calvin looked at the criminal and he looked at me, and then, drawing on some inner reserve of strength and courage, he pressed the intercom button and said, “Alice, let us in.”

Alice is Calvin’s wife. She buzzed the door lock, and we opened the door and went inside, leaving the criminal out there with his jacket pockets still pointing at us. He never did blow our heads off, although the next morning I wished that he had.

Anyway, it was a pretty sorry performance, and if he is in any way representative of the criminals out there today, this is yet another area where the United States is heading down the tubes. I hope that the criminal, if he is reading this, has enough self-respect to learn from the criticisms I’ve outlined here and get his act together. Although in all fairness I should warn him that Calvin and I have given our performance some thought, and if this criminal ever tries to rob us again, he might be in for a little surprise. Because next time we’re going to take strong, decisive action. Next time we’re going to have Alice come out and give him a piece of her mind.