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10 - Orono Weekly Tinies, Wednesday, May 15 1996 5T FMJF- ASII VMEWS St. Francis students held a fund raising sale with various items up for grabs. Here some of the students look over the available wares. The money raised will be used by the grade sevens to go and see the Diary of Anne Frank later this month. Arthur Black There is no new thing under the sun Ecclesiastes 1:9 Well, perhaps not new, but there are some uncommonly strange and unlikely critters out there that, despite our scientific sophistication, we still haven't laid eyes on. Never mind the sasquatch and the abominable snow- man. Forget about UFO's and quirks and quarks. How about architeuthis? His common name is "giant squid" and the simple fact is, even though marine biologists and fishermen know he's down there somewhere, no one bas ever seen a giant squid in his natural habitat. Oh, we've seen squid, alright. All kinds of squid. Newfoundlandersjig for them. I can go down to a favourite Spanish restaurant and order up a dish of calamares any time I want. But neither the Newfoundlanders nor I will be tucking into a dish of giant squid. Squid of any size are never going to win a beauty contest. They are, at least to the con- ventional human eye, an apparition right out of your worst nightmare. There is for starters, those huge, unblink- ing eyes and a corolla of undulating sucker-pocked tentacles surrounding a par- rot like beak. The thought of such a creature pulsing silentlytbhrough tbie depths E and as big as a railroad car is enough to give anybody the cold sweats. Giant squid are something else again. They spend their lives in the dark depths of the ocean. They never get within a half mile of the surface unless they're sick or dying. And they're big. More than 2,000 years ago the Roman naturalist Pliny described one with arms "knotted like clubs" with a head as big as a wine cask. A medieval Swedish observer wrote of "monstrous fish" of "horrible forms with huge eyes...One of these Sea- Monsters will drown easily many great ships provided ýwitb many strong Marriners." Several famous novelists have used the giant squid to great dramatic advantage. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville waxed apocalyptic about a "vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length... long arms radiating from its center and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas." In 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, author Jules Veme invented a squid so huge it wrapped the submarine Nautilus in its embrace. Even as I speak, there's a movie making the rounds called Beast, the main character of which is a 100- foot-long architeuthis. Literary flights of imagina- tion? No doubt. But there have been bits and pieces of giant squid washed up, snagged in deep sea fishing nets and found in the guts of sperm whles to make it clear there's something mighty big swimming around down there. In 1861, a French corvette actually did battle with a 25-foot squid off the Canary Islands. Crew members attacked the squid with a hail of rifle fire and cannon balls. They tried to haul it aboard but the skipper chickened out and eut it loose "lest the creature damage or injure the ship and the crew." The largest specimen ever measured was found on a beach in New Zealand in the late 1800's. It weighed about a ton and was just slightly longer than your average Greyhound bus. So. ..is there any chance that there are some really, really giant squid down there - bigger than anything we've ever seen? Doctor Clyde Roper thinks so. He's a marine biologist and curator of an exhibit called In Search of Giant Squid, currently on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. This fall, Dr. Roper hopes to head for the squid jigging grounds off New Zealand, fold himself into a deep-diving submersible and become the first human being in history toobserve - and film - the giant squid in its natural habitat. Roper believes there's a very good chance he'll find "massive, unbelievable animais" up to 75 feet long. Fictional flights of fancy aside, is Dr. Roper likely to be in any danger down there, surrounded by squid? Well, there was that photographer taking shots of squid under- water off the California-coast a few years back who was attacked by a "hive" of swarming squid. They actu- ally began to pull him down until he had the presence of mind to use air bubbles from his regulator to "hose" them On Tuesday May 7th the grade seven students had a few tables set up in the school's gym where they were selling different things to help them raise funds for their trip to see the Diary of Anne Frank which will take place later this month. There was a special Jump Rope For Heart Assembly that was held in the gym on Thursday May 9th. Everyone who was in attendance watched in awe as the group of skippers who had come to perform skipped the after- noon away doing many differ- off his body. The diver came out of it with what Roper describes as "giant hickeys" all over his skin. And those were just little squid, no more than a hun- dredth the size of archi- teuthis. Good luck down there, Dr. Roper. I'm worried about Eddie. You know Eddie - the cheeky little Jack Russell Terrier on the TV program Frasier? For about four episodes in a row last winter, I was pretty sure that Eddie was not performing up to his usual feisty best. The mutt seemed listless, distracted. His usually impeccable comic timing was definitely off. Turns out I was right. A small item in the newspaper revealed that the NBC vet had to perform two root canals on Eddie. Since then the pooch (whose real name by the way, is Moose) bas been, accord- ing to his co-stars "a pleasure to work with". Personally, I think Eddie ent routines. Everyone is invited to attend the C.P.T.A. meeting that is to be held in the library on Thursday May 16th at 7:00 p.m. Hope you plan to attend. Everyone was busy prepar- ing for Mother's Day on ýFridayMay 10th. Mrs. Condon and her grade three class and Miss Gill and Miss Mulligan and their grade one classes all celebrated by hon- ouring their mothers at the special Mother's Day tea that they held in their classrooms. (or Moose) has every reason to be cranky and out of sorts, even with a mouthful of per- fect choppers. What kind of a life is that - sitting around on a stuffy TV set, under the hot lights waiting for his cue to hop up on a chair, run across the dining room or bark at the cleaning woman? Any self-respecting canine would be out on the street, casing fire hydrants, biting postman's' ankles or greeting fellow canines in that inim- itable dog-to-dog, nose-to- butt greeting that should make us all think twice before allowing any mutt to lick our face. Still it could be worse for Eddie, I suppose. He probably eats well, has his own dress- ing room and generally gets treated like a star. Humankind hasn't always been so kind to "the lesser orders." Did you know that, back in medieval times, pigs were put on trial? They were routinely charged with offences like dis- orderly conduct, or stepping on human toes. 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