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Orono Weekly Times, Wednesday, July 25, 2001 - 5 Orono vs Orono Orono 1 Atoms (wearing pinnies) played the Orono 3 Atom team Monday night at home. BASIC BLACK Ustinov ARTHUR BLACK Have you noticed how Time turns into a bit of a bushwhacker as you get older? Used to be that I measured events in the conventional conventional way -1 knew that it was six months since my last dental checkup; two years since I bought my car; an hour and a half since I drank that root beer. But I find Time much shiftier these days. It suddenly suddenly dawns on me that events which feel like they happened yesterday are actually actually quite hoary and long in the tooth. Some anniversaries anniversaries are incomprehensible. It seems impossible, for instance, that Wayne Gretzky is retired. Retired? Wasn't he . playing for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds just a cou- • pie of seasons ago? Can you wrap your mind around the fact that Canada's Expo happened nearly 35 years ago? How about the fact that Peter Ustinov just had a birthday - his eightieth birthday? 1 Ustinov an octogenarian. Common sense tells you that just can't be true. Except that it is. the man who's delighted the world with a blizzard of plays and novels, movies and musicals; the man who's roly-poly figure figure and irrepressible smile seem ageless, was in fact bom in London, England in 1921. I looked it up. It seems highly unfair that one man should be so skilled in so many fields. Books? He's written a wagonload - including his best-selling autobiography Dear Me. Poems? Sheaves of them. And scripts. And musical works. Ustinov has also directed just about every creative creative form that calls for an artistic traffic cop - stage plays, operas, and some 90 films in all. And of course he's acted - won Academy Awards in fact, for his work in Spartacus and Topkapi. Mostly what Ustinov's been for every one of his 80 years, is charming. And he can be charming in six languages languages - fluently, mind. He can also 'pass' in another half- dozen tongues Oh, heck, let's face it - Ustinov could fake his way- through anything from Ancient Greek to Woodland Cree. The man's a devastat- ingly funny mimic who's been imitating people since he was a tiny child. His career started started when his parents invited Haille Selassie for a formal dinner. . The young Ustinov brought the house down with a hilarious impersonation of the rather priggish Ethiopian Emperor. Ustinov was three at the time. /■ ;L Someone once asked him how he pulled off his uncanny impression of the veddy, veddy Upper Class toff, Sir Anthony Eden. "I simply try to talk as if I had a cathedral in my mouth" he said. Ustinov was bom with a silver samovar spoon in his mouth - his parents were White Russians who moved in the loftiest of European high society - but Peter spent more time laughing at the Upper Crust than living iff it. He was fascinated by 'blue blood' -- but only for it's comic potential. "Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died" he once said. Actually, I think it's his bon mots that I enjoy more than his novels, plays or films. Ustinov is Oscar Wilde without without the barbs; Samuel Johnson without the bluster. Above all, he revered the therapeutic benefits of the belly laugh. Ustinov once described laughter as "the sun that drives winter from the human face". And he's still with us, still writing. Still charming. Still warming the cockles of our hearts. Shine on, Sir Pete. Ducks Safari Club International Foundation 800.377.5399 www.SafariClubFouridation.org (continued from page 1 ) active pond management. While the Ministry of Natural Resources acknowledged in their assessment of the Orono Mill Pond Darn that fluctuation fluctuation of water levels enhances pond life, Peacock says, that removing stop logs from the dam to let more water flow down stream at certain times of the year is not an option. "The influx of silt would cover the spawning beds down stream," he says. The safest way to remove the silt would be to pump ft out, said Peacock. The dredging technique - digging silt out, would be very difficult difficult for several reasons. The pond is not an easy place to get in and out of, and while you're stirring up the saturated saturated slop you have to be careful not to put , a lot of sediment downstream "It is a'bit of a quandary," said Peacock, "and the answer is as much a quandary as the problem." The Ministry of Natural Resources is currently involved in a Class Environmental Assessment of the Mill Pond Dam. This fall they plan to install a fixed weir structure in front of the dam, and remove the stop logs to make the dam maintenance maintenance frèe. It is then their intention to turn the dam, which is part of Mill Pond Road, and the pond over to the Municipality. The Municipality of Clarington intends to keep the pond as it is, says Tony Cannella, Manager of Engineering for the Municipality. "It is the intent of the Municipality to keep it in its existing condition; as a p'ond." He also said the Municipality would perfonn some kind of maintenance to keep the pond in its existing condition. Under current conditions, the pond will continue to silt up and become a wet land. Vegetation will grow as water gets shallower, says Peacock, and new aquatic habitats will be created. Eventually the wetland will revert back to a stream, as it was before the Mill Pond was created to power a grist mill over a hundred hundred years ago.. SUBSCRIBE TO THE ORONO TIMES $30.00 a year. Come, check us out. 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