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8 - Orono Weekly Times, Wednesday, October 8,2003 ) Basic Black by Arthur Black Nessie: Missing and presumed dead Bulletin! Bulletin! It's confirmed: The Loch Ness monster is missing. The alert comes from the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club, headquartered in Inverness, Scotland. 1 President of the Club, Gary Campbell reports "There has been an unusually unusually low number of sightings reported this year, all of which were made by local people. It appears that no tourists visiting visiting the area have seen anything anything strange whilst at the loch." Unusual indeed. People have been routinely and regularly regularly reporting odd splashings and swirlings of outsized scaly undulating critters from the banks of Loch Ness since AD 565. That's when a monk named St. Columbia reputedly stared down a serpent-like behemoth and sent it scuttling back into the tea-brown depths of Great Britain's largest body of fresh water. Deep water too. If a giant marine monster was going to pick any lake in the land to hide in, Loch Ness would be number one on the list. It's almost a thousand feet deep in places and experts suspect there may be a few rifts and canyons that go even deeper than that. If there was a Nessie, it would have to be one elusive creature. People have been peering and poking and prodding prodding the lake waters for the past 1500 years and no one has yet come up with any conclusive conclusive proof of the beast's existence. Oh, sure there have been a few amateur photographs photographs and some grainy video footage but nothing that couldn't be explained away as playful otters, twists of driftwood, driftwood, currents, wind or a trick of the light. Not that they haven't tried to nail Nessie down. Over the years investigators have trawled the loch with underwater underwater cameras, sonar transceivers, transceivers, closed circuit TV cameras - they've even used mini-submarines. Nothing. This summer, the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to answer the question once and for all. They dispatched dispatched a team of researchers • FREE ESTIMATES • COMPETITIVE RATES • • INSURANCE CLAIMS • FRED'S AUTOBODY (905) 623-6353 163 Baseline Road, Unit 1 Bowmanville, Ontario L1C 3L4 Fred DeVries proprietor Complete Collision Repair, Restoration and Refinishing M »! ■i-f Tfifl NEWCASTLE FUNERAL HOME Family owned and operated by Carl Good, Funeral Director, and Joyce Kufta 386 Mill St. S., Newcastle 905-987-3964 www.ncwcastlefuneralhome.com "Caring for our Community" Because you love your MedicAlerMTie bracelet with an emergency hotline linked to your medical record. Call 1-866-734-9423 or visit www.medicalert.ca <$> Medic Alert Lets You Live Life. to conduct the most exhaustive exhaustive search ever. They used 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation technology technology to pore over ever cubic foot of the loch. "We went from shoreline to shoreline, top to bottom on this one" said Ian Florence, one of surveyors. "We have covered everything in this loch and we saw no sign of any large living animal in the loch." The BBC conclusion? The Loch Ness Monster is a Loch Ness myth. That means the end of Nessie. Not. Nessie is a star, known around the world. Type "Loch Ness Monster" into an Internet search engine and you will come up with 92,200 sites. Nessie won't die. Too many people need her. We need our ores and our trolls, our vampires and ghouls, our werewolves and ogres and zombies. So what if nobody's ever conclusively documented the existence of Pgopogo in Lake Okanagan or Càdborosaurus off Victoria? We live in a world where sentient human beings believe in their paranoia-wracked hearts that JFK was murdered by the CIA, the moon landing was staged in the Arizona desert and Princess Diana was murdered by the British Secret Service. A recent poll shows that an astounding 20 percent of the German population believes the U.S. government ordered the September 11 attacks ON ITSELF. In an effort to restore sanity, sanity, the respected German newspaper Der Spiegel recently published a 16-page point-by-point refutation of myths and half-truths held as gospel by conspiracy theorists. theorists. Will it change any minds? Of course not. As American political scientist Michael Barkun writes: "The wonderful wonderful thing about a conspiracy theory is that it allows you to understand everything perfectly. perfectly. It discloses to you that all the evil in the world can be attributed to a single cause, and that 'they' are this cause, whoever 'they' might be." Which brings us to the true fate of Nessie. She's not dead. She's confined in a holding tank at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba under suspicion of global global terrorism. I know it for a fact. Elvis told me. Leading the Wav CORPORATION OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF CLARINGTON PUBLIC NOTICE www.municipality.clarington.on.ca I Form 6 Municipal Act, 2001 SALE OF LAND BY PUBLIC TENDER The Corporation of the Municipality of Clarington Take Notice that tenders are invited for the purchase of the land(s) described below and will be received until 3:00 p:m. local time on October 24, 2003 at the Municipality of Clarington, Office of the Treasurer, 40 Temperance Streét, Bowmanville, Ontario, L1C 3A6. The tenders will then be opened in public on the same day at 3:01 p.m. local time at the Municipality of Clarington, Office of the Treasurer, 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, Ontario, L1C 3A6. Description of Land(s): Part of Block 10, Plan H-50073, Town of Newcastle, Part of Block 13, Plan H-50073, Town of Newcastle designated as Parts 4 and 5 on Plan 10R-276; Part of Smart Avenue, Plan H-50073, Town of Newcastle as closed by By-law registered as N158143 designated as Part 3 on Plan 10R-661, Municipality of Clarington, Regional Municipality of Durham, Land Titles Division of Durham (No. 40). Municipally known as 173J3aseline Road Minimum Tender Amount: $ 501,482.55 Tenders must be submitted in the prescribed form and must be accompanied by a deposit in the form of a money order or of a bank draft or cheque certified by a bank or trust corporation payable to the Municipality of Clarington and representing at least 20 percent of the tender amount. Except as follows, the municipality makes no representation regarding the title to or any other matters relating to the land to be sold. Responsibility for ascertaining these matters- rests with the potential purchasers. This sale is governed by the Municipal Act, 2001 and the Municipal Tax Sales Rules made under that Act. The successful purchaser will be required to pay the amount tendered plus accumulated taxes and the relevant land transfer tax. The municipality has no obligation to provide vacant possession to the successful purchaser. For further information regarding this sale and a copy of the prescribed form of tender contact: Lou Ann Birkett, Purchasing Manager Municipality of Clarington 40 Temperance Street, Bowmanville, Ontario, L1C 3A6 Telephone: (905) 623-3379 Advantage #2 Mortgages * all rates subject to change without notice Great rates plus free Bonus Shares