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Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 Nipigon - Red Rock Gazette Page 5 Basic Black Anybody Seen A Dinosaur? Museums, museums, museums. Object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archeologists; crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized?” D.H. Lawrence I see where Canada’s most famous museum managed to misplace an entire 80-foot-long dinosaur skeleton. For nearly half a century. Doesn’t surprise me in the least. Our most famous museum? Unquestionably The Royal Ontario - known to millions, affectionately and otherwise, as The ROM. It squats at the corner of Bloor Street and Avenue Road - Ground Zero for the Hogtown horsey set that animates the carriage trade in the Centre of the Known Universe. The ROM has occupied the same space since the beginning of World War I. In the nearcentury in between it’s had more face lifts than Phyllis Diller - the latest one being a ludicrous cubistic encrustation grandly known as Renaissance ROM. It’s a sharp-angled agglomeration of aluminum and glass that juts, ten storeys high, out and over the main entrance. It looks as if a gigantic mutant sugar crystal dropped from the heavens and lodged itself in the building like an ill-placed sliver. But that’s cosmetics. Inside, the grand old ROM really is grand - Canada’s grandest and the fifth largest museum on the continent. It is home to 40 galleries and more than six million items, from Egyptian mummies to Algonquin amulets. And not forgetting the dusty skeleton of an eighty-foot long Barosaurus dinosaur that the Museum ‘discovered’ in the basement last November. Apparently the museum acquired the skeleton back in 1962, put in storage and then forgot about it altogether. Why am I not surprised? Because for one summer, as a teenager, I worked at the Royal Ontario Museum -back about 1962, as a matter of fact. And from what I saw, losing a dinosaur skeleton the length of two subway cars would be a walk in Queen’s Park for The ROM. Understand that I was not employed as a paleontologist, archeologist, curator, exhibit technician or anything grand like that. I was a lowly roofer’s apprentice brought in to handle the grunt work while my more skilled colleagues replaced some air ducts and re-shingled part of the roof. This is supremely boring work on most buildings, involving as it does, crawling through dusty, cobwebbed attics festooned with forgotten junk, bats, rats and occasionally unidentifiable and odiferous blobs of dubious biological provenance. That’s the way it is in most attics, but at The ROM - hoo, boy. The first thing I saw when I pushed back the attic hatch was a welter of arcane weaponry that could only bring joy untrammeled to the heart of any teen-age boy. There were Prussian lances and Indian tomahawks, Spanish swords and Italian stilettos. There were bows and arrows, a blunderbuss, several ancient long guns and the strangest ‘weapon’ I’ve ever seen. It was labeled “Newfoundland Duck Boat”. It was a scrawny rowboat about 12 feet long featuring what looked like a small cannon mounted on the bow. Apparently, 19th century outport Newfoundlanders would stealthily row the boat into a bay filled with hundreds -even thousands - of migrating ducks. Then the oarsman would jump up and wave madly to startle the ducks into flight while his fellow huntsman touched off the buckshotladen cannon. If things worked out well, the entire community had duck for the rest of the year. There were other treasures in that magical cave. I got to try on the breastpiece of a 16th century Scottish suit of armour. I also modeled an ancient Persian helmet like the one Brad Pitt wore in Troy. Actually, I tried to put it on, but the breastplate looked like a brooch and the helmet sat on my head like an acorn. Those guys were really tiny compared to us. The wonder of it was, all this glorious stuff was just stashed like junk in The ROM attic - barely labeled or sorted. It was the antithesis of typical museum protocol, where everything is, as D. H. Lawrence lamented, ‘co-ordinated’ and ‘systematized’ . It was chaos for a museum, but heaven on earth for a teenage boy like me. And now, forty-six years later, the truth can be told. I’m the guy who broke the flash pan on that exquisite 17th century muzzle-loading flintlock musket. It was an accident. Sorry about that. On the other hand, I had absolutely nothing to do with hiding that dinosaur. Chicken Salad Supreme A great way to incorporate more vegetables into a kid approved recipe 12 Frozen Breaded Chicken Fingers 1/3 cup Heinz Tomato Ketchup 1/4 cup Plain Yogurt or Sour Cream 2 tbsp Mayonnaise 1 tbsp Heinz Sweet Relish 10 cups Torn Romaine Lettuce 1 cup Each Cubbed Cheddar Cheese and Tomato 3/4 cup Corn Kernels 1/4 cup Each Bacon Bits and Chopped Green Onion 1. Prepare the chicken fingers according to package directions. Cool slightly; chop into bite size pieces. 2. Stir ketchup with the yogurt, mayonnaise and relish until well combined (dressing mixture). 3. Combine the lettuce with the cheese, tomato, corn, bacon bits and green onion in bowl. Add chicken pieces and dressing toss. Makes 6 servings Classified Order Form Mail Cheque or Money Order to: The Nipigon-Red Rock Gazette P.O. 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