2000: Steve Times 4
2001: It Only Hurts When I
Laugh
2002: Footprints in the
Sand
2003: I
Apologize
2004: I've
Become Kyle's Mom
| SHEILA's BLOG 
She's really fun to play with--even if she does steal my
toys. |
FUNNY THE
VLOG
" Big Night Out"
|
WHO CUT THE CHEESE?
14 October 2005
Oh those wacky Canadians. I liked this story from the Ottawa Globe
and Mail so much I decided to paste the whole thing in here.
MONTREAL —
Luc Boivin's lost cheddar is passing into local legend as the Titanic
of the cheese world.
The Quebec cheese maker dropped a 2,000-pound cargo of cheese to the bottom of the
Saguenay fjord last year in a ripening experiment. Then he spent this summer searching for
it. And now, after deploying a team of divers and an arsenal of high-tech tracking
equipment, Mr. Boivin has given up the quest.
The sunken treasure of cheddar is nowhere to be found.
"It got too expensive to continue. At some point, you can't be crazy," he said
recently from his factory in La Baie, Que.
No one can accuse Mr. Boivin, a fourth-generation cheese maker, of
giving up easily. Searchers used state-of-the-art sonar equipment and underwater cameras
to look for the bounty. Divers returned to the waters of the Baie des Ha! Ha! eight times.
And the Development Centre in Ocean Mapping sailed to his aid with a $1-million,
multi-beam sonar device, one of the most sophisticated marine mapping systems in Canada.
No luck.
"It's a mystery. All we know is that the cheese is no longer where it was left,"
said Pierre Dufour, a master diver who assisted La Fromagerie Boivin in the hunt. Whether
it was eaten by cheddar-loving fish or stolen by cheese smugglers is anyone's guess.
"Where is it? We don't know," Mr. Dufour said.
According to a company estimate, $50,000 was spent to look for the cheese. The most
popular theory is that its anchoring cables got caught up in the winter ice and that the
cheese was carried downriver. Still, Mr. Dufour is not discouraged.
"The Titanic sank in 1912, but it was only found in 1985," he said.
The story has captured the public's imagination. The Saguenay cheese hunt made headlines
around the globe. Mr. Boivin received random reports of sightings of the errant cheese
barrels miles from where they were placed.
Last month, a commander of the HMCS Chicoutimi, on a local visit, said perhaps the
Canadian Forces submarine could locate the cheese. "He said he had systems that could
help," Mr. Boivin said.
"It's become like a treasure hunt. It has intrigued a lot of people," Mr. Boivin
said, adamantly refuting suggestions the sunken cheese story was a fish tale, although he
can't deny its priceless marketing value.
Mr. Boivin dropped 10 barrels of cheese into the Saguenay last fall after a fisherman
reported reeling in a piece of Boivin cheese from a lake bottom and trying it. It was
pronounced the best cheese he'd ever tasted.
Undeterred by the apparent failure of this year's underwater cheese experiment, Mr. Boivin
is trying again. He still believes that underwater pressure will enhance the taste of an
aged cheddar. So within the next few weeks, he will drop another charge of cheese in a
stainless steel, submarine-type vessel into the Baie des Ha! Ha! But this time, he's
taking no chances. The cheddar will be outfitted with a tracking device.
Now, you may wonder how I happened across this article. Oddly
enough, I am not a regular reader of the Ottawa Globe and Mail, nor am I in the
habit of searching the web for interesting and unusual articles about cheese.
But I did come across an interesting site called "del.icio.us" which is a place to store all of the
links you don't want to lose, in case you need them when you travel and don't have your
own computer, or in case your computer goes kablooie and you lose everything.
The neat thing about del.icio.us is that each time you log on, you
see a list of links that have been posted in the last 2 minutes, 1 minute, and instant.
And that's how I happened to find out about the Canadian cheese.
I can see that this could become a new addiction, seeing what oddball
links people are adding, but I suspect that the novelty will wear off soon enough.
But how could I pass up the opportunity of stumbling over a site like
this to watch Titanic
reinacted by bunnies? Or get a psychic reading from The Toaster Oracle? Or get a guide to the Malls of America? Or find a set of Marzipan babies on Flickr?
(The marzipan babies are incredible) |
