The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Of all the people in Flin Flon and area, I doubt anyone spends as much time rummaging through the phone book as yours truly. Pretty much daily I comb the MTS Northern Lights Region directory not only to look up contacts, but also to verify name spellings and pin down the address of a particular property. A couple of years back, while searching for somebody's number in Creighton, I came across an unusual sight that begged an explanation. There, as the only listing under U, was 'University of California San Diego' on Beaver Lake Road. I had heard of UCSD, as they call it, as one of America's top universities (after obvious legends such as Yale, Harvard and Princeton). But I was completely unaware that this major post-secondary institute had any kind of a presence in Canada, let alone along a rural road essentially in the middle of nowhere. The first thing I did was dial the 688 number. All I heard back, after multiple rings, was a series of beeps that seemed _ seemed _ to indicate a fax number. I then tried sending a fax, identifying myself as a reporter curious to learn more about the apparent UCSD Beaver Lake campus. After several attempts, it became obvious that my fax was not going to go through. I guess it wasn't a fax number after all. Undeterred, I contacted the actual UCSD, located in La Jolla, a wealthy part of San Diego. I was put through to a spokesperson by the name of Paul Mueller. Baffled A baffled Mueller looked into the matter but came up with no rationalization for the listing. He suggested it may be some kind of phone company glitch. 'It's not like we have a secret lab or anything there, I can assure you of that,' he told me. I sat on the story for quite some time after that. Events such as the closure of Trout Lake Mine and the cottage annexation debate began eating up my journalistic focus. But last week I returned to this unfinished piece of work. I dialed up SaskTel spokesperson Michelle Englot to see what, if anything, she could tell me. She confirmed that UCSD Beaver Lake is a 'legitimate number.' When I asked her what kind of number it is, she said: 'It appears to be a _ it could be a high-speed line.' I queried Englot as to why UCSD, or at least its spokesperson, knew nothing of the listing. 'I can't answer why they wouldn't know anything about it because we do have a legitimate billing address, obviously,' she replied. Englot could not say whether UCSD is billed for the line, but she did confirm that whoever is paying for it is based outside of Canada. Read between the lines and it appears _ appears _ that for some enigmatic reason, a major American university is paying for a high-speed phone line located between Creighton and Denare Beach. It could be that Mueller was honestly unaware of the existence of this line, that a campus as massive as UCSD has too many tentacles for one person to keep track of. It could be that this is some sort of closely guarded secret for the university, one so deeply clandestine that officials are told to deny its existence to the media! Then again, it could be a practical joke on someone's part or it could be that Englot, not Mueller, is somehow the one without the full facts at hand. All I know for sure is that nobody is attending classes this fall at the University of California San Diego's Beaver Lake campus.
