At last a summer snake

As the reader will know, a summer snake is crude, irrelevant or directly invented news that the bad press uses to fill pages while the dog days last.

In summer the parliaments close, the governments go on vacation, the spokespersons are silent and the provocateurs only cause sleep, with which there is no news and the ink barrels have to be spent on something else.

The yeti, for example, or the archaeological confirmation of some delirious biblical chapter or what do I know, the Virgin appears to a cazurro, the Martians abduct a married couple with problems and the Raelian sect clones a million people to take them to the Andromeda galaxy for some reason.

The closest thing to a summer snake we've seen this year has been the heat.

It is curious that, after a century of laughing at the English,

we have all fallen into their same elevator conversations.

Oh Mrs. Peabody, today

is hot, isn't it?

Yes you do, Mr. Calaway, don't you?

Yes it is, isn't it?

Yes it is.

But every summer snake pales in comparison to the mother of them all, the pioneer, the seminal, the resplendent Loch Ness monster, for which the journalistic phenomenon is probably named.

Not that

is a snake, but judging by a famous photo from 1934, it does belong to her family.

There is an enormous reptile with a long neck and a row of humps on its dorsal line.

Okay, the photo turned out to be a joke with balconies facing the street, but it's all we have, and remember that we're trying to build a summer snake, don't bother me.

That false photo from between the wars was surely responsible for

's fame transcending the borders of the Scottish Highlands, until then only famous for its excellent

of malta, and reached the farthest corner of the planet.

Well, the Loch Ness monster has finally appeared in this tiresome and endless summer.

Let's meet the plesiosaur, a 12-meter-long dinosaur that swam through the Jurassic seas as if there were no killer asteroid tomorrow.

Some of these seas - freaks of geology - constitute present-day Scotland.

Until now, it was thought that plesiosaurs were exclusively saltwater, but Georgina Bunker and her colleagues from the universities of Bath (United Kingdom) and Hassan II, in Casablanca, Morocco, publish in

that some dwelled in the fresh water of the rivers.

And, of course, the lakes.

What do you want more for?

According to Jenny Gross in

, this simple fact has excited

, who had been toying with the idea for some time that the Loch Ness monster belongs to a lineage of plesiosaurs that somehow escaped mass extinction caused by an asteroid 68 million years ago.

Gross cites a few headlines from the

and the English tabloids that are to fall on one's back, such as “Monster bombing” and “Loch Ness monster plausible”.

It is not?

Yes it is.

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