Last week, everyone got their panties in a bunch about the video from the folks at SeaTrepid.com showing exactly three golf balls that they found while scouring underneath the surface of Loch Ness for the hoax of a monster rumored to be in the lake. 

The CNN article reporting the story claimed that "thousands" of balls were at the bottom of Loch Ness.  The follow up story then magnified the initial report of thousands of balls into "hundreds of thousands."

Clearly, over the five hundred years that people have been playing golf, some of the locals probably took the opportunity to work on their games at Loch Ness Driving Range and Swimming Hole and Excrement Sanctuary.  In other words, people have been doing a whole lot of polluting in Loch Ness.  Tires, sunken boats, dead bodies.  They're all in Loch Ness in some varying state of decomposition.

Still, the Danish Golf Union - which I didn't even know existed because Denmark has absolutely zero standing in the golf world - went ahead and put on the tin foil cap to complain that golf balls may "takes between 100 to 1,000 years for a golf ball to decompose naturally."  That led to the revelation that some 300 million golf balls are lost in the USA each year alone.  It's a proverbial party in the USA!  (They're playing my song.) 

Then, somehow the British got wind of this international ironic conspiracy hatched by golfers to slowly destroy our planet playing a game that takes too long and is played on the earth's most beautiful soil.  And so that led Scot lawmaker Patrick Harvie to proclaim, "From the moon to the bottom of Loch Ness, golf balls are humanity's signature litter in the most inaccessible locations."

Looking for a practical and meaningful solution, I honestly was considering incinerating all of our forests to clean up the golf ball problem, in addition to burning our lakes and estuaries with motor oil.  It would solve our kudzu, algae bloom, and golf ball decomposition problem all at once!  Then I decided to put the gas can, chainsaw, and bottle of moonshine down and think this through.

Loch Ness is 23 miles long and about a mile wide, according to about.com.  Effectively, that's 23 square miles of lake. (Duh.)  But, the article says that they found the balls mostly 100 to 300 yards out on the lake.  All told, that gives us 5.22 square miles of lake that could have golf balls in it.

Being generous to the hippies, let's say there are 500,000 golf balls in Loch Ness.  That's about 100,000 golf balls per square mile.  If they're Pro V1s, then that is about $400,000 in decomposing golf gold per square mile.

Supposedly, there are 100,000 balls lost alone in the much smaller space surrounding the 17th green at Sawgrass.  Not only has that been around much less time than Loch Ness - created by a glacier instead of a Caterpillar earthmover - but the density is much higher.  Think about that.  The 17th at Sawgrass the supposedly accounts for 0.03% of all lost balls in the USA EACH YEAR.  One hole.

On top of that, our environmentally-friendly President - an admitted duffer - is contributing to the problem at a much higher clip of the former administration.  George W. Bush's party rallied in '08 on the slogan "Drill, baby, drill!," which is a whole lot more destructive than shanking golf balls into the woods.  So, if golf balls are so horrible for the environment, should we dig up all of our golf courses and try to find oil underneath them?

I think the people at Loch Ness should stop complaining and start fishing the bottom of the lake for golf balls instead of trying to sell us on Nessie.  Besides, the Chesapeake Bay here in Maryland has a much better fake monster.  Meet Chessie.