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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2016-02-25, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2016. PAGE 5. Other Views Dumb and dumber around the world Only two things are infinite — the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe. — Albert Einstein J'm with the professor. I am looking at a story about Beyonce and her performance at the Super Bowl. Due to a previously scheduled hairdressing appointment I missed the spectacle, but I'm told that she warbled a song about taking her man to a Red Lobster restaurant after sex. What's got me scratching my head is the news that Red Lobster sales increased by 35 per cent over after the ad aired. Um...what's the thought process here? Did diners suddenly descend on Red Lobster hoping to get lucky? Did they think they'd bump into Beyonce at the salad bar? There's a lot of stupidity -driven content in my newspaper these days — such as the latest dog shooting down in Indiana. Not shooting of a dog, shooting BY a dog. A duck hunter by the name of Allie Carrier left her shotgun on the ground — shell in the chamber, safety off — while she fine-tuned her binoculars. Her chocolate lab wandered over and stepped on the trigger, drilling her in the foot. in a masterpiece of understatement, an Indiana conservation officer observed: "We encourage everyone to take a hunter education course Arthur Id: Black before they venture out in the field." Ten point bonus — the dog's name is Trigger. At least the gimpy nimrod was out in the fresh air getting some exercise. Not like the legions of Unboxers who spend their spare time hunched over their screens watching unboxing videos on YouTube. Unboxing videos? Just what it implies. Videos of strangers' hands unwrapping packages of brand new blenders, sneakers, Disney princesses, Star Wars figurines — you name it. It all started 10 years ago when somebody selfie'd his own hands unwrapping a new Nokia cell phone. Last year Americans watched 60 million hours of unboxing videos. Not everyone was glued to YouTube. Some of us were dying our armpit hair. It's the latest fashion fad, let by those fashion icons Madonna and Myley Cyrus. There's even a Free Your Pits website where fans can get late -breaking pit news and follow trends. (As of this writing, the hottest pit colours are turquoise, hot pink, purple and neon yellow.) In case you think this moron harvest is limited to North America, guess again. Know what the Chinese are buying up by the case - lot? Air. Canadian air. A company called Vitality Air decided to see if there was a Chinese market for quality, bottled -in -the -Canadian -Rockies air. They sent a shipment of aerosol cans to Beijing with a price tag of $20 a can. Sold out in four hours. Now there's a raw material export I could get behind. Forget your clearcut virgin timber, your dwindling ore bodies and your polluting and poisonous bitumen. Sell 'em Canadian air! Good to know that stupidity doesn't play favourites. Gullibility is democratic. You don't have to be young or inexperienced. Or blonde. Nothing is deader than the old 'dumb blonde' cliche. Dolly Parton said it best. "I don't care if people think I'm a dumb blonde because I know I'm not dumb". Then she gave it a beat and said: "I'm also not blonde." I never make the mistake of laughing at blondes. I mean, look at Joan of Arc. Everybody laughed at her but she went ahead and built it anyway. A very belated welcoming party Several years ago, I wrote about the zoo that my home had become with my wife's three cats, my two birds and a dog (a poodle named Juno, for those whose memory is as good as mine). I realized, however, that those who read the paper may have noticed that I've been walking around a new dog lately, so I felt I should share the story about how she came into my life. A few months after initially writing about the zoo in our home, we faced some rough days with the animals. We had to find a new home for Juno because, as a puppy, she was just a little more than we could handle. Ashleigh was working two jobs and teaching people to ride horses and, with everything from council meetings to hockey games to special events, I just wasn't home consistently enough to teach Juno when and where to do her business. Juno then moved in with a friend of Ashleigh's and has been doing absolutely wonderfully ever since. After that, however, some absent-minded zookeeper (and we haven't figured out which one yet, so no blame being tossed there) left a door open and one of our cats, Luna (short for Lunatic), decided to make a run for it. Not long after, my wife found a job in Toronto, so we had to do the long-distance relationship thing for awhile, which worked out fine. However, once Ashleigh relocated back to Huron County, we realized that the zoo wasn't quite the attraction it used to be, so we set out to rebuild it. Fate felt that we should do the same as it saw fit to have someone bring Luna back to us. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Luna was returned to us two years after she went missing. We got a call from a neighbour in the community saying they had this cat and had tried calling the company that was listed on her collar. The company tried to get in touch with Ashleigh, however her phone number had changed a couple of times since Luna's microchip was implanted and the tag was stamped. Fortunately, I'm a creature of habit and have Denny Scott Denny's Den had the same cell phone number since I got my first phone more than a decade ago. So, to make a long story (that was previously covered in this very space) short, Luna came back to us and has since become the friendliest cat I've ever seen. Unfortunately, she must some how know that me being stubborn and refusing to change my cell number is the reason she was able to get home because she won't leave me alone. My wife says the cat is no longer hers, it's mine; allergy -inducing dander and all. After that I decided to pick up a new cage for the birds (a cockatiel named Boo and a quaker parrot named Yoshi) which was a great investment. The birds love it and often decide to sit on top of it all day, thinking they rule the roost. However cats and birds didn't seem to be enough for us and it wasn't long until Ashleigh and I were looking to get a new dog. When I was growing up, dogs were a staple for my family. I can remember always coming home to a dog somewhere up to my seventh birthday or so. My mom loves Boxers so we always had one. I can remember two of them, but I'm told there was a third. After my seventh birthday (and the passing of our last Boxer) we didn't have any more dogs. I tried some smaller, easier to manage pets in my youth including hamsters and gerbils but there's just something about an animal that is actually happy to see you when you get home (and not just because that means meal time is imminent). More recently, both my mother and father have taken in some older dogs that people couldn't take care of for one reason or another and I felt that would fit perfectly into the busy lifestyles Ashleigh and I have built. So we kept our eyes and ears open, waiting for the perfect dog to come along because (as we would find out in a rather unpleasant way) my allergies to animals actually stretched to certain breeds of dogs. It took awhile, but we found our perfect match in Mikayla. A friend of Ashleigh's runs a dog kennel and occasionally takes in rescue animals and she got in touch with us shortly after Mikayla showed up. She's a mix of shepherd, husky and something unknown and loves walking, sitting on the couch and, most importantly, doing nothing when the mood arises for that. She also loves stopping every five feet, while walking to try and figure out the scent history of every blade of grass or flake of snow within the range of her leash. That's something we're working on. She's a friendly dog (provided you're not trying to take a bone from her), but she did spend a bit of time in a kennel so she gets very frustrated (and very loud) when I don't let her run out and meet every dog within earshot to give them the once-over with her snout. We've had her for a few months, but, before I got to telling the world about her, both Ashleigh and I wanted to make sure she was a good fit for the home. So if you see (or hear, then see) me out walking in the morning or early evening, feel free to say hi. She might whine or bark a bit, but she is just excited to be out taking in the sunshine. What's next to the zoo? Only time will tell, though I can promise you it won't be a cat. We have more than enough of them. Final Thought "Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it." — Henry David Thoreau Shawn 111 ‘! Loughlin Shawn's Sense Where there's smoke... This week a release came across my desk from the Huron County Health Unit commending the World Health Organization (WHO) for its initiative to ban smoking in movies. The release stems from the WHO Smoke- free Movies Report. It provides statistics regarding to how much smoking is actually in the movies we watch and how many young people start smoking because they see it in movies. Locally, the Health Unit is a member of the Ontario Coalition for Smoke -Free Movies, an organization that aims to only see tobacco smoked in movies that are available to people aged 18 and over. For the record, I think this is a fine idea and I'm certainly not throwing the Health Unit under the bus, but I see this as another case of focusing on the wrong things. Smoking is bad. There's no doubt. And the fewer young people out there smoking, the better. Those trends already seem to be forming, as fewer and fewer people are smoking as the years go by. But, at the risk of sounding like a very old man, the things I've seen in movies rated for children aged 14 and up are getting edgier by the year. One example is the AMC show The Walking Dead. This is a show that takes place after a zombie apocalypse and each episode chronicles the killing of dozens (if not more) of zombies, as well as humans. The deaths are the most gruesome I've ever seen on television. Heads are stabbed, guts are ripped out and people are literally ripped limb from limb by the teeth of zombies while blood flows from them in excess. It took until the fourth season for the show's rating to be changed, which began at 14 and up, to target people over the age of 18. I have a hard time reconciling the fact that a show featuring someone hacking and slashing dozens of zombies to pieces would be appropriate for 14 -year-olds, but if and when the aforementioned character decided to have a smoke whilst hacking and slashing, it will have crossed the line into 18 -and -over territory under the WHO recommendations. A quick search provides plenty of results. The body count in the recently -released The Expendables 3 nearly reaches 500. It was rated for viewers 14 and under. And that's just one example. The case has long been made that young viewers are particularly impressionable to what they see in movies and on television. We've heard for years that violent video games have bred a culture of violence and that suggestive lyrics in music have led to anything from mass murder to suicide. How firm those connections are is certainly up for debate. However, if we're going to crack down on smoking in movies, shouldn't we perhaps be casting a wider net? What about drug use? Murder? Theft? Hell, the show literally called How To Get Away With Murder is rated for an audience of 15 and under. This WHO initiative reminds me of another odd banning request that I've written about in years past. The popular video game Battlefield 3 was plagued with protests due to a scene very early in the game that calls for the player to kill a rat in a sewer. This is a game in which, over the course of its hours, the player will have to kill hundreds of soldiers if he hopes to successfully reach the end of the game, but killing one rat is simply going too far.