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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2016-11-10, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2016. PAGE 5. Other Views Thar's gold in them thar aquifers Water is everywhere and in all living things. No water, no life. Period. Water comes in many forms - liquid, vapor, ice, snow, fog, rain, hail. But no matter the form, it's still water. — Robert Fulghum You can say that again, Bob — and by the way, water comes to us in even more wonderful forms than those listed. I am currently savouring a tumbler of the finest effusion of sparkling water collected by dedicated Lombardy artisans from frothy springs bubbling up in the mountains of Italy, lovingly decanted into a dark green bottle and shipped to my dining room table. San Pellegrino, the label says. The question is: why the hell am I drinking Italian bottled water? I live in a country that contains one-fifth of the planet's supply of fresh water. I have fresh water gushing out of a tap in my kitchen, my bathroom and the garden hose. I can sit down in any restaurant in the land and ask for a glass of water — for free. Does San Pellegrino water taste better than water from my tap? Come on. Water is water. It has no smell, no taste, no colour. Aside from slight carbonation I couldn't tell San Pellegrino from what comes out of a drinking fountain in downtown Thunder Bay. And truth to tell, the ambiance for the water I'm drinking is about as Italian as Walt Disney. It's distributed by an international cartel called Nestle Waters North America, headquartered in Connecticut. Nestle is the largest `producer' of bottled water in the world. Bottled water is big business. Ask the citizens of Aberfoyle, a small Ontario town northwest of Toronto. They lost their long-time supply of spring water last year when they were `outbid' by an international conglomerate named — you guessed it — Nestle. The Ontario government now allows Nestle to siphon off 4.7 million litres of Aberfoyle spring water every day. Cost to Nestle's (after permit fees, etc.): Three dollars and seventy one cents. Per million litres. When it comes to water rights, Big Business plays hardball. The citizens of Weed, California can testify to that. For more than half a century they've enjoyed fresh water from a nearby spring that bubbles out onto land owned by a lumber company. The company let the town take all the water it needed for a fee of one dollar per year. This year the price went up. To $97,500 annually. The lumber company sold its water rights to a conglomerate with plans to export bottled water to Japan. The townsfolk have been told to pay up or get their water somewhere else. Water. Economists call it the `liquid gold' of the 21st century. Michael Burry would agree. Remember him? He's was the only person to predict the sub -prime mortgage crisis and real estate collapse of 2008. Wall Street thought he was crazy. While everyone else lost their shirts he made $800 million. So what's Doctor Burry doing these days? According to the Wall Street Journal, he's not juggling a menagerie of hedge funds anymore. Burry's shed his entire investment portfolio to focus on just one commodity. Aitch. Two. Oh. Saying adieu to the oldest of friends When I was younger, my parents gave me something that would shape my life beyond compare and recently T had to say goodbye to it. It wasn't the three full bookcases of English literature novels my mother had (I bade farewell to them long ago) nor was it a stuffed animal or a blanket or anything of that ilk. It was my Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I'm sure most readers will remember the NES. It's the gray and black box that hooked up to a television, usually through a coaxial cable port just like a VCR. It was the first in a long line of video game systems to come after the great video game crash of the early 1980s. It was the birthplace of the famous plumber who never plumbs, Mario; the home of Link, the oft -confused protagonist of The Legend of Zelda games and home to the blue bomber himself, Mega Man. A lot of people may have an old baseball mitt or hockey stick from their youth that holds some fantastic memories... Actually, I do have a hockey stick just like that. Anyway, as I was saying, a lot of people may have an item that reminds them of their carefree, innocent youth and for me, that was always the NES. No matter what happened in life (with the exception of blackouts), I could always go to the old computer room in the basement of my family home in Goderich, pick up a cartridge, blow on it a few times to clean out the dust and slot it into the NES. It was a portal to other worlds, a chance to be anyone and, if I'm being honest, as much a security blanket or crutch as I ever had. I don't mean the latter in a negative way, either. No matter what was going on in my life, I could wrap my hands around a rectangular controller, power up the system (a couple times if it was being stubborn) and slip into a world where the good guys beat the bad guys and saved the world... or princess... or woke up from a dream or... Anyway, the good guy could win. I realize that video games aren't everyone's cup of tea, so I'm not going to get into how things have changed or what games were my favourite or anything like that, this is more about the act of saying goodbye than it was about to what I was saying goodbye. My wife Ashleigh and I were cleaning out Denny Scott Lima" Denny's Den our storage closet in the house in hopes of... well making more storage space. Between clothes that my nearly -three-month old daughter Mary Jane has already grown out of, gifts that we've received that she's not quite old enough for and the fact that the room that is now her bedroom used to house a lot of other things, storage space is now at a premium in our home. Because of that, Ashleigh and I spent hours on Sunday going through boxes of personal items and trying to decide what we needed and what we didn't and organizing the rest to either sell or donate as we could. There were things we wouldn't dare part with: collections of books we hope Mary Jane will enjoy as much as we did, keepsakes given to us throughout our lives that hold a special place in our hearts, accessories for items we still use in the house and boxes, and I mean boxes, of cords and cables that I don't remember the use for that I just can't throw out in case it turns out I need them. Then I opened a box that I probably hadn't opened since we first bought our home more than five years ago — a box containing some old video game consoles. Inside was my NES, complete with controllers, the light gun for Duck Hunt and all the memories that went with it. I had, six years ago, boxed it up to keep it protected for my future children. After all, at that time, the system was around for 25 years and my particular Nintendo was nearly 20 years old. I realized that, if I waited a few years, if the video game console world was anything like the car world, it would be an antique. Opening the box brought back those memories. It reminded me that, one day, I had hoped to sit down and play a game of the original Mario with my children. It reminded that I wanted to share this big part of my youth with them. While it reminded me of a great many things, it also made me realize that a lot had changed in six years. Ignoring the Back to the Future scene where Michael J. Fox's Marty McFly is reminded that video games of the future are going to be far more advanced than those now, I realized that showing Mary Jane a video game console as old as her father probably wouldn't inspire her as much as simply letting her discover video games on her own. My parents didn't really play video games until I got my Nintendo. My mom probably gave it a shot or three over the years, and my father and I used to play Blades of Steel, a hockey game, or Jack Nicklaus' Major Championship Golf, a, shocker, golf game, pretty often, but I don't remember any video games in my house or my life before then. The way I remember it, I brought that experience to them. Fast forward a few years and you would find my father and me sitting down to a round or three of the most recent golf and hockey games for the Xbox, and I'd wager it's because of that original NES I received for my birthday. As I poured over that box, I realized that sharing my memories of video games wouldn't be of interest to her if (in a few years time, obviously) I plopped her in front of grainy old 8-bit graphics and waxed poetic about the days of my youth. She might enjoy my stories, but only if she found enjoyment of video games on her own. So it was with a heavy heart that I turned to Ashleigh and told her it was time to sell it. It went in a box with a few other old consoles and, by the end of the day, it had turned into diaper money. After the deed was done and the console was gone from my life forever, I realized that I had probably held on to it longer than I ever needed to. There will always be video games to play with my family and those memories aren't tied to the object that made them possible. As far as fall cleaning goes, it was a good revelation to have done it because I am a bit of a pack rat. Every once in awhile I need to be reminded that nostalgic memories are wonderful things that stay even when the items they are associated with are gone. It made going through the rest of the closet easier. Shawn Loughlin Shawn's Sense When you're wrong... When you're wrong, you're wrong. Or at least that's what the title of this week's column would be if I had enough space to fit it all, but it's all about being wrong. It's not about being mistaken — I'm pretty sure I've already written a column about that. There have been plenty of corrections along the way at The Citizen in the 10 years I've been here. Not that we make a habit out of making mistakes, but, just like we all have to face in our daily lives, they do happen. No, this week I wanted to talk about expressing an opinion or wanting to investigate something further and realizing you're wrong. Once that realization is staring across the table at you, accepting it can be harder for some than it can for others. Take Huron East Council for example. One councillor wanted to take a closer look at bringing policing to the municipality from Stratford rather than from the Ontario Provincial Police. However, after a quick bit of investigating, municipal staff identified that not only would it not be legal for Huron East to be policed by Stratford Police, but that costs to police the municipality would suddenly double overnight if such a decision was to be made. And that's all before Stratford Police even accepted an invitation to police Huron East — which the smart money would be against. Once that information was presented, all of council pretty much decided to fold up their tents and move on from that proposal. The proposal that policing from Stratford turned out to be wrong. And that's okay. We are all wrong from time to time. It's in accepting that, that we are truly reasonable adults. I remember a time a few years ago when I was seeking an idea for what to put in this very spot for the week and The Citizen received a press release from the local Health Unit about (I'm paraphrasing) new parents keeping calm in the face of stressful situations with a newborn baby. One session was aimed at men and it hoped to teach them about the dangers of shaking babies out of frustration. When I first read the information I was incensed at the suggestion that it would only be men who were careless enough to make such a fatal decision. So I spilled all of my rage out onto the page and was pretty happy with what I had written, thinking that I was sticking up for fathers everywhere and speaking up on behalf of my fellow man. However, being the calm, level-headed person I pride myself on being, after I wrote the column, I took a few minutes to do a little research and the figures didn't lie: the numbers were vastly slanted towards men in cases of shaking babies (I remember it being nearly 90 per cent, although it was a few years ago). So I scrapped the column. It was clear that the Health Unit had done its research and identified a target demographic for a dangerous trend. I was wrong on that one, and, because I was able to apply a sober second thought to my ideas, the column never saw the light of day. No one will crucify you for being wrong. And if they do, it's an unfair way to go through life. However, if you've been proven wrong and you continue to insist otherwise, that's a character flaw that shows a complete lack of self-confidence. Be wrong, it happens to all of us. But insisting the opposite is true, despite readily available facts is just embarrassing and far more damning than any simple wrong answer.