HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-02-21, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2013. PAGE 5.
Not to be paranoid or anything, but
don’t be surprised if some day soon
you’re pulled aside by a couple of
grim-looking dudes dressed in bad suits and
dark glasses with curly wires coming out of
their ears. As they shake you down they’ll
probably identify themselves as agents with
the ‘Disease Control Unit’ or ‘Alien
Surveillance Command’ or some such.
It’s legit. They suspect you of harbouring
and giving sustenance to ‘alien life forms’ and
you know what – they’re right. You, my friend,
are an enabler – a host. You are the
front man for dangerous, possibly life-
threatening creatures who are living and
breeding, rent-free, at this very moment on
your person.
You’ve heard of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang?
Well, this is the Hole in-Your-Gut Gang. These
no-goodniks are presently residing and
conspiring in your belly button.
Interesting piece of business, the belly
button – or umbilicus, as it’s properly known.
It’s our only souvenir of the feeding tube – the
umbilical cord – that sustained us all for
the nine months we spent in our mommas’
bellies.
Nobody goes through or gets out of this life
without one – except I suppose, Adam and
Eve, if you subscribe to the Garden of
Eden miniseries. All Gaia’s chillun – the
placental ones anyway – got belly buttons,
one to a customer. And for microscopic
creepy-crawlies, what a perfectly swell
condo-cum-cafeteria the average belly button
is.
“Your belly button is a great place to grow
up if you’re a bacterium,” says Dr. Tom Kottke
of Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota.
“It’s warm, dark and moist – a perfect home.”
And that’s actually fortunate because not all
bacteria are bad guys. Most of them, in fact,
range from benign to positively healthy. Only
a handful are what you’d call troublemakers,
causing everything from leprosy, cholera and
pneumonia all the way to ear and respiratory
infections. Sounds ominous until you learn
that researchers have identified more than
2,300 types of human belly button bacteria so
far – and most of them are as unthreatening
as Anne of Green Gables at a strawberry
social.
Are you an Innie or an Outie? If it’s the latter
chances are the Men in Black will let you off
with a stern warning. People with protruding
belly buttons don’t offer as hospitable digs for
bacteria to thrive on. The odds are, however,
that you’re an Innie – 90 per cent of humans
are. And 100 per cent of belly button bacteria
like that just fine.
Belly button infections are not unheard
of but they’re relatively easily avoided.
Simple soap and water usually does the
trick.
For more stubborn cases though, there’s
always the military option. Bring out the big
guns, I say. Warships, if necessary. Luckily we
can do this without unduly taxing the
resources of the Canadian Navy. You
can build your own warship at home. Just root
around in the attic or closet and find that old
hula hoop you never got rid of. Next, insert a
series of thumb tacks into the hoop perimeter,
each one pointing inwards. Finally, put that
hoop around your waist, crank up your
Chubby Checker eight-track and gyrate
vigorously.
Hey, Presto! Your very own navel destroyer.
Arthur
Black
Other Views A bellyful of bacterial bad guys
The bizarre case of Oscar Pistorious is yet
another reminder of several in the past
12 months that athletes and coaches,
while they may seem larger than life on their
chosen field, don’t necessarily follow suit in
their home lives.
Pistorious, arguably, was the story of last
year’s Summer Olympics. Dubbed The Blade
Runner, South Africa’s Pistorious captured the
hearts of many as a man whose legs were both
amputated below the knee at the age of one, but
was now competing in sprinting events at an
Olympic level.
He learned how to use carbon fibre blades as
legs and was soon posting world record
paralympian running times.
Pistorious became a symbol of what can be
achieved despite overwhelming adversity
and even opposition from fellow athletes,
similar to how the world embraced Lance
Armstrong winning seven straight Tour de
France titles after his bout with testicular
cancer that had spread to his lungs, abdomen
and brain.
Pistorious, now, has been charged with
shooting and killing his girlfriend Reeva
Steenkamp, shooting her four times in the head
and hand.
Despite early claims, according to several
major news sources, police have discounted
Pistorious’s claim that the murder was a
misunderstanding. Pistorious initially said that
he thought Steenkamp was an intruder, but a
police spokeswoman has since discounted such
suggestions, adding that police had been at the
couple’s home before investigating previous
domestic violence allegations.
Police say they responded to the couple’s
home around midnight when neighbours claim
to have heard a loud argument ongoing at the
couple’s home. They were called out a second
time just hours later around 3 a.m., responding
to the shooting.
The situation is heartbreaking for many
reasons. Steenkamp was a celebrated model in
South Africa as well as a spokesperson against
rape and domestic violence.
The news of Pistorious’s arrest and eventual
trial comes within a span of 12 months where
several athletes have been involved in very
serious situations spanning far beyond the field
of competition.
Armstrong’s years of lying have been well
documented, as has the bizarre saga of Notre
Dame football star Manti Te’o and his “fake”
girlfriend, a lie perpetrating by a man who
admitted to having romantic feelings for Te’o.
There is the case of Penn State football coach
Jerry Sandusky who will spend the rest of his
life behind bars after sexually abusing dozens
of young boys and fellow coach Joe Paterno
who had an active hand in covering for
Sandusky.
In September Kansas City Chiefs linebacker
Jovan Belcher shot and killed his girlfriend
Kassandra Perkins before driving to
Arrowhead Stadium and shooting himself in
front of his team’s coach and general
manager.
Earlier this year there was also the case of
Josh Brent of the Dallas Cowboys who was
driving drunk when he wrecked his Mercedes
Benz, killing his teammate Jerry Brown.
When watching an athlete accomplish things
on the field that you know you never could, it
can be hard to remember that they, too have
shortcomings. It can be difficult to lower them
from the pedestal you voluntarily put them on,
but Pistorious and countless others are a sober
reminder that an athlete’s hands can get just as
dirty as anyone’s.
A hero’s rise and fall
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Being a journalist has become
simultaneously a heck of a lot easier in
the past 10 years and a lot more
difficult.
Now, granted, I’ve only actually been a
part of the industry for the past five years, but
before that I did have brushes with
journalists and journalism. In that time,
I have found that, like every part of life,
technology has made it easier to do my job.
People, on the other hand are making it
tougher.
Sure, I’ve had to deal with reluctant people
when it comes time to take pictures, stubborn
people who don’t want to have their joys
shared with the world and students whose
parents don’t want their picture in the paper,
but lately things have been getting truly
ridiculous.
Over the past few weeks we’ve run into
authorities not letting us take the pictures
we need to have (at no apparent risk to
ourselves), people in our community not
willing to speak to us but speaking to other,
foreign news media and, just to take the cake,
not being allowed on a hockey bench during a
Novice match to take pictures of a hockey
game.
Now the former two items on that list are
just a sign of the times; ridiculous rules being
put in place because of the one in a million
chance something happens or people just not
being cooperative with their friendly
neighbourhood journalist. The latter item,
however, really got under my skin.
I’ll set the scene.
I was standing at the arena at the Blyth and
District Community Centre and, to get the best
pictures, I made my way to the home team
bench. Once there, I did my best to stay out of
the way and started taking some decent
pictures.
A few minuites later, however, with two
minutes left in the second period, something
happened to me that hasn’t, to the best of my
recollection, ever happened before.
One of the referees (who happened to be
covering the other side of the ice, actually),
crossed the ice, and informed me that I needed
to leave the bench because I wasn’t on the
game sheet for the home team. How the
referee knew that nearly instantaneously, I’ll
never be sure.
That frustrated me, not just because I was
slightly embarrassed at being centred out in
such a way, and not because it meant I’d have
to shoot my pictures through the glass, which
would have a detrimental effect on their
quality. No, it frustrated me because this is just
one more development in a long line of
annoyances that makes it that much more
difficult for me to do my job.
I won’t lie, I was also frustrated because, as
a soccer referee, and as a guy coming from a
family of hockey referees, I’m fairly sure
the referee in question could have waited out
the two minutes to come over and address me.
It would have been easier for everyone
involved and meant less of an interuption for
the kids playing hockey. That’s who referees
are supposed to be doing their job for; the
players.
In the end, I did get my shots, through the
glass, and they may have been a little lower
quality than what I could have gotten
elsewhere. The first thing I did when I got back
to work on Monday was something that’s
becoming a little to familiar; trying to play
catchup with issues like these.
I find myself trying to get in touch
with authorities, be they authorities in
minor hockey or elsewhere, to make sure
that The Citizen can remain competitive
and these barricades don’t get in our way
again.
Sure, when I became a journalist, I had
dreams of being like Sydney Schanberg.
Like the musicians on the Titanic, Schanberg
stayed behind after the city of Phnom
Penh in Cambodia after it fell in 1975.
He told the stories about the Khmer Rouge no
one else could and did so by braving certain
death.
I dreamt of that kind of journalism, but at the
same time, I knew that staying behind enemy
lines isn’t the kind of thing most of us get to
do. Some of us work in a small town and take
pride in the fact that we can sometimes get a
decent photograph of a hockey game.
Little did I know that the home team bench
would become as inaccessible to me as a
warzone is to foreign correspondents.
The reasons I’ve been given by officials
and by others involved in hockey range
from liability issues to “that’s the way the rules
are.”
The latter explanation frustrates me as much
as the event itself. Maybe that’s why I’ve never
found the appeal of refereeing hockey; the
game puts the rules first and common sense,
decency and courtesy second, third and fourth.
It’s part of a growing movement that has
ridiculous rules that are enforced with
impunity. The rules, drafted for one-off
situations that may never occur again, tie the
hands of everyone due to one past event or one
possible event that could never come to pass.
As a young’un, I was more apt to be pushing
and bending the rules until they broke but that
wasn’t because I sought trouble or attention
(much as some people may have labelled me
as such), it was always because I didn’t feel
the rules made sense and, looking back, a lot
of them didn’t, and still don’t.
No chewing gum, for example, was an
example of a rule that didn’t make sense to me.
It still doesn’t.
Not allowing someone on a hockey bench,
or someone behind a barricade, that has a
legitimate reason for being there follows the
same guidelines in my mind. When we go
back there, be it into an area near a fire or onto
a hockey bench, we are accepting that
something might happen to us or to our
camera. Logically, you have to know that’s a
possibility.
Then again, I suppose that’s the issue, we’re
trying to be logical but the rest of the world
isn’t.
I thought rules were made to be broken
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Opportunity is missed by most people
because it is dressed in overalls and looks
like work.
– Thomas Edison
Final Thought