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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-03-28, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2013. PAGE 5. We can all agree that the Olympics have become utterly silly, right? Synchronized swimming has always been goofy; beach volleyball is a voyeur’s wet dream, aimed, it would seem, at attracting an audience of creepy guys in stained raincoats who normally hang out in peep show arcades. And Equestrian Dressage? Please. Are there 11 people in the world who have ever sat through an entire episode of Equestrian Dressage televised coverage? There was a time when the Olympics were serious. I have stood on the track at Olympia in Greece where athletes of antiquity vied to see who was the fastest runner, the wiliest wrestler, the most agile gymnast. Those Olympic Games were simple and straightforward; but that was 2,000 years ago. The modern Olympic Games are a travelling circus of civic hoopla, media sensationalism and under-the- table corruption and graft. The athletes today are all but an afterthought amidst the wining and dining and wheeling and dealing that constitutes the modern Olympic experience. And now, the seedy backroom boys who run the Olympics are on the verge of lowering the Olympics bar to Limbo depths: they are considering making Ice Fishing an Olympic sport. Really. Last month, (you may have missed it) the World Ice Fishing Championship was held in Wisconsin, and when it was over, the US Anti-Doping Agency rounded up the contestants. To test their urine for the presence of steroids and/or growth hormones. Trust me: there are no drugs in ice fishing. Unless beer counts. I spent my formative winters not far from the ice-fishing hotbed (okay, not hot) of Lake Simcoe in southern Ontario. I also spent more than a dozen winters in and around Thunder Bay. I am somewhat of an expert on ice fishing. But that’s not saying much. Can you bait a hook? Can you hold a line? Can you sit for hours cultivating haemorrhoids over a hole on a frozen lake waiting for a tug to jerk you out of your frozen torpor? Hey! You’re an ice fishing expert too. Ice fishing is what you do when you can’t stand being cooped up in your log cabin anymore. It ain’t, as the saying goes, rocket surgery. It also isn’t an Olympic sport. A Holstein could be a successful ice fisher. Except Holsteins have more sense. Not that there isn’t a certain amount of cunning involved. I recall the time I was ice fishing on Lake Nippon years ago and not having any luck at all. Along comes an old guy with an axe, a bucket and a grubby old haversack. He chops a hole in the ice about 20 metres away, baits a hook, drops in a line – and within minutes he’s hauling in fish after fish. I haven’t had a nibble. After half an hour I can’t stand it any more. I walk over and ask him what his secret is. He glares up at me and mumbles: “Roo affa heep ah wums wahm!” I say, “Sorry? Come again?” “Roo affa heep ah wums wahm!” I tell him I still can’t understand what he’s saying. He spits a slimy brown ball into his mitten and says: “You have to keep your worms warm!” Arthur Black Other Views Ice fishing in the Olympics? Anyone who has picked up an issue of The Citizen in the last four years knows about wind turbines. They may have varying degrees of familiarity with them, but they will have heard about turbines and the controversy surrounding them. In a recent presentation to Huron East Council, Huron East Against Turbines (HEAT) posed several ultimatums to council, saying that the issue has been before council for four years and there has been a minimal amount of action taken. HEAT proposed that council put a guideline in place that would dictate that wind turbine companies would be held responsible if property values were to decrease, if adverse health effects were proven, etc. Because of the provincial government’s Green Energy Act, however, council is prohibited from creating any legislation dealing directly with any form of renewable energy, which would include wind turbines. Several councillors then proposed that an agreement be drawn up for any business in the municipality, stating that they will be financially responsible if property values were to decrease, if someone could prove their health was adversely affected, etc. So basically, if anything bad happens after a business start- up, business owners could be held responsible. Mayor Bernie MacLellan said he was concerned that such an agreement would “drive businesses away from Huron East”. In this fragile economic climate, municipalities throughout the province are fighting tooth and nail to attract business to the area, thirsty for the shot in the arm a new business can supply for a community. Nearly every discussion at Huron County Council meetings surrounds, in some way, attracting new business, and therefore residents, to Huron County. Huron East has a full-time employee, Economic Development Officer Jan Hawley, who spends every waking hour brainstorming ways to increase Huron East’s population and employment numbers. If this was a race, an agreement like the one HEAT discussed with council would be the equivalent of nailing a sprinter’s shoes to the ground. To say Hawley would have her work cut out for her would be a massive understatement. She already has her work cut out for her, this would make it impossible. HEAT, understandably, doesn’t seem to look too far past wind turbines. As a wind turbine opposition group, members spend their time researching wind turbines from every angle, so it’s reasonable that when they ponder an agreement, they consider it from that perspective. Council, however, has to consider things from every potential angle. As MacLellan had said before, while Huron East is home to many members of HEAT, it is also home to those who support turbines. Council has been careful when, with dozens of HEAT members present at a council meeting speaking to their particular issues, to see the forest for the trees and always remember to keep the municipality’s big picture in mind. Councillors wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they looked at an issue with a severe case of tunnel vision, even if one side of the issue claims serious adverse health effects. Council and staff in Huron East have been working continuously for years on the wind turbine issue and have made some progress, a point HEAT has contested, but erecting a wall around the municipality to keep wind turbine developers out may also inadvertently keep a lot of great opportunities out as well. A balancing act Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense When you look at that headline, you may be expecting this to be more of a news story and less a column, but that’s just me teasing a little; the column is about expectations... and bank robberies. Before you think I’m being too misleading or elaborate, it’s also about a bank robbery. A robbery that was well-planned, well executed and successful up until the point that the bank robbers were caught in a field some distance from the bank. I’ll set the scene: Police officers arrive on the scene at a TD Bank in Burlington. Summoned by an alarm, the officers began looking around the bank, which has apparently not been breached. All the doors are still locked, not tampered with and not opened. However, when they opened the vault, they found cash, gems and valuables missing. They also found that someone had gone to the trouble of installing a skylight in the bank’s expensive concrete vault. That’s right, the heist was literally an inside job. Apparently, a squad of five bank robbers cut through the bank’s roof. Utilizing empty office space above the bank, they had blocked out the windows to make it look like they were doing renovations and, using both manual and power tools, over the course of two days, cut their way into the vault and walked away with the loot. The police, aside from finding the men, found several vehicles with the aforementioned tools in them with the help of some scent-tracking canines. So here we have a Hollywood-esque bank robbery pulled off, apparently without the help of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Casey Affleck or the rest of the Ocean’s Eleven (or Ocean’s Twelve) group. The lack of ‘A’ list celebrities wasn’t the only difference either. The aforementioned cash, jewels and valuables didn’t exactly amount to the $150 million that Danny Ocean and his crew were attempting to liberate from The Bellagio in Las Vegas. The Canadian version of the silver-screen scoundrels made away with approximately $300,000. That number made the whole story a little disappointing. When I read the list of equipment they used, unless they stole that as well, I figured that the concrete saws alone likely cost them between two and five per cent of their final takeaway. Add in the rappelling equipment the police found, the vehicles, the gas, the two days worth of time they spent there, even at minimum wage (and, let’s be honest, if they knew how to effectively cut through a safe without compromising it to the point that they all fell in, they likely had some training and thus were likely from some kind of demolition or construction company and making a goodly amount) and the time they weren’t at their real jobs, they probably lost somewhere in neighbourhood of 10 per cent of their haul in getting it alone. Split the remaining $270,000 by five, and each person only stood to make $54,000. If they had gotten away, that may have made for a tidy little pay day. That’s of course, assuming they hadn’t been systematically killed by one person who wanted all the money to themselves like The Joker in The Dark Knight. But for me, it was a really disappointing figure to look at. They’re looking at, for unarmed robbery, anywhere from a few years to a few decades behind bars depending on what they’re charged with. If given the choice between working just over a couple years and possibly missing out on decades of my life, I’d say that, in this case, the risk just wasn’t worth the reward. It got me thinking about Hollywood and all the amazing stories we see of those rebellious robbers we cheer for, the valiant villains we are made to like and those scrupulus scoundrels who are only breaking the law because they have to save a loved one or make enough money to pay for a life-threatening operation for their sick daughter. If this is the reality of robbing a bank, imagine how many times someone would have to do it to earn what they need to pay off that gangster threatening their wife. Imagine what they would be risking by stealing 100 cars to save their brother’s life. My expectation, to get back to the theme here, is that robbing a bank, or stealing a nice car, or breaking some misunder- stood good guy out of prison, is always portrayed as this huge, worthwhile endeavour. Then at the end, everything always works out. In the real world, I guess things don’t work out that way. Whether we’re talking about these five guys who, if successful, would only have become marginally more wealthy, or say the man who robbed a bank in Goderich a couple years ago and used a normal taxi as his getaway vehicle and was hours away when the police finally caught up with him, the message I’m getting from the real world is that crime may pay, but it certainly doesn’t pay enough to be worthwhile. So, let that be a lesson to all the children of the world. Unless you’re making $500,000 or more off a heist that you spend 15 to 20 years in jail for, crime pays less than your average journalist’s wages. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Daring bank robbery foiled by cops “The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.” – Ernest Hemingway Final Thought