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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2013-12-05, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2013. PAGE 5. Not to alarm you or anything, but suppose tomorrow morning you looked over the rim of your Tim Hortons double-double to perceive a massive fireball screaming across the heavens towards you. Suppose further that this fireball turned out to be an incoming meteor travelling at, let’s call it 67,600 kilometres an hour. And for the sake of argument, let’s imagine the fireball exploded right over your town. Already happened, my friend – last February. The resulting shock wave burst with what scientists say was the force of 40 Hiroshimas, shattering thousands of windows and injuring more than 1,600 people who suffered everything from temporary blindness to skin-peeling sunburns. Thing is, it happened over the remote city of Chelyabinsk in Russia, so we hardly heard about it. In any case this meteor was little more than a cosmic snowball, as meteors go – merely 19 metres in diameter. Scientists estimate there may be as many as 20 million space rocks that size whizzing around our solar system. Up until the Chelyabinsk incident, scientists didn’t even bother tracking space junk that small. They figured only rocks more than 30 metres across were dangerous. Chelyabinsk has changed the odds. Scientists used to say we could expect a serious hit from outer space about once every century and a half; now they reckon it’s more like once every 30 years. We’ve seen this movie before. Back in 1908 a comet exploded over the Tunguska region of Russia, flattening an estimated 80 million trees and scaring the bejeepers out of thousands of rural Russians. Then, of course, there was The Big One. Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid six miles wide ploughed into Mexico’s Yucatan, unleashing world wide tsunamis, forest fires, acid rain and an eviction notice to the world’s dinosaur population. Canada’s number has also come up in the meteor lottery. Eons ago, an uninvited intruder from outer space scoured a crater 16 miles wide and 40 miles long creating Ontario’s Sudbury basin and leaving behind a vast and rich mineral deposit for which, nearly two billion years later, shareholders in Inco are still giving thanks. Naturally, such an event had minimal effect on Sudbury’s property values, occurring as it did back in the Mesozoic Era – but what if it happened today? And how likely is that anyway? More likely than we’d like to think – and more likely than we used to believe. According to the journal Science, the experts now reckon the Earth is seven times more likely to get seriously stoned from outer space than was previously believed – and they’re talking about rocks even bigger than the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk last year. And don’t forget: that one exploded in the atmosphere. What if it had plowed into the city? Or into New York? Or Toronto? Or Salt Spring Island? Not to alarm you or anything. Arthur Black Other Views Look! Up in the sky! It’s …Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense There are more than enough stories out there proving bad blood between neighbours to help illustrate my point here, but few are as poignant as the story of Canada and the United States of America. I would feel remiss if I didn’t point out that this isn’t a matter of being a patriotic Canadian. I’m not pointing out the flaws of some of our southern neighbours to increase the likability of my own nation, but to point out that materialism is bad. There is no better example of that than some of the stories to emerge from our neighbours this time of the year. We are the polite neighbours to the north and despite the fact that I know most Americans aren’t anything different than the rest of the world, the few who make it to the top of my newsfeed always are. Take, for example, Black Friday. There is no true comparison for the event. The savings must be insane for people to react the way they do, causing bodily harm or, worse, death to their fellow shoppers and the unfortunate employees who have to work during the holiday. There are only two events in Canada where I could imagine people being anything less than civilized to fellow shoppers. One was a one-off event that I was a part of and happened just last month. The other would be the annual Boxing Day sales in and around Canada. The first event was Future Shop and Best Buy offering several new video games absolutely free with the trade-in of any other game for a current generation gaming console. On Nov. 8, I was fortunate enough to find out that Future Shop and Best Buy would be offering two brand new, big-name video games for free so I was able to reserve my copies and save myself standing in the cold. That said, my fiancée Ashleigh and I did get some first-hand experience with the line-up as I checked when the store was open. This was at 9 a.m. (the store opened at 11 a.m.) and the line was already forming and getting to the corner of the large building. Everyone there was talking, laughing and enjoying how crazy the idea of the free game was. Many of them were also laughing about the fact that the majority of the people in line weren’t kids, but adults who couldn’t justify buying the games new, but could justify braving the cold for a few hours to get the games for free. While the situation was called “pandemonium” by some media outlets, and police were called in to provide security, the very worst thing that happened, in my experience and my research as I did end up standing in line with some friends for the better part of two hours, was that people cursed under their breath when stocks of the games ran out before they got their own copies. There was no pushing, no shoving and anyone who cut lines (which, at the Milton location I was at, happened only once and that was unintentional) was told by staff where they needed to go. Keeping in mind that every single person in the line was either a gamer or related to a gamer, those poor, misguided souls on whom some people blame all the world’s violence. The fact that nothing happened beyond a few bruised feelings shows exactly how these kinds of deals should be handled. Some stores handed out copies in lines to stop people from rushing, others only permitted 10 people in at a time and had staff outside keeping the line orderly (though truth be told they were likely unnecessary). While I’ve heard that people were upset that some stores bent or broke the rules, the simple fact is that nothing bad happened that day. Boxing Day in Canada is likely the only event that resembles Black Friday in any dimension. People do get up at crazy hours to wait in line for those great deals. I’ve got friends who have waited all year to get a new television and stood in line for hours. After the fact, they saved a few dollars, lost a few hours of sleep and were certainly not any worse for wear. I’m sure there are situations where things get a bit rowdy but, being the polite nation we are, I can’t find anything definitive saying that people have been hurt, maimed or killed during the event. Contrast that with Black Friday which has its own website for tallying the injured and the deceased. Black Friday Death Count, a morbid website located at blackfridaydeathcount.com, tallies all the injured and deceased from Black Friday going back to 2006 when 11 people were injured during the shopping holiday, one in Salt Lake and 10 in Southern California. Two years later the first deaths occurred when a stampede of Wal-Mart shoppers trampled a seasonal worker to death in Long Island and when two people were killed in a shooting in California. In 2011, a man died when he collapsed in a Target store and, instead of helping him, people stepped over him as he lay suffering on the ground to get to the next sale item. Aside from the seven deaths, there have been 90 injuries reported from Black Friday in the last seven years according to the aforementioned site. That means that, on average, 10 people are injured every year as a result of Black Friday sales and the pushing, shoving and trampling (as well as stabbings and shootings) that accompany them and that number doesn’t include all the yet-to-be reported injuries and damage from this year. This year alone, one person has been stabbed over a parking space and another shot while he carried a television home from a sale. Materialism isn’t a trait of the United States. There are places in the world, like the United Arab Emirates, where ATM machines exist that give out gold bars instead of cash. There are places where the most expensive vehicles in the world aren’t enough of a status symbol, so the truly rich people in those countries have those vehicles plated with gold. However we don’t hear stories about people killing each other over a pair of jeans or a television from those nations. The disparity of wealth there makes it so that some people are fighting to survive, not fighting to get a vacuum cleaner. So while I know that not every person in the United States is out there acting like a good hockey player and keeping those elbows up in front of the crease, or in front of the television displays, enough of them are that seven people have died and nearly 100 people have been injured in seven years. Something isn’t right here. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Putting up with the southern neighbours Fascination evolution This year’s revelation of Barbara Walters’ annual 10 most fascinating people list for the year might say more about us that it does about those lucky enough to make it. Walters presents the list every year and then, when her show airs, as it is scheduled to do this year on Dec. 18, chooses the most fascinating person of the year, from her shortlist of 10. This year we were truly blessed. The list is: Robin Roberts, news anchor; Prince George, royal infant; Jennifer Lawrence, Academy Award-winning actress; Edward Snowden, controversial whistle-blower; Diana Nyad, swimmer; Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, musician and professional celebrity, respectively; Miley Cyrus, musician; the stars of Duck Dynasty and Pope Francis. I feel our standards for fascination have really gone in the toilet recently. A handful of people on the list are genuinely interesting, like Lawrence, Nyad, Snowden and Pope Francis, but the rest? Come on. Prince George is a baby. He’s four months old, so let’s just get him off this list right now. We can argue over the fact that babies are fascinating and that when a parent has their first child, the child becomes the most fascinating person you’ll ever meet, but for the public’s purposes, Prince George is a baby who drinks his mother’s breast milk, goes to the bathroom in a diaper and cries. I wonder what kind of questions Walters has lined up for him. When I first saw a commercial for Duck Dynasty, I thought it was a joke. It’s not a joke, I guess. It is one of the most popular shows in North America. Now, while I can respect a man with a good beard, my admiration for all things Duck Dynasty ends there. I don’t know much about the show, but I can tell you that it’s not fascinating. It’s a scripted “reality” show about a load of bumpkins schlepping around the woods. Next. To be fair to Walters, who has been compiling this annual list since the early 1990s, it’s impossible to create such as list this year without including musician Miley Cyrus. Earlier this year Cyrus seemed to have some sort of awakening where she makes music videos that border on pornography. She has not been seen in public wearing pants in probably about six months. But, to be fair, she has dominated many a conversation this year that hasn’t dealt with embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. In fact, why isn’t Ford on this list? He’s fascinating for all the wrong reasons... which brings me to the final pair on the list: West and Kardashian. This year they brought North West into the world, which to those of your not in the know, is not a GPS command, it’s their child. Kardashian is not an actress, a model, a musician or anything of note. She was introduced to the world, as any noteworthy individual is this day and age, via sex tape. She has done nothing with her life to date that could even mildly be considered an accomplishment. Moving along to her husband, the man who wrote the song “Gold Digger” about the perils of gold diggers and married the biggest gold digger the world has ever known. West is best known for proclaiming himself to be Christ-like in late night interviews and punching out media photographers on a regular basis. If these people are the most fascinating the human race has to offer, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board.