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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2010-07-15, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 15, 2010. PAGE 5. GRAZE vt. 1. to feed on (growing grass, herbage, etc.) – Collins Concise Dictionary Once upon a time, in a city far away where I put in a tour of duty as a lowly city hall reporter, I encountered a magnificent specimen of The Grazing Mammal, subspecies Homo sapiens. She was a city councillor, famous for her large hats, larger purses and unfailing attendance at all civic functions that featured a complimentary food bar. This city councillor would sweep in, usually about the time the function was winding down, engage in a little political banter for a few minutes and when (she thought) no one was looking, surreptitiously fill her capacious purse with canapés, pastries, celery sticks, cocktail wieners and other assorted hors d’oeuvres that were lying about. Hey – no finger pointing here. I’m an old- time bottom feeder myself. When I was working my way through (okay, half-way through) college I had a nighttime job as a bartender. The pay wasn’t great but I survived for at least three semesters on a diet that consisted pretty much of olives, orange and lime slices, maraschino cherries and beer nuts. On-the-job grazing kept me alive but I bear the scars. I still can’t look at a pimiento without gagging. But I was strictly an amateur in the grazing field. I have a friend who worked security for a large Toronto hotel for many years. I once asked him what his biggest headache was – towel thieves? Mini bar raiders? Drunks? Pickpockets? Peeping Toms? He shook his head. “Convention Coyotes,” he told me. These were people – mostly men –who haunted the ballrooms and showrooms of the larger downtown hotels. “They’d wear a suit and tie, slap on a big smile and a name tag and slip into the convention rooms around lunch time,” my buddy recalled. “A lot of conventions have three to four hundred delegates in attendance, so it wasn’t hard for these guys to blend right in. Some of those freeloaders ate free lunches for years.” Serious grazing takes serious nerve – but you’d have to go some to out-nerve the Kiwi who got outed in Wellington, New Zealand recently. At the Harbour City Funeral Home. That’s right – the guy was a fake mourner. According to funeral director Danny Langstraat, the grazing griever hit at least four funerals a week, hoovering up the finger food, even though he had no idea who had died. “Certainly he had a backpack with some Tupperware containers,” said Langstraat. “So when people weren’t looking, he was stocking up.” Officials eventually got wise to his antics, took a photo of him in mid-forage and distributed it to all the local funeral homes. The ‘grim eater’ was out of business. The biggest mistake professional grazers make? Underestimating the enemy. Like the smart aleck yuppie who cruises up to a lonely shepherd tending his flock on a hillside one afternoon, casts a smirking glance at the host of nibbling sheep and says to the shepherd, “I’m looking for a lamb dinner. If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd figures there’s no way the yuppie can count every critter, so he nods. Instantly the yuppie whips out an iPhone, Googles a NASA app, calls up a GPS navigation system which scans his geographical location and gives him an ultra- high resolution photo of the hillside. He forwards the data to an image processing facility in Silicon Valley. Within seconds, his portable printer is delivering a four-colour, twenty page digitized report. The yuppie glances at the report summary turns to the shepherd and says “You have exactly 673 sheep. I’ll take that lamb over there.” He picks it up and places it in his car trunk. The shepherd says, “If I tell you what your profession is will you give me back my animal? The yuppie snorts, says “Sure, why not?” “You’re a business consultant,” says the shepherd. The yuppie is floored. “How could you possibly know that?” he says. “Pretty easy,” says the shepherd. “You showed up here, even though nobody called you. You expect to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked – and most important: you don’t know anything about my business.” “Now open your trunk and give me back my border collie.” Arthur Black Other Views Don’t feed the Convention Coyotes It was with a healthy mix of happiness and sadness that I read through last week’s valedictory speeches from The Citizen’s six area public schools, along with pictures of their graduating classes. It was fun to read as seven different students took a walk down memory lane. Memories of kindergarten through to Grade 8 were recalled. It conjured up my own images of recesses, snowball fights and hours and hours of basketball played on the asphalt of St. Anthony Daniel Catholic School. While each speech was unique in its own way, one torch was carried through them all, an undeniable and unwavering love for their schools. While these students will have moved on to their choice of high school in September, the rest of the student body will return for another year. Probably, in some cases, for the last year of classes that will be held at some of these facilities. After two different Accommodation Review Committees (ARC) appeals are in the process of being launched, Ontario Municipal Board appeals have been filed and arguments continue to rage at levels of government far higher than any student body president. Many speeches speculated on what the future might hold for the valedictorians’fellow classmates; what jobs they may hold, what their families may look like and what they may have accomplished. However, what wasn’t part of the vision was a world without their beloved schools. While several students speculated on the futures of their fellow students, others wondered how the years would go by for students just entering these schools and how they would feel when they were up on the same stage and they were graduating. The smart money, however, is on the closure of many of these schools, three of the six in fact. So unless one of the last-ditch efforts at appealing the decisions made in either ARC scenario pays off, these stages might not see many more graduating classes. Now that is a future that these students couldn’t speculate on. So many graduation speeches centred around teachers and the special relationships these students had with their teachers, school- specific traditions and jokes students laughed hysterically at, while parents sat confused. School will always be school, but it’s this potential loss of environment that could compromise the special bond these children have with one another being alumnists from their same local school. When super schools are created, school has the potential to be somewhere you go, not something you experience or a cornerstone of your community. In the future, teachers will be people who parents meet on parent-teacher night, instead of running into them at the supermarket, sitting beside at a church supper or bumping into them at the bank, which is just another local step in the sprint to the outsourcing of everything in today’s global economy. It is this divide, more than portable classrooms or anything else, that could threaten the future of Huron County education. I went to a high school with over 30 portables, but at the end of the day, it was about the connection I had with my teacher that quenched my thirst to learn. So the graduates are right, the future will look different, and it’s unfortunate that a lot of us may need binoculars to see where it’s all happening. New televised power for right When you’re young The surest sign a planned all-news TV channel will be a new and powerful voice for the political right – one of the biggest talking points in Ontario politics – is the way far-right journalists are rushing to defend it. The channel to be called Sun TV News will be provided by Quebecor Media, which includes the Toronto Sun and many other newspapers in Ontario and elsewhere. It quickly has been dubbed Fox News North by critics who see it as a copy of Fox News in the United States, which attracts a large audience mainly through strident, far-right commentators. The leading spokesman for the channel and its vice-president of business development, Kory Teneycke, until recently was director of communications for Stephen Harper, the most right wing prime minister Canada has had, which suggests it will have Conservative leanings. Teneycke claims the channel will express a diversity of opinions and be modelled particularly on the Toronto Sun. The Sun, founded in 1971 by enterprising journalists who lost their jobs when the Toronto Telegram closed, has unimpeachable Conservative antecedents. The money to start it was raised by Toronto lawyer Eddie Goodman, a long-time behind- the-scenes adviser to William Davis, Conservative premier from 1971-85. Goodman laid down the conditions that The Sun should never support any looney left wing causes, which to him would have meant any party left of the Conservatives, and always support the State of Israel, and it has never deviated from them. The Sun proclaimed in a recent editorial it is “still true to its conservative roots.” Its news reports on the legislature increasingly have become non-partisan, but the vast majority of its editorials and most of its political columnists express Conservative views. If the new TV channel is like The Sun, it will be Conservative. The right-wing columnists who have leaped to defend the new channel include Adam Daifallah in the even more Conservative National Post, who complained much of the news media sneers at Harper and the Conservatives. Conservatives are now starting to stand up for themselves, he said, and the new channel will give them a voice to fight back. Terence Corcoran in the National Post wrote someone has to set up a TV channel different from the “ingrown cabals of mostly Toronto- based, old-line liberal media celebrities and groupies." Chris Selley in the National Post claimed the “hyperventilating lefties” are worried and the new channel will give a much-needed jolt to TV debate in Canada. Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail said she would love to see the new channel take on “the insufferably liberal CBC.” Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun wrote he has no idea what his organization plans, but Fox News provides a diverse, enlightened and independent alternative view, while Canada is “inundated with lib-left orthodoxy." Worthington, who once ran federally for the Conservatives, added another knock at the CBC, saying it provides a slanted and selective view of the news of the day. Michael Coren, a commentator on private radio, wrote in The Sun that news media in Canada are run by by traditional, consistently left-of-centre elitists, who have had an easy, soft and lucrative living for too long and resent change. Monte Solberg, another Sun columnist and former Conservative MP, wrote the new TV channel will need to focus on big government spending and challenge the wisdom of the nanny state, which Conservatives in the legislature accuse Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty of creating, and “really reflect Canadian conservatism." The Toronto Sun, which ought to have some idea what political stance the new channel will take, said in an editorial there is no room for right-of-centre views on TV in Canada today, but this is about to change. Canadians are about to get a large new dose of right-wing views, but there are plenty of these already-- all these writers licking their lips at the prospect prove it. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk Shawn Loughlin SShhaawwnn’’ss SSeennssee Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise.