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.