HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-02-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2009. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Reap what he sows
J ust remember that you’re standing on a
planet that’s evolving And revolving at
900 miles an hour…
Ah, Monty Python and crew, God bless ‘em.
Never encountered a gang of comics who
made me laugh longer or harder than those
loopy Brits. The Dead Parrot Sketch. The
Lumberjack Song. The Department of Silly
Walks. Hell’s Grannies.
And of course, The Galaxy Song.
That’s orbiting at 19 miles a second,
so it’s reckoned
Round the sun which is the source
of all our power
Canada’s pioneering funnyman, Stephen
Leacock, defined humour as “the kindly
contemplation of the incongruities of life”.
Leacock would have loved the Pythons.
They deal in incongruities too. Incongruities
like the fact that you and me and this
newspaper and this country and this continent
and this planet we call home,
We’re moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm at
40,000 miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
The whole ‘incongruity’ that the Galaxy
Song addresses is the cosmic insignificance of
self-important bipeds like thee and moi.
But hold on! According to the latest
scientific data, we’re not quite as insignificant
as we thought. And that applies to the Milky
Way as well.
It bulges in the middle 16,000
light-years thick
But out by us it’s just 3,000
light-years wide
Poppycock. Monty Python had it all wrong.
According to data recently analyzed, our
Milky Way is actually about one and a half
times bigger than we thought it was.
Mark Reid, a researcher at the Harvard-
Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics dumbed
it down for me: “It’s the equivalent of a 5-foot-
5, 140-pound astrophysicist suddenly bulking
up to the size of a 6-foot-three, 210-pound
NFL linebacker.”
But before you let our new-found gi-
normousness go to your head, think about our
planet. Pretty hefty place. Twenty-five
thousand miles around the belly. Near 200
million square miles in area…
Yeah, well. If our sun was a beach ball? The
earth would be a chick pea.
So, okay. Earth is a runt but our sun is an all-
star heavyweight, right? Not right.
Our galaxy itself contains a
hundred billion stars…
The Pythons had that right – but ‘hundred
billion’is one of those phrases that trips off the
tongue meaninglessly – as U.S. Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson has so ably
demonstrated of late.
How big is a hundred billion? Put it this way.
Imagine not the earth but our sun as a
chick pea. Find yourself a bucket. Drop in the
solar chick pea…Now add 999,999
similar chick peas. Better make it a real big
bucket.
That’s how many other ‘suns’ there are in
the Milky Way.
Okay, so our planet’s dinky, our sun is a
dime-a-dozen cosmic bauble, but at least our
Milky Way is a galactic heavy-hitter, right?
Don’t see a galaxy like The Milky Way
kicking around every day.
Wrong again. We may not see them, but
they’re out there. Hundreds. Of thousands. Of
millions of them.
The experts reckon (and it’s little better than
an educated guess) that there may be as many
as 125 billion galaxies in the universe. They
think there may be more galaxies in the
universe than there are stars in our Milky Way.
Or as Monty Python put it in song:
…our galaxy is only one of millions
of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
So let’s call a time-out to reconnoitre here.
We live on a corner of one continent of one
planet of one galaxy that contains a hundred
billion other stars – some with orbiting
planets, some without.
Our galaxy swims in a void that contains at
least a hundred billion galaxies more or less
like ours.
Still think it matters which deodorant you
use?
I think the United Nations sent the right
message when Voyager I was launched in
1977. The space capsule contained a message
that read: “We step out of our solar system into
the universe seeking only peace and
friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be
taught if we are fortunate.”
On second thought, Monty Python’s Galaxy
Song probably said it better:
Pray that there’s intelligent life
somewhere up in space
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here
on planet earth.
Arthur
Black
Other Views In search of intelligent life
T his recession, that is changing so
much, is developing its own
language.
Even news media, which are rarely at a loss
for words, are running out of ways to describe
it.
They started by mundanely reporting
employers are reducing, cutting, eliminating,
laying off, chopping, even slashing jobs and
employees losing them or becoming
unemployed or jobless.
The repetition got monotonous, so they
moved quickly to talk of companies
retrenching, handing out pink slips, shedding,
downsizing, streamlining, trimming, slimming
and cutting fat.
None has suggested a company is doing a
Jenny Craig or calling in Weight Watchers, but
these cannot be far off.
Employees now are being axed, which
sounds brutal, or less gruesomely “let go,” as
if they had hammered on the factory gates to
be let out and their employers reluctantly
opened them, which usually is far from the
case, but sounds more palatable.
A car manufacturer was said to be “taking
production down a notch” at a plant in
Alliston, which sounds minor and well under
control, but it cut its work force in half until
demand increases.
When the once trendy clothing
manufacturer, Cotton Ginny Inc., had to close
some stores, a newspaper said it was “frayed”
by the recession, an apt metaphor this writer
would like to have thought of, and a mining
company in Sudbury planned to “shutter” a
mine.
Companies that fire workers often come up
with explanations that avoid discussing the
reasons and are as suspect as claiming “my
grandmother had a baby yesterday and I
couldn’t come to work.”
A carpet manufacturing company that will
close its plant in Belleville explained this was
“part of a global restructuring effort that will
strengthen our long-term viability,” which
means it hopes to carry on elsewhere and
brings no cheer to the 90 local employees who
lost jobs.
An employer that provides auto windshields
and sunroofs explained closing a plant in
Cambridge will enable it “to align its
remaining plants capacity to meet demand,”
which is another way of saying goodbye
Cambridge.
An auto parts supplier in Niagara Falls said
it was “liquidating its assets in an effort to
develop a viable North American strategy.”
An aluminum producer said its major cuts in
production and jobs are “part of a broad-based
plan to reduce costs.”
The telephone service provider, Telus Corp.,
laid off 100 workers and said this “will help
move resources out of declining areas of our
business to those which help us ensure our
ongoing success.”
The high-tech equipment maker and former
stock market darling, Nortel Networks Corp.,
which has been declining for years, will cut
still more staff and explained this will slow the
rate it uses up its cash reserves.
But it was revealed to have been spending
$1 million a month leasing corporate jets until
recently, despite the many criticisms of
business executives’ high flying. It postponed
its annual meeting at which shareholders
might have asked awkward questions about
this and other issues.
Employers often make little effort to soften
blows. An exception was a mining company in
Sudbury that at least said it recognized its
firings “will affect our employees, their
families, our unions and other key
stakeholders and our first priority is to ensure
displaced employees are treated fairly and
with respect.”
Some media companies have not looked
compassionate, notwithstanding their
demanding this from others. A free daily
newspaper read mainly on public transit and
owned by The Toronto Star, which publishes
an editorial a week praising small business as
the backbone of the economy, fired its paid
writing staff and replaced them with unpaid
interns, but described this as merely “a small
adjustment.”
The Rogers Communications TV-radio-
magazines-cable conglomerate sacked an
undisclosed number of employees three weeks
before Christmas, and the same day the
entrepreneur who assembled it, Ted Rogers,
died.
The tributes, from Prime Minister Stephen
Harper down, praised him as “one of the
greatest Canadians” and not much thought was
spared for those who lost jobs.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
The door closes shutting out the dreary
grey, the damp bite of the bitter winter
day. Yet, even as the home’s warmth
wraps itself around me, there is a lingering
chill permeating heart and soul.
A shiver moves through my core, trying to
shake off the final vestiges of iciness. Then as
I move further into the enveloping comfort, my
eye is caught by something so verdant, so
lushly earthy, that the frigidity which had
seemed encapsulated in every pore, bone and
fibre immediately dissipates. In the corner,
against a wall is a plant. And what a plant it is.
Its vibrant foliage rises strong and straight
from the urn, its promising buds are abundant.
This, I muse, is veritably summer in a pot.
And it is my son’s pride and joy. This
particular project, a pepper, joins an indoor
grow operation consisting of a variety of herbs
to which strawberries and other vegetables will
soon be added.
It would seem that the boy has a bit of a
green thumb. Every seed he has put to earth has
resulted in healthy, vibrant plants. There are no
wilting leaves, no spindly stems. Their
aesthetics turn one’s mind literally to goodness
and nature.
And this is where son and I differ. I can grow
things. I take great delight in my gardening
successes. But unlike his, mine are not assured.
I fret and worry, I feed and nurture. Yet
sometimes despite my best efforts, I fail.
Even when I don’t, results are minimal. I
never achieve in a bright, sunny garden the
profusion of vegetation my son has managed
indoors in the winter, seemingly with ease.
That’s a gift.
My grandmothers had it. So does my
mother-in-law.
Which got me wondering about heredity and
nature over nurture. My son never knew his
great-grandmothers. He never really paid any
attention to the gardens at his grandmother’s
house either.
He has seen me with hands in dirt, taking
great delight over a bud on a new plant, or
moving things around to try and get that right
look. But as I can’t imagine that being any
inspiration to him, I think I’ll rule out nurture
as the driving force behind his knack for
horticulture.
No, I think there is a green thumb gene and
I, sadly for me, am just a carrier.
Heredity is interesting in the way we may
not always know from whom a trait has come.
I do not look at the face of a family member
and see my own. I do not see a physique or hair
colour that matches mine. While my older
siblings liked to explain those differences by
telling me I was found on a doorstep, I have
come as a grownup to suspect a more common
sense notion. I believe that rather than looking
like one person, I am an amalgam of many,
going back generations.
There are similarities I do pick out that I find
quite fascinating though, because they are a bit
more puzzling. For instance, there is the way I
rest my arms and fold my hands when carrying
on a conversation during dinner, exactly I’ve
noticed, the same way my sister does.
Likewise, there is that tone of tolerance I adopt
during certain kinds of discussions, the same
one my brother has.
Nature or nurture? Who knows.
One thing I do know is that I as a mother,
nurtured someone who seems to have an
affinity with Mother Nature. So guess who I’m
getting to start my plants for me now? I may
not have the gift, but I’d say I’m close enough
to one who does to reap what he sows.
New talk developing in slump
People often say that this or that person has
not yet found himself. But the self is not
something that one finds. It is something
that one creates.
– Thomas Szasz
Final Thought