HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-03-05, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 2009. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
The best for them
Here’s a fun experiment: draw a human
face. Nothing fancy – just take a
pencil and draw a circle on a piece of
paper. Now add two dots for the eyes. Draw a
smaller blob below them for the nose.
Doesn’t tell you much of anything so far,
right? Your subject could be loon-like
hysterical or wrist-slashing suicidal. Ticked
off or blissed out. There are no clues in that
half-finished face.
Now take your pencil and draw a line for the
mouth. Presto, you’ve got attitude.
If you draw the mouth like a hammock with
the corners riding high, you’ve got a happy
camper. Invert it and you’ve created Gloomy
Gus.
All with one simple line.
At about this point you are saying
approximately, “Yeah, so? It’s a dumb cartoon.
What’s this got to do with real life?”
Everything. You want to elevate your mood
and feel better – right this minute? Forget
pills. Forget the double Drambuie. You don’t
need a hit from The Comedy Network.
All you have to do is lift the corners of your
mouth and smile.
Fake it if you have to. Take that pencil you
drew the face with and stick it crossways in
your mouth. It works.
In 1983, researchers at the University of
Washington instructed half a dozen subjects to
jam a pencil between their teeth, then showed
them a series of cartoons. They showed the
same cartoons to six subjects who weren’t
required to ‘smile’.
The pencil-clenchers rated the cartoons
‘significantly funnier’ than the control group
did.
It’s powerful medicine, the smile. So
powerful that it’s common to cultures around
the world, primitive and sophisticated alike.
People everywhere smile when they’re happy
and frown when they’re not.
Charles Darwin, on his voyages aboard the
Beagle, remarked on this cross-cultural
phenomenon nearly 200 years ago.
Best of all, The Smile is aide de camp to The
Laugh, which is even more powerful
medicine. Researchers at the University of
Maryland Medical Centre have been analyzing
the therapeutic clout of simple laughter.
They came to the conclusion that laughing:
• increases blood flow through the arteries;
• lowers blood sugar levels among diabetics,
• eases pain (because it relaxes muscles);
• regulates the immune system and…
• even burns calories.
Wait a minute. You can lose weight by
laughing?
Absolutely. Researchers at Vanderbilt
University calculate that 15 minutes of hearty
laughter burns about 40 calories. Do it every
day and you’ll drop four pounds over the next
year.
And you thought watching the
Parliamentary Channel was a waste of time.
Is there a downside to laughter? Not really.
“A tranquilizer with no side effects” Arnold
Glasow called it.
Laughter is also an unparalleled tool of
diplomacy. It is very hard to be angry with
someone while you’re laughing at them.
At the same time it’s an incredibly powerful
skewering device to wield against your
enemies. Adversaries can steel themselves for
sneers, curses, growls, snarls, slanders, and all
manner of verbal abuse.
But someone laughing at them? There’s no
defence against that.
And it starts with a smile. A simple flex of
the lip muscles. Smile enough and your
enemies will melt away before you have to
bring out the heavy ordinance. At worst, you’ll
confound them for life.
Or even longer. Lisa Gherardini’s smile has
been confounding viewers for more than 500
years.
Lisa Gherardini? Wife of a 16th century
Florentine silk merchant. We’d never have
heard of her if her smile hadn’t caught the eye
of an artist named da Vinci about the time
another young Italian named Columbus was
setting sail from Spain to see what was over
the horizon..
So smile. Worked for Mona Lisa. It’ll work
for you.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Smile! It is good for you!
Aby-election in cottage country
northeast of Toronto a decade and a
half ago started a revival of Ontario’s
Progressive Conservative Party that quickly
put it in government. Could another there on
Thursday (March 5) do the same?
The influential by-election was in 1994 in a
riding then called Victoria-Haliburton. Mike
Harris had been Conservative leader for four
years, but still was little known.
Harris had begun promoting policies with an
underlying theme of cutting government and
taxes under the title, The Common Sense
Revolution, but had not caught much public
attention.
The competing opposition party, the
Liberals under Lyn McLeod, held a substantial
lead in polls. The New Democrats, who had
won government and the riding in the 1990
general election, were not in the race,
particularly because they had piled up $10
billion-a-year annual deficits that were held
against them.
The Conservatives, who had not emerged as
quite the aggressive, far right party they were
to become under Harris, took the offensive by
saying their own first priority was to create
jobs, while the Liberals’ was to provide gay
and lesbian couples with the same family
benefits as heterosexual couples.
This was a distortion, because McLeod had
supported extending family and survivor
benefits to same-sex couples, but placed this
nowhere near the top of her professed goals
and spent incomparably more time discussing
jobs.
Harris also declared Ontario had “too many
from other countries coming here for a free
ride” which also bent the truth, because
immigrants generally have been as willing to
work as those born here.
Harris added, if he became premier, welfare
recipients who “choose to stay at home and do
nothing will get nothing,” which appealed to
many who had to scratch out a living in a
riding that lacks industries that provide
reasonable incomes.
The by-election was the most bitter in
memory and the Conservatives won it
comfortably, in terms of votes. It put Harris on
the map, where he had not been before.
A year later, Harris went on to sweep the
province, particularly because of his promise
to cut government and taxes, which most
residents had been waiting to hear.
He was helped, particularly among small-c
conservatives, by his refusal to support
spousal benefits for same-sex couples, which
went along with his refusal to recognize same-
sex marriages.
Harris also won votes because he promised
to force welfare recipients to work, which
many felt logical, although it is less easily put
into practice.
The legislature’s best phrase-maker, Liberal
Sean Conway, who had shied from attempts to
persuade him to run for leader of his party,
announced “the politics of prejudice” had
taken hold and later he would run for Liberal
leader solely to eliminate Harris, although he
did not follow through.
Not much of what Harris campaigned on is
of help to Conservative leader John Tory, if he
wins the by-election in approximately the
same riding, now re-named Haliburton-
Kawartha Lakes-Brock.
Same-sex benefits are no longer an issue.
The courts have ruled that refusing to
recognize same-sex marriage and provide
benefits are discriminatory and Tory
and his current party have gone along with
this.
Mainstream parties today would not single
out immigrants as unwilling to work or argue
many are on welfare because they choose
to stay home, although they might press
for policies to get more welfare recipients in
jobs.
Tory or whoever is Conservative leader will
have to produce policies that appeal, but will
be helped by the rapid deterioration of the
economy and tendency to blame Liberal
Premier Dalton McGuinty for it or at least
failing to act sooner.
Tory would have to avoid the trap of
advocating policies that hurt him, such as
proposing to fund more faith-based schools,
which destroyed any chance he had in the
2007 election.
But for the Conservatives even to have a
leader in the legislature at a time when a
government is struggling would help make
them a more acceptable alternative.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
They were the newsmakers in The Post
and The Standard, their names gracing
the pages week after week.
Now for more than 20 years it has been their
children and their grandchildren whose stories
have found their way into the news published
in The Citizen.
They were and are the young people of our
communities. And if there was ever a core
group of our readership making repeated visits
onto our pages it would be them.
This struck me recently while perusing the
archives for fodder for the weekly Looking
Back. Happening upon a photo of one of my
kids, I realized how often a school-aged
youngster gets photographed for, or written
about in, the local newspaper. They are there as
members of sports teams, Guides or Scouts,
public speaking winners, debaters and assorted
other varied achievements.
Then with high school taking them further
afield we are less able to discover, or
acknowledge their accomplishments, so their
profile in the public eye tends to lessen.
And it was this realization that came to mind
as I sat in on the recent Accommodation
Review Committee meeting. The concept
being discussed by the ARC is to amalgamate
Blyth, East Wawanosh, Turnberry and
Wingham students under the roof of one
‘educational centre of excellence’. With the
probability that at least one of these schools is
destined for closure, proponents for the new
facility are hoping that the Avon Maitland
District School Boards in June will agree this
is the best solution.
Having been to the meetings and heard
concerns and arguments, both pros and cons, I
have a good understanding of the situation and
the rationale behind the concept. Yet, having no
child directly affected, my view is more of
interested bystander.
However, it has dawned on me that should
the trustees agree with the committee’s idea, it
will impact this newspaper. For instance, if we
go back to the first discussions of
amalgamation for our municipalities, there was
a tongue-in-cheek hope from editorial staff that
those in our readership area (Blyth, Brussels,
Hullett, McKillop, Grey, Morris, East and West
Wawanosh) would come together for our
convenience. Such was not the case, of course
as our convenience really didn’t, and shouldn’t
count in the big picture. But we now find
ourselves not only unable to cover all the
councils that would take in our readership area,
but attending meetings where discussion often
has little to do with ‘local’ issues.
Similarily, we currently try to cover the
activities of five ‘local’ elementary schools,
which includes Blyth and East Wawanosh, as
well as Hullett, Brussels and Grey. We do not
cover the events or activities at Wingham or
Turnberry schools. Yet, should the school be
built, we could hardly exclude those children
from photos we take.
Distance is going to play a factor as well.
Unless the proposed school was built in Blyth,
having our pulse on what is going on will be
difficult, just as it happens with high schools.
Also, when we find ourselves looking for that
last minute front page picture on a busy
Monday, we will no longer have the advantage
of running a couple of blocks to get it.
Obviously, like amalgamation before, this
has nothing to do with the big picture. The
board rightly so will be considering what is best
for the students, for their education and their
future. And should that be a new school, our
best for them will be to see that those students
continue to be our community’s newsmakers.
By-election could influence again
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I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being
poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is
only a temporary situation.
– Mike Todd
Final Thought