The Brussels Post, 1974-11-13, Page 2aITTAILIOND tin
Brussels Post
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1974'
BRUSSELS
ONTARIO
Serving Brussels and the surrounding community.
Published each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario
by McLean. Bros.Publishers, Limited,.
Evelyn Kennedy - Editor
Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and
Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association.
Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $6.00 a year, Others
CCil" $8.00 a year, Single Copies 15 cents each.
Second class mail Registration No. 0562.
Telephone 887-6641.
voiitnEo i-Apacu,NnoN
St
18 61 building at Beechwood
Sugar and Spice
By Bill Smiley
•
4e/ V,/ 4.<" .4. • ..., , , 41,
rznv, y ,Z260 ' 1:70AV
The population puzzle
TOP
Brus
Beef
Ach i
of 15
of the
ea..*:Mr010-:094x.:01(AMW:4AAMOte'>,katathZ,9:Malitiiia
Sir:
Enclosed please find $6 for a
subscription to The Brussels Post. M y
Aunt and Uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Lorne
Nichol sent me the Oct. 23 issue which had
the writeup of their 60th wedding
anniversary and I was impressed with the
quality of the paper. I work for the daily
newspaper in Thunder Bay and we have
two weeklies, neither of which come near
the quality of your paper. Congratulations.
Don Smith
R.R.#2,
Thunder Bay,
Ontario.
A bits and pieces column. First item
shows a malicious delight in "catching
someone out" as the phrase goes. It is one
of the less pleasant aspects of the human
character, but at the same time has given a
great deal of pleasure, over the centuries,
to the human race.
There is nothing people enjoy more than
somebody else's feet of clay. How we all
secretly rejoice, if not openly, when a
cabinet minister is caught with a blonde
who is not his wife, or a prominent judge is
nailed on an impaired driving charge, or a
teacher is discovered nurturing marijuana
in his/her window boxes.
Disgusting, and definitely not Christian,
but it's tun. I've been a victim myself. Sent
out a questionnaire to elementary school
teachers of English last year. There was
one spelling error in it, and I didn't do it, a
secretary did. But about 50 per cent of the
questionnaires returned had the mistake
circled, and some gleeful little remark
attached.
Now, it's my turn. I have before me a list
of. novels and plays sent out by the
Educational Communications Authority, a
fairly Sacred cow with the Ministry of
Education.
The Authority wants English department
heads to tick off a list of the books most
used by students in our high schools, with
a view to buying the movie rights to the 20
most popular, so that they can be
video-taped and made available on a wide
basis. A laudable plan.
It was when I started to scan the list that
I t hought it must be a put-on. I re-checked
the accompanying letter. No, it was real, it
was official.
I looked over the list, a fairly
comprehensive one of most of the literature
used in our high schools, and started
ticking off the obvious ones: Macbeth,
Hamlet, Romeo and. Juliet, Death of a
Salesman, Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby.
Everything in order.
Then I turned to Page 2 of the list arid
nearly fell off my chair. I came to two
conclusions. Either the chap who had
dictated the list had failed to proof-read it,
or the secretary who had done the typing
had finished Page 1 and gone out and had a
large liquid lunch before taCkling Page 2.
Don Quixote came out as Don Otiiote.
This must be an animal story about a
coyOte Called Don. Emily l3ronte must be
twirling in her grave on the Moors, to see
her magnificent Wuthering Heights
described as Withering Heights.
Thomas Hardy Will be having a celestial
.seizure when he realizes that his great Tess
of the D'Urbervilles has a new title: Tess Of
the D'Umbervilles. D'Umber than what?
A science fiction novel, The Chrysalids,
has a new life as The Chrysslids. The Luck
of Ginger Coffey has been transformed to
Lack of Ginger Coffey. Probably some sort
of rationing'.
A fine western novel, The Ox Bow
Incident, has changed shape. It is now the
Ox Box Incident, a rather square title, if I
may say so.
A Grade 11 standard, To Kill a
Mockingbird, has become To Kill a
Mocking Bird. Can't you see that bird, just
sitting around mocking the old lady who
owns it?
But perhaps the greatek blow to
Canadian literature, and certainly the one
that nearly bust a gut in a number of
English teachers, was the updating of that
fine, old novel about French Canada,
cMhaarpiadeCihaianpe.delaine. It is now called Marve
That is an obvious backlash by some
male chauvinist pig to the entire Women's
Lib movement. But I'd certainly like to
read the new version. I can just see Marve
up there, in the Quebec backwoods,
bringing in the kindling, worrying about
wolves, and having babies under primitive
conditions. Poor Marve. It was OK for
Marie. She had guts.But Marve doesn't
sound as though he could hack it, with a
name like that. I imagine he'll die in
childbirth, or be eaten alive by mosquitoes,
or drop a pot of scalding soupe aux pois on
his foot, or something like that.
Now I know this entire column is
completely unfair to the poor guy who
made up the list. But I got so much
pleasure from it, purely malicious
plea sureit
on.
I couldn't refrain from
passing
And the sheer joy of it is that it cod
from an Educational Authority. In capitals.
It would be no fun at all if it came from as
illiterate bookseller.
It's interesting to learn that your
n eighbour is going to have a baby, after l5
years of sterility, or that your Uncle George
had an affair in Singapore when he.\va
thech merchant echaindternavy, ,arid before he became
a
thaBtutsoitni'seosnheeerawgaleye awbh6evne you
you
d snc o tve h el'
boa
h b i er.atohoy has Committed a monstr°115
We all have clay feet, bitt Most of Us
keep our shoes tightly laced, or at least ("t r
socks on.
Nothing can be as discouraging as to give long
speeches on the need for population control to a
conference whose delegates 'know that, for the time
being at least, they are fighting'a losing battle. Yet
that is what occurred at the August World Population
Congress held in Bucharest, Romania.
Some delegates implored. Others warned. Quite a
number didn't turn up because inflation had eaten
into travel budgets. And none who came had a
meaningful solution to what is probably the most
pressing problem in the world today.
Unless the people in poorer lands tend to follow
the example of more affluent nations, where young
people are beginning merely to replace themselves
by having no more than• two children in many cases,
future generations face a grim prospect.
The recent floods in Bangladesh, for instance,
which covered almost half the country and which
took thousands of lives, are a form of population
control that was accepted by humanity for centuries.
If the land had to support too many souls, vast
numbers starved to death, or died of thirst, or were
killed and drowned in storms and floods. Mankind,
with its new technology, today can overcome the
cruelties of nature on most occasions.
But will we conquer nature if we grow from today's
figure of 4 billion to 8 billion by early next century?
Will the massive international relief operations that
were mounted in drought-stricken Ethiopia or
flooded Bangladesh be enough? Will the hundreds of
millions of unemployed wandering the world by the
year 2,000 be content with degradation and
deprivation? Clearly, one must answer NO to these
questions. And therefore daily the need to search for
meaningful solutions to the population puzzle
becomes more urgent.
(Contributed)
To the Editor
Quality of Post
impresses reader
GATE
best
Fred
Hal lal
Dairy
LL
ere
ridE
rah,
eaf
uck