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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1990-08-29, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 1990. PAGE 5. Smooching for fun and profit “A young woman and a young man had better not be alone together very much until they are married. This will be found to prevent a good many troubles. Kisses and caresses ... have a direct and powerful physiological effect. Nay, they often lead to the most fatal results.” from A Complete Sexual Science And a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood (1894). I remember when I first did it. Judy Page was her name. It was at my sister’s wedding and I (rogue that I was) took advantage of all the nuptial confusion. I Dragged Judy behind a curtain and we did it. Just once. I was a beginner, after all. Not like Paul and Sadie Andover, two passionate Americans who hold the world record: 20,009 times in two hours. Not like the three couples sprawled in the parking lot of a furniture shop in Reno, Nevada last month. Tourists and shoppers i The International Scene 4 Mayen - another idyllic spot BY RAYMOND CANON We all have places that we enjoy visiting and sometimes we come upon them quite by accident. That is precisely how I discovered Mayen, a small German city about 35 kilometres west of Koblenz and the Rhine River. It all came about a couple of years ago when I flew into Frankfurt, planning on doing some business in the famous wine producing area of the Moselle River. My plane was late, I was tired and by the time I had crossed the Rhine River at Koblenz, it was very clear that what I needed was not wine but sleep. I resolved to turn off at the next interchange and look for a small hotel in the nearest locality. The sign said ‘‘Mayen - 5 Kms” and I must confess that the name was totally new to me. However, I reasoned that it had to have a decent hotel somewhere. The next little while was not very productive. There did not seem to be any hotels on the streets I was on but finally I found one only to discover that it was closed for holidays. Not wanting to waste any more time, I decided to ask in a florist’s shop across the street. The young and very helpful clerk suggested that, if I went around the corner, made a sharp turn to my right and followed the street, I would find one. Her directions were excellent and in a few moments a hotel presented itself in front of me. The hotel, named the Zur Traube, was entirely to my liking and in a short while I was sound asleep. I should add that since that time the same hotel has been my starting off point for business in Germany. It is exceedingly clean and quiet, the staff is friendly and in all honesty I cannot ask for any more. There is even a garage to park my car and, to top it ail off, there is a bonus - Mayen itself. I find the city every bit as delightful as the hotel and I have spent many an hour wandering around the streets. The hotel is only a few meters from the main square where I can sit, sip a beer and watch the coming and going. On a nearby corner there is a small bakery where the smell of Arthur Black practically had to climb over them as they did it tout ensemble right there on the main drag! What’s that Madame? You say you’re cancelling your subscription to The Citizen and faxing a petition to Joe Clark to have me drawn and quartered in the shade of the Peace Tower? Relax. It’s osculation we’re talking about here. Paul and Sadie Andover kissed each other 20,009 times in two hours. Those three Reno couples in the furniture store parking lot were joined only at the lips. As for Judy and me, well what do you expect? She was the flower girl and I was the page boy. We couldn’t have made one teenager even if you added our ages together! Judy and I did it out of curiosity, I guess. Paul and Said did it to get their names in the record book. The Reno Sextet did it strictly for money. They were contestants in an event called the Great American Kiss-Off, a promotion sponsored by a Nevada furniture store which offered $10,000 U.S. to the couple that could kiss the longest. Contestants had to smooch for 12 hours each day, from nine in the morning ’til nine at night, right out there in the furniture store’s parking lot. They got a five-minute break each hour to reapply their lipstick and water the flowers - otherwise it was nose to nose with their loved one from dawn to dusk. How long do you think you could buss your sweetie under those conditions? Half a day? Three days? A week? fresh bread is overpowering. I have taken to buying some bread and with a few other things going off on a picnic lunch. In what always seems like all too short a time I have to leave to start my business but there is always the next time to look forward to. But I have to tell you a few words about Mayen itself. If you love history, you will love this place. The first settlement has been calculated to have taken place at no less than 3000 B.C. It was, however, not until 1291 A.D. that Mayen first became officially a city and, in case that date looks familiar, I should remind you that this is the date of the founding of Switzerland. I know that the latter is going to have a big celebration; perhaps Mayen is going to do the same. Not surprisingly, with wars being com­ monplace in Europe, the city was destroy­ ed by the French in 1689 but it was soon afterwards reconstructed and the old city hall, which was built in 1717, is still Letter Help teachers, don’t criticize them THE EDITOR, Fall brings the hunting season to Ontario and not just for deer and geese. Many publications such as the Reader’s Digest and local newspapers attack the education system and teachers with great regularity each September. Our education system is, in this pro­ vince, one of which to be proud. Offering a multiplicity of services, and a space age curriculum, teachers are ready each Sep­ tember to take on the impossible. They must provide a child-centred curriculum to many children, and inspire love of printed matter when the child’s home is a largely non-print world, keep the child’s interests first, all the while pleasing Ministry and board officials and parents. Learning is invisible, taking place in the mind and heart. Content and imagination are the warp and woof, the teacher is the weaver. Our society is visibly oriented however, demanding precise marks on report cards. The Nevada Nuzzlers held out -- and on -- for 42 days. In fact, they’d probably still be nibbling at each other except the furniture company got tired of not having a parking lot. Company officials awarded the 10 grand to all six contestants and let them split it up any way they liked. Strange way to say hello, though - kissing. When I was a kid we used to laugh about the Eskimos and their habit of rubbing noses. But is that any more bizarre than our custom of planting juicy smackers on one another’s lips? I wouldn’t want to argue it in a court of law. Which is where some kissers end up, by the way. Like the 24 year old Oklahoman who was convicted of assault back in 1976 and fined $200. His crime? Kissing the elbow - the elbow! — of a parking warden while she was giving him a ticket. Things were even tougher in England during the early nineteen hundreds. Any chap caught kissing his wife on a Sunday could expect to spend two hours in the stocks. All of which brings to mind a morsel of doggerel that’s been dancing around in my head ever since I read about the Great American Kissoff: She frowned and called him Mr. Because in sport he kr. And so in spite That very nite This Mr. kr. sr. Don’t know a thing about the poet, but I’ll bet you a French Kiss he wasn’t a nineteenth century Englishman. standing. When the city was again badly damaged in the Second World War, this building was fortunately spared and it is one of the first things that you see when you come into the city square. While we are hooked on history, as it were, if you turn 180 degrees from the city hall, you will see the imposing Genoveva Castle which was built in 1280. Only a short distance from the square, some four kms. to be exact, is another castle - Buerre- sheim, built about the same time and, by the time you have visited both of them, you will have enough history to satisfy any­ body. However, it is my daily walk through the city that delights me; it is just as if the world had stopped for a short while and allowed me to get off. My discovery of Mayen is one of the fortuitous happenings that everybody needs to experience now and again. I’m sure it would leave the same impression on you as it did me. Why would anyone become a teacher, let alone stay in teaching? The assumption by the public is that it must be easy to teach, but the public actually knows little of what goes on inside the classroom. With a higher stress rate than any other profession (yes, we passed air traffic controllers) a teacher really has to love his/her profession. Classroom hours are augmented by long hours outside in preparation and marking, coaching, pro­ ducing plays, directing choirs, attending PTA meetings, summer and winter univer­ sity and Ministry courses, etc. These people are professionals who don’t need to punch a time clock. Give your child’s teacher a message of encouragement this fall. Believe me, they really need it, because a pat on the back doesn’t come too often in the teaching profession. Carol McDonnell RR 3, Blyth. Letter from the editor The fascination with killiny machines BY KEITH ROULSTON Like a couple of thousand other Huron County residents, I found myself at Sky Harbour airport in Goderich Saturday to see the return of the Lancaster bomber and the display of other historic warplanes. It was a time of nostalgia for many. For some, like a friend who told me he had flown 37 missions as a bomb-aimer in the glass-bubble nose of a Lane, it brought back real memories of the war. Some people, seeing an Anson trainer probably recalled the days when Huron was the home of four airfields training air crews from around the world under the Common­ wealth Air Training Plan and these planes flew through local skies on training flights. I’m sure there were others like myself who were just fascinated by the aircraft. Until I was about 18 my fondest dream was to be a jet pilot in the airforce. The fifties were still a time when jet fighter pilots were allowed to crack the sound barrier and the shockwaves impressed young boys. A friend and 1 started knocking together boards to make airplanes some­ thing like hobby horses that we rode through imaginary clouds in our back­ yards. For my friend the fascination faded but for me it became an obsession. I read books about pilots. I built models from kits and when I didn’t have money for that, I invented new jet fighters, making them out of paper and inventing all the important statistics about how fast and far they could fly. But late in high school the dream was reluctantly put aside. Partly it was because to go to officer’s training school I was going to have to take more maths and sciences which I dreaded (and even switch schools to get one of the sciences). Partly it was also because in those days we had cadet corps in the high schools and participation was mandatory in our school. I quickly grew irritated by the often-silly rules of discipline. My father didn’t speak a word at the time but later said he could never have seen me putting up with military discipline. Still, Saturday, as I watched a T-33 trainer flash over the field then soar in a vertical climb until it was nearly out of sight, 1 felt the old pangs and I wondered what the fascination is. I wondered what it is that draws millions of people in Canada to air shows to see these deadly machines each year: people who are peace-loving in all other aspects of their lives. Over the years I’ve suffered guilt just butchering a chicken and yet these killing machines designed to, in the case of the Lancaster, devastate whole city-blocks with a single bomb, still have the power to send a chill of excitement through me. There’s a strange, clean beauty to these machines that seems to take us beyond the reason for their being. The more modern the aircraft, the more streamlined and the more striking its looks. Aircraft may be one of the new places where clear, cold efficiency brings about beauty. Efficiency in buildings often makes them like boxes. Efficiency in consumer goods, creates boring sameness. But efficiency for the designer of a jet fighter leads to a thing of beauty that goes beyond its killing power. That beauty is there on the ground when you can get close to it and touch the sharp edge of the wing or the nose, but it’s there even more in the sky when the plane flashes by leaving spectators breathless. It looks so effortless, like a bird soaring on an updraft, and yet it also holds our fascina­ tion with technology in its speed at five, 10, even 30 miles a minute. Whatever it is, some of us are hooked. Those planes on Saturday made me want to find my old books or buy some new models. I know now I’ll never soar in those fighters so maybe that’s as close as I’ll get.