HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1996-02-21, Page 5International Scene
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THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1996 PAGE 5.
I could have
been a teacher
Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — I
get weary of the sybaritic and dissolute life
of a newspaper hack. That's when I
fantasize about how things might have
turned out if I'd opted for an honest line of
work.
I could have been a teacher, for instance.
There's something intrinsically noble about
the idea of imparting knowledge and
wisdom into the craniums of the future
Leaders of This Great Nation.
Not to mention having the summers off
and that plush pension plan.
Of course there is a downside to the
profession of teaching.
Students. You have to put up with the
students.
But even that could be okay — providing
you remember to laugh instead of cry.
Consider for example, these answers
submitted by various students writing test
papers and essays in science:
• H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water.
• Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin
and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin
Elections
south of
the border
The Americans are about to go into that
drawn-out ritual called the presidential
election and it is hard to imagine any
country subjecting the candidates to more
physical and mental stress than does the U.S.
electoral system.
This is one game that you simply cannot
understand without a program and, with the
intention of making the whole contest as
comprehensible as possible, I am going to
give you as light-hearted and in-depth an
explanation as I can with the hope that you
are still with me at the end of this article.
There has been a great deal of posturing
going on for the past few months, but the
real contest starts in February when
preliminary voting begins in a number of
states. The principal candidates pretty well
have to take part in most of these, that is, if
they want to make any impression on the
people who will attend the nomination
conventions later on and who will vote for
the candidate of their choice. But more of
that later.
Right now one of the chief candidates is
Bill Clinton, the president who is expected
to get the Democrat nomination. The
Democrats are roughly comparable to our
Liberals.
The other main party is the Republican,
is gin and water.
• The moon is a planet just like the earth,
only its even deader.
You've got to wonder about these kids'
grasp of biology too. Here are some
verbatim results from a health exam:
• Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries,
vanes and caterpillars.
• Resperation is composed of two acts,
first inspiration and then expectoration.
• When you breath, you inspire. When you
do not breath, you expire.
• Blood flows up one leg and down the
other.
• Artificial insemination is when the
farmer does it to the cow instead of the bull.
And finally, my all time favourite:
• The body consists of three parts — the
brainium, the borax and the abominable
cavity. The brainium contains the brain, the
borax contains the heart and lungs, and the
abominable cavity contains the bowls, of
which there are five — a, e, i, o, and u.
What happens to kids like these when they
grow up? Well, maybe they become doctors.
A British linguist by the name of Richard
Lederer has been going bloodshot in the eyes
collecting medical malapropisms from
hospital reports.
Some of his findings:
• Sister Anna Maria is a Catholic nun who
is currently between missionaries.
whose favourite son is currently Bob Dole.
While Clinton does not have much in the
way of opposition in his party, Dole has to
keep an eye on such would-be candidates as
Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, Lamar
Alexander and Richard Lugar. Don't worry
yet what these latter stand for. Most of them
are busy flying trial balloons and are not
sure themselves what will catch the voters'
attention.
The election has been made poorer by the
decision of Gen. Colin Powell not to run for
the Republicans. He was so popular that he
probably could have had his party's
nomination for the asking. It is a pity, but he
did not feel that he had the necessary zeal for
such a long campaign, not to mention what
he would have to do if he won.
But back to the states. Each state is
allowed to send so many delegates to the
party's nomination convention and a goodly
number of these delegates know who they
are going to vote for before they go.
The usual way to have a state election is to
hold what is called a primary. If Dole, say,
gets 50 per cent of the Republican vote in a
specific state, he will be able to count on the
support of 50 per cent of the Republican
delegates going to the convention. If Gramm
gets 25 per cent, he can count on that
percentage of the candidates and so on.
Just to make the whole procedure that
much more complicated, some of the states
do not have a primary; they have what is
called a caucus. This is where the active
members of the party get together to elect
delegates.
Still others use a combination of both.
The larger the state, the more delegates are
sent to the party's nomination convention.
As far as the latter is concerned, the
Republicans will hold theirs in San Diego
• Patient has chest pains if she lies on her
left side for over a year.
• The patient is a 71-year-old female who
fractured her little finger while beating up a
cake.
• Patient was seen by another doctor who
felt we would sit tight on the abdomen.
• The patient states there is a burning pain
in his groin, which goes to his feet.
• Patient was released to outpatients
without dressing.
• She slipped on the ice and apparently her
legs went in separate directions in
December.
• After his release from coronary care a
doctor worked him over.
• The patient was found to have 12
children by her doctor.
• The patient will need disposition,
therefore we will get a doctor to dispose of
him.
• Physician has been following the
patient's breast for six years.
Are all doctors this ... well, illiterate? No,
of course not. Take my doctor. Now there's a
guy who wouldn't dangle a gerund or mis-
modify an intransitive verb if your life
depended on it.
I think.
Actually his handwriting is so illegible I
can't tell if he's scribbling in English or
Cantonese.
starting on Aug. 12. The Democrats do the./
same in Chicago later in the same month.
A candidate does not have to take part in
every contest but the leading ones such as
Dole and Clinton probably will. Sometimes
the primaries and caucuses are not kind to a
particular candidate in which case he does
the smart thing and gets out of the race.
Some states have special importance,
regardless of the size. A case in point is New
Hampshire which only has 16 delegates
(compared to 165 in California). Its primary
on Feb. 16 is the first real test of a
contender's popularity and if he or she does
badly here, the chances of improvement later
on are slim.
If you think this is complicated, there's
more. Americans vote for a president
separately,from the rest of the candidates; a
totally different system from that in Canada.
If, say, Clinton gets even one vote more in a
state that his opponent, he gets all the
electoral votes for that state. Since the
electoral votes vary according to the size of
the state, California is much more important
to win than, say Rhode Island.
Perceptive readers will realize that a
presidential candidate could possibly get less
than 50 per cent of the popular vote, but end
up with enough electoral votes to propel him
into the White House.
A third, independent, candidate such as
Ross Perot could confuse things even more.
Perot, as some of you may recall, ran in the
1992 election and the votes that he got are
widely believed to have brought about the
defeat of George Bush.
Don't feel badly if, in spite of this
extremely lucid explanation of the American
electoral system, you are still confused as
you listen to news from south of the border.
You will have plenty of company.
The
Short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
Bringing history
to life
History! It was something I never thought
about as a youngster, then in schoolwas a
topic that I handled relatively well, though
for which I was inclined to be mildly
disinterested.
Yet, as more of my life becomes part of it
with the passing of a few decades, history
has become a bit of a fascination for me. No
longer bored by tales of the past, I have a
keen curiosity and almost romantic zeal to
uncover as much of it as possible,
particularly as it relates personally.
This latter is an attraction my mother canes
not understand. As I question her with
regards to my roots, I am nonplussed to
discover that she has absolutely no wonder
regarding her ancestory. While her reality is
the here and now, I argue with her that we
wouldn't be here now if one minute, one
decision, had changed along the way of our
life's path. I find this fact nothing less than
fascinating.
But, history is more than people. My
house for example, has its hidden secrets.
Perhaps that is my attraction to older homes ,
that like people, they have a history. They
have stories to tell. They were lived in, loved
in, families were raised in them and loved
ones died in them.
The communities in which we live also
have their own tales to tell. In Blyth this year
a group of volunteers is busily preparing for
a school reunion for the summer, while in
Brussels plans are being made for the 125th
anniversary celebration in 1997. The staff at
The Citizen is presently pulling together a
history book, with the help of local residents
for the latter event, and through this I have
had the opportunity to hear, and see through
old photographs, interesting notes from the
annals of longtime community folk. For
someone who has lived here for just two
decades, it has been a wonderful treat.
What has primarily impressed me about
the people with whom I have spoken are
their memories. I am awed by their ability to
call up such long-ago reminiscences and
relate them as if they were from yesterday.
Secondly, however, I admire the people
who had the foresight to not only clip and
paste every bit of news, but catalogue it and
preserve it. Obviously, it pleases me because
it makes the task of compiling an historical
account that much easier, but it is also
reasurring to note that there are many for
whom the past may be over but is not to be
forgotten.
As it is with any subject, history is not
going to be everyone's cup of tea. I see this
in my family on a regular basis, with a son
who has a degree in History and three
siblings who don't care to discuss it with
him. But even if you really aren't interested
in what events brought you to where you are,
or in what happened before you got there, I
would think it difficult to not enjoy hearing
the past revealed in colourful anecdotes by
the people who remember, who were part of
it or were told about it by their parents and
grandparents.
This week committees are meeting,
Wednesday night in Blyth and Thursday
night in Brussels, to discuss their respective
reunion celebrations. Both anticipated events
will bring together hundreds of people to
share memories, but they will also provide
an opportunity to view history in the most
interesting way, through the eyes of those
who can bring it to life.
Arthur Black