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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1997-07-16, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 16,1997 PAGE 5. Granddaddy of slingshots I was sitting near the rear of a cross-town bus pretending to read my paper, but actually, covertly, spying on these three young teenage kids across the aisle. They were all boys, all dressed in the regulation watch cap, hooded sweatshirt and baggy pants that seem to be de rigeur for all young teenage rugged individualists these days. The boys were scrunched over in their seats, like medieval supplicants, heads down, frantically manipulating plastic lozenges in their laps - lozenges that beeped and blipped incessantly. Nintendo addicts. They didn't know I was alive - and that's okay. I doubt that any teenagers in history have ever been aware they shared the planet with other, older or younger people. That's the nature of teenagerdom. But it made me sad all the same, because looking at these kids, these electronic surfers, I was pretty sure that none of them had ever known the pleasure of owning a good, old- fashioned slingshot. I can't imagine being a young boy and not having - or at least coveting - a slingshot. It was what boyhood was all about ... going down by the creek and searching among the saplings until you found that elusive tree crotch that formed a perfect "Y". Cutting it down, peeling back the bark, whittling perfect notches to hold the rubber band. Slingshots were forbidden of course. Parents warned us never to fool with them. Policemen confiscated them on sight. International Scene Do we worry too much? A psychologist friend of mine once told me that 90 per cent of the things we worry about never come to pass, five per cent of the things that do, we can do nothing about. Therefore only five per cent of our worries are legitimate. It is a good question whether our worrying about that five percent paralyzes us to a certain degree and prevents us from taking any preventative action. I'm not sure where Canadians rank in the worrying race but by most accounts the French are in first place. This is rather strange, for that country shows rather arrogant tendencies at times, to the extent that many would consider this arrogance the dominant national characteristic. But no! I have it on good authority that the French consume more pills per capita, for ailments real or imaginary, than any other nation. In fact, their consumption of pills is at such a level that it is one of the chief, causes for the deficit in the country's national health plan. This is not something new. Back in the 17th century, the French dramatist Moliere, whom many consider to be the greatest writer of comedies the world has ever known, poked fun of this very thing in one of his plays The Doctor In Spite of Himself. To a degree Moliere was poking fun at himself for he suffered from all sorts of maladies and it is a good question how many of them were real. Teachers would send you to the principal if they saw one jutting out of your back pocket. So naturally we adored them. I was totally infatuated with my slingshot. Right up until I knocked the window out of Old Man Winthrop's garage with it. It wouldn't have been so bad if Old Man Winthrop hadn't been working in the garage at the time, looked up at the sound of tinkling glass and seen me standing there with eyes as big as golf balls, incriminating slingshot in my hand, the rubber band still swinging in the breeze. • Later that night, my father convinced me that my future would be infinitely brighter if I eschewed playing with slingshots thenceforth. Not so Hew Kennedy. Kennedy lives on a farm in Shropshire, England, and although he's approaching middle age, he's never lost his love of slingshots. Which explains the trebuchet in his back yard. Trebuchet? That would be the granddaddy of all slingshots. A huge, hulking behemoth of a catapult that looks like a kind of giant, 60-foot-long spoon attached to a five ton weight. Hew Kennedy's trebuchet can throw very heavy objects up to 150 yards at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour. How heavy? Oh, heavy like a sofa, a grand piano or a dead pig. "A good, big sow is really aerodynamic," says Kennedy. And he should know. He's hurled all of those and more on his trebuchet. He's not the first - not by several centuries. Back in Roman times, legionnaires employed trebuchets to lay siege to castles. They would By Raymond Canon I’m also aware of the penchant for hypochondria on the part of Germans. I was once in a small German town nestled in the Alps. I was there on some business and decided that, rather than drive all the way back to St. Gall in Switzerland, I would stay there overnight. Finding a hotel room proved to be something of a chore. Most of the places I tried said that they rented rooms out only by the week or more since the place was a Kurort or spa. Finally I found one hotel which agreed to let me have a room for one night. When I went down for breakfast the next morning, what a revolution! Everybody at my table, and every other table for that matter, suffered from something; me being a newcomer, they almost stood in line to tell me their ailments. I was frankly glad to get out of there before I caught everything that ailed them. The Americans do their share of worrying, but I doubt that they could rival the French. However, with a certain penchant for action that seems to characterize that country, they go a step farther. They write book after book telling anybody who wants to buy a copy how to conquer their anxiety. I think it was Dale Carnegie who set the trend, but it has turned into something of a national pastime. The more enterprising of these writers have their works published in several languages and I have seen these in European bookstores; some of them even make the best-seller lists on the continent or even Japan. Of course, the Americans have to realize that they are chiefly to blame for much of the anxiety. They are also the ones who chum lob huge boulders, burning bundles of hay - even dead horses - over the castle walls to wreak havoc among the inhabitants. But Hew Kennedy isn’t laying siege to any castles. He just likes slinging things around the countryside. "It's bloody good fun," says Kennedy. It's also lucrative. Hew Kennedy and his trebuchet have become a bit of a tourist attraction in Shropshire. Film crews from Japan, Germany and the Scandinavian countries keep knocking on Kennedy's door, asking if he'll activate the trebuchet while their cameras record the event for prosperity. He also gets requests from the odd rich American family which is happy to pay just so "the kids get to see it fling something". Kennedy's happy to oblige - if the price is right. It's not a bad living, but when I talked to Kennedy he indicated that he's getting a little bored with the repetitive nature of his hobby. Possibly because he's just bought an elephant. Actually, it's a mechanical elephant, powered by a Ford engine, covered with what looks like elephant skin and featuring four pylon-sized legs that clomp along just like a real elephant. "Jumbo", Kennedy's Robot Elephant can carry up to four kids at a time on its back. It's quite popular as well ... but truth to tell, Kennedy is beginning to tire of Jumbo too. He's looking for new thrill horizons to conquer. Now if he could just figure out a way to lever Jumbo into the trebuchet... out book after book predicting the next economic collapse. Perhaps anxiety can be aptly described as the disease of the century since it is about a century since Sigmund Freud really gave an impetus to the practice of psychotherapy. Practitioners of this art must be delighted by the discovery that the medicine men and witch doctors in Africa have been using somewhat the same system, listening attentively to what their patients have to say and using more common sense and fewer tranquilizers. Either African patients don't suffer as much from anxiety or else witch doctors are more practical in their approach than are doctors of the western world. In all this I am reminded of the story about a German division in World War II that was half German troops and half Austrian. During the course of fierce fighting they got cut off from their allies and it was only with difficulty that radio contact was re­ established with them. When the German commander of the division was asked about the situation, he replied that it was serious but not hopeless; they would fight to the end. Shortly after, the Austrian in charge of his troops was contacted and asked for his opinion. He replied that the situation was hopeless but not serious. Maybe the Austrians know something that we don't about the art of avoiding anxiety. A Final Thought Happiness is like potato salad — when you share it with others, it is a picnic. How’s summer going? "Number, please" Remember the telephone operator, that very real voice, attached to the very real person, whose job it was to connect you with the party of another line, with whom you wished to speak? Remember rhyming off those numbers and letters, always hearing a courteous "thank you" before the ringing began? Like most other people I knew, I was very excited when the news came that our town was finally moving into the future with dial phones. But it didn't lake long before I recognized that while progress had occured, a good deal of personality had disappeared. Sitting at home on an evening, listening to the empty ring that signalled a vacant home at the other end, it dawned on me that when there had been an operator I was never really alone. Even if contact couldn't be made with anyone else from my outside world, I knew that I could expect a human response, however briefly, just by picking up the telephone receiver. Oh, sure, dialing 'O' could get some attention, but it wasn't the same. You actually needed a reason. Today is even worse, as connecting with an operator, or for that matter, any other breathing organism, who might actually assist you, is through monumental error, or ignorance. This typically happens when you find yourself left with soundless space or a dial tone for company as you look with stupefaction and bewilderment at the receiver. My first frustration with telephone advancement occurred several years ago, when my son, who was working up north, asked me to register him for his university courses. I had all the information, all the numbers, all I could ever need to know. The only thing I lacked, which I had no idea I needed, was touch tone. A polite, albeit mechanical, voice answered my call and began reciting instructions from which I was to make a decision and act, punching in various codes from my phone's key pad. Recognizing the futility I bided my time, assuming flesh and blood would eventually respond. The taped recording, however, continued, actually sounding more beligerenl with each message until it finally hung up on me. The next day I made the switch to touch tone. And as a person who spends a good deal of time dealing with the public I must admit that from time to time I have been grateful of the impersonality. Ironically, the company through which we can pay our bills, do our banking, leave and receive messages, without speaking to another person, doesn't necessarily do business that way. Last week my son was trying to get a phone installed. He was put on hold, over the course of three separate calls, a total of 35 minutes. One call he spent trying to explain where he lived. During a subsequent call, they requested the previous tenant's phone number and when they moved out. Then he spent a good deal of time trying to convince them that they had. Bell told him the phone was connected, he told them there was no dial tone. They spent several minutes trying to ascertain if he lived between the railroad tracks and Queen Street, with him trying to explain that that was the north and he lived in the south. All and all, I think by the end, he'd have been happy to punch something.