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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1999-08-11, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 11, 1999. PAGE 5. Arthur Black Stop the car — I want out! It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. - John Stuart Mill Well, it’s easy to see why old J.S. was so pessimistic - he lived back in the 19th century. If he was alive today he’d be singing the praises of the Brave New Technological world we've cobbled together for ourselves. Consider the automobile. Just a few years ago, the car was a device whose sole purpose was to get a body from point A to point B without getting wet, frozen or stuck on a Greyhound beside a drunk with BO. But now? Now a driver can buy a gizmo called AutoPC. It's a piece of software about the size of a fat novel, arid it mounts right on the dashboard. With AutoPC, a driver can do everything he could do if he was sitting in front of a desktop computer - spreadsheets, graphs, cruise the Internet. The system also controls the car stereo system and acts as a speed-dialing telephone. A new infrared interface allows the busy International Scene Tourists’ spending creates hundreds of thousands of jobs in Canada Last year over 16 million people visited the Czech Republic but you would never know it by looking at the area where I worked. One of my jobs was to install the importance of tourism in the students whose courses on the subject I was setting up and to remind the regional authorities of the same thing. For the most part I had the feeling any effort on my part was greeted with something less than prolonged, stormy applause. Most of the 16 million made straight for Prague while northern Moravia, where I was, remained virtually an unknown region. Any efforts to attract tourists were spasmodic at best even though there are a goodly number of attractive destinations. When you have a city of 70,000 with one good hotel and even it is hard put to break even, you know you are in trouble. But Canadians have no reason to feel complacent. True, we had over 18,600,000 visitors to our country who managed to spend just over $9 billion while they were here but, with all the variety that we have in this country, together with a low dollar, we should be doing better than that. Just remember this foreign spending alone creates hundreds of thousands of jobs; since executive to use AutoPC to download files from their home or office PC. If you're really keen to push paper while you're on the fly, you can always order a little workmate called Auto Exec. This is a desktop workstation that’s small enough to fit in a passenger-seat. It contains a compartment with hanging files - even a storage bin for a laser printer. Isn’t this wonderful? Now executives don’t have to wait 'til they get to the office to start their toil - they can be hard at it even while they’re driving to and from Ye Olde Salt Mine. The humble auto has become a mobile Dilbert cubicle - no excuse to ever stop working! Ah, well. For those of us who are not enamoured with the idea of turning our jalopy into a rolling version of the office, we have an option. We can always just park the heap, right? Right - but be careful just where you park it. If you should happen to have the extreme bad luck to pull your automobile up in front of a DPT Model 300 Intella Series unit ... my friend, your miseries are merely beginning. This unit is what we used to refer to quaintly, as a Parking Meter. But this one’s different. For one thing, each 'meter’ costs about a thousand bucks. By Raymond Canon the tourism is one of the most labour intensive of industries. With our unemployment rate still around eight per cent, we should be doing everything to create yet another 100,000. Doing so is not impossible! In the world of foreign tourism, the French are currently clear winners. They had 70 million visitors in the country last year followed by the Spanish with 48 million, the Americans with 47 million and the Italians with 25.5 million. Switzerland, by the way, came in 17th with LI million which is quite an accomplishment given that the Swiss franc is horribly overvalued in contrast to our dollar not to mention many other currencies and has been for some time. However, you can count on good service and the incomparable scenery. If you ask nicely, I will even show you the mountain I climbed but don’t ask me to climb it again. To me Paris is something of an overrated city but at lot of tourists have yet to realize this or else don’t agree with me. The same could be said about Rome or Madrid, yet all three cities attract hordes of visitors. Perhaps we really do have to try harder since Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver rank high on any international listing of cities worth visiting. Getting the word out is proving to be hard for us. We are not the only country that has been missing out on tourism. The British have noted that the growth in the number of visitors coming to the island has levelled off over the And it's 'way smarter than your average meter. The DPT etcetera is the brainchild of a Canadian firm. Digital Pioneer Technologies of Vancouver. Their little baby doesn’t merely tell you how much time you have left, it contains a digital camera. No primitive TIME EXPIRED flags with this baby. When your money runs out, the DPT: takes a photograph of the offending licence plate, sends a digital picture to a central ticketing office, alerts a towing company if a vehicle is 'impeding traffic flow, contacts a bylaw enforcement officer if some ticked off driver gives it a thump or tries to block the camera lens. And as soon as a car pulls away from the DPT meter it automatically resets itself, so nobody gets a free five or 10 minutes parking. Is it all getting a little too hi-tech, Big Brotherish for you? Me too. I take solace in the memory of my uncle Barlow. He has a television set in his car ... but it’s not as swell as it sounds. Last April he was cruising down the Trans Canada. His wife was at the wheel. Uncle Barlow was watching This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Then the commercial came on, and Uncle Barlow stepped out to go to the bathrooln. past decade. There is no doubt that this may be partly due to the high exchange rate of the British pound but that is not the only reason. The effort of Tony Blair and his government to promote a "Cool Britannia” image is not the drawing card that was hoped and some attractive areas of the country have been badly neglected. Hopes are being pinned on a millennium celebration plus the royal wedding this year but, if greater numbers come from either of these events, will they come back? Can the British be persuaded to take their holidays within the country like they used to? Mr. Blair, for one, would like to know the answer to that. A successful tourist industry for any country is brought about by a number of things. One is adequate and pleasant accommodation; another is competent and friendly service. They are often taken for granted and just as often are badly neglected - to the detriment of the host country. We don’t have to worry about the high exchange rate like the British do so perhaps we can concentrate on the others. A Final Thought There’s only one way to fail - and that’s to quit. - Brian Hays Why is it so hard just saying hello'? Hi, how you doing? It’s a simple, casual salutation frequently offered by adults to passing friends, neighbours, and on occasion, strangers. Unfortunately, particularly for the latter group, after the obligatory nod or quiet response of "Fine. You?", the conversation ends. While on vacation, the difference between adults and children when confronted by new people, became dramatically clear. Staying at a resort inn a few hours to the north, there was a relaxed atmosphere, a place made for families. Cottages were nestled in the pines on one side and a motel-type unit sat across an open field cluttered with bikes, croquet equipment, badminton, volleyball and basketball nets. Parents sat on shaded patio, barbecuing supper while the youngsters played. However, as the children seemed to quickly bond, it soon became apparent even casual conversation was not part of the adult scene. My husband, a frequent greeter of strangers (a practice our son questions repeatedly), said hello to the couple from next door as they strolled past with their little girl. The response? Not a word, not a nod, just a glance downward. Whether purely out of an instinctive reaction against the metropolis or simply with the hope that residents of a small community would not give this sort of response, we both said, “They must be from Toronto.” How strange that the adults could not acknowledge each other while their offspring laughed and played together just yards away. With the children, though often portrayed as such in the media, there was no shunning because of perceived class differences, the lack of stylish clothing or even age disparities. Five-year-olds were welcome to play volleyball with 12-year-olds. A seven and five-year-old, strangers just moments before, were willing to share time on the trikes, racing up and down the sidewalks. As my husband and I pondered this lack of response, we wondered when the openness and friendliness ends? As our children age, do we stress too much to be wary of strangers (obviously a very real concern these days)? Are we so indoctrinated with fear of those we don’t know that we reject human contact? (To be fair, there were two other couples who did converse, one from a very small community in southern Ontario and the other from England.) Maybe we should take a lesson from that seven-year-old who, after only two days, had hopes that his new found friend would become a penpal, then shed a tear when the family departed before addresses could be exchanged. We may not find a soulmate in casual conversation, but a little humanity is not too much to strive for.