HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2001-03-14, Page 5Final Thought
Much learning does not teach under-
standing.
- Heruclitus
THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2001. PAGE 5.
Other Views
Care for a bite of dead man's le
W hen it comes to foitt, the name is
everything. Pate de foie gras
sounds elegant and mysterious to
the English speaker's ear, but it translates as
`fatty liver paste'. 'Cauliflower' rolls off the
tongue splendidly, but the vegetable itself turns
out to be, as Mark Twain harrumphed,
"nothing but cabbage with a college
education".
And then there's the other side of the
coin - food that sounds far, far worse
than it could ever possibly taste. We
Canucks have a particular talent in this
department. We're the folks who gave the
world blueberry grunt, bangbelly and bugger-
in-a-bag.
Blueberry grunt is a Maritime delicacy
- a steamed pudding that has been known
to emit grunting noises while it's being
steamed.
Bangbelly? That's something your
Newfoundland guide might whip up for you on
a fishing trip. It's a kind of pancake usually
made out of flour, baking soda, molasses, pork
fat (seal fat if you can get it) and whatever else
happens to be lying within reach of the frying
pan.
And, as the name suggests, it does stick to
the ribs.
The task of
/have been shaken up a couple of times by
earthquakes, but nothing that really gave
me cause for alarm.
I recall going off to San Francisco one time
—and arriving by plane on the day that a tremor
was predicted by somebody who was in the
business.
With my luck I thought that such an event
might wait until just when I was going over the
Golden Gate Bridge but all was calm and
somebody at the airport remarked that such
predictions happened all the time and nobody
paid much attention to them.
Given the recent bad one in India with the
death toll in the scores of thousands, the
question naturally arises as to whether it could
have been predicted. At the same time it is
worth asking if the science of such predictions
has reached the point where it can alert people
living in such earthquake-prone areas.
I can relate to what the seismologists, the
specialists in this field, are going through since
predicting earthquakes is much the same as
predicting economic trends etc.- Both are
inexact sciences and we are frequently
remembered for what we get wrong rather than
for what. we get right. And if your house is
destroyed by an earthquake, even if you knew
it was coming, you may not think too kindly
about the seismologist who predicted it.
Anyway, to return to basics, earthquakes take
place when the rocky plates that make up the
earth's crust, shift suddenly. These plates are
shifting constantly but very slowly and
pressure gradually builds up over the years.
When this pressure reaches the breaking point,
you have an earthquake.
While the quakes usually take place
somewhere along the edge of these plates, they ..- can erupt in the middle, which is exactly what
happened in India.
On the basis of past events, the entire west
-coast and north .of India is under the threat of
an earthquake. The one that just happened in
India was located in Gujarat, which is the
central west part of the country, and it was one
of the worst to take place in that country in this
century._ To make a comparison, it released
enough energy to equal that of a 30 megaton
atomic bomb.
These quakes are more likely to happen in
There are scores of oddly named Canuck
food treats - soapalallie and geoduck
(pronounced gooeyduck) on the west coast,
switchel and rubbaboo on the prairies; and
thanks to the wildly creative kitchen jockeys on
the east coast, everything from whore's egg to
barmy bread; from flummy dum to rum
runners black-bottom pie.
Ah, but for true gastronomical eccentricity
we have to bow to those . world-renowned
terrorists of cuisine, the British. These are the
folks who came up with blanc-mange, toad-in-
the-hole, dead man's leg and spotted dick.
My dictionary defines blanc-mange as "a
dessert made of gelatinous or starchy
substances and milk, usually shaped in a mold.
My dictionary is too kind. An acquaintance
of mine (a war bride who came to Canada in
1946) still can't get the memory of blanc-
mange out of her head.
"I spent 12 years at English boarding schools
Raymond
Canon
The
International
Scene
the north where, if you remember your school
geography, the Himalayan Mountains are
located.
There isn't any place along the entire
northern frontier that is immune to such
tremors and the danger area even extends into
Nepal.
Given that the better part of a billion people
live in India, you can imagine why it is that so
many people die when there is a quake Of any
magnitude.
Unfortunately the Indian government has not
availed itself of some of the latest techniques in
determining what areas can be considered high
risk. One reason, strangely enough, is military;
the army has a practice of maintaining a high
level of secrecy along its borders and it is, as
indicated above, precisely in these areas that
the greatest danger of an earthquake.
The recent Gujarat quake is in the vicinity of
the Pakistan border; in fact the effects extended
into that country. But Pakistan is also India's
most likely adversary in any war; the two have
fought twice already and hence the perceived
need for secrecy.
In spite of this problem, Indian scientists are
hoping that they can make use of the latest
technique, a satellite based method of
determining the danger points on the earth. It is
already in use along the west coast of the
United States and Latin America but, as the
recent earthquake in Central America showed,
it is not yet able to do the necessary prediction.
In the meantime both the Central Americans
and the Indians could do well to improve their
response measures. Both were weighed in the
balance and found wanting.
Letter
THE EDITOR,
Having more interest-free loan funds
available to plant crops this spring has to be
viewed with mixed emotions.
I am reacting to an announcement earlier this
week by Hon. Lyle Vanclief, Minister of
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, that the
maximum interest-free loan a farmer can have
to plant crops this spring has been increased to
$50,000 from $20,000.
It's great the federal government is prepared
to make this money available. It not only
acknowledges the realities of increased input
costs, but also the lack of cash in the hands of
farmers as a result of devastatingly low returns
from the past two years' harvests.
Many farmers will use this program, but we
must remember it is a repayable loan and the
interest-free aspects on a $50,000 loan over a
six-month period would be a benefit of
approximately $2,000 per farmer. This amount,
while helpful, certainly doesn't replace the
need for the $900 million we requested.
At a meeting of provincial and federal
ministers of agriculture earlier this week, the
provincial ministers of agriculture collectively
called on the federal government to provide $1
billion as its share of the additional safety net
support, and the provinces would contribute
$500 million. The Federal Cabinet needs to
reconsider its decision of adding only $500
million.
.Hon. Lyle Vanclief, Ministe(of Agriculture
and Agri-Food Canada, announced an
additional $500 million at the beginning of this
month when farmers and their organizations
had been calling for $900 million. If crop
prices yielded a profit and safety net programs
were supported at the appropriate level, we
would not need this additional cash.
Jack Wilkinson
Ontario Federation of Agriculture
ervident.
Extra hours in a day
M y eyelids are in confusion, too heavy
to stay open, too restless to stay
closed. All else is paceful, the
snuggling blanket of darkness surrounding me,
the silent sounds of a family at sleep soothing.
And yet, I cannot join them.
It would seem that with increasing
frequency this one-time slumber fanatic has
become if not an insomniac then nocturnally
challenged. There is no pattern, but I can say
it's a given I will not enjoy six straight hours
of sleep. Actually, I consider myself lucky if I
get six hours total.
The cycle will begin with several
consecutive nights when I will fall
immediately into a dead sleep, similar to the
kind you might have on an operating table,
only to wake about four hours later, never to
snooze again. Sometimes there is a spell of a
week or so, when I tumble exhausted into my
bed at nights, barely able to keep my eyes open
until my head hits the pillow. When it does, I
amazingly find myself unable to fall asleep. It
doesn't matter how tired I am, my date with
Mr. Sandman has apparently been cancelled,
and I lie frustrated for hours.
Occasionally, I will wake in the pre-dawn
hours, about 4 a.m. or so, still tired, not in the
least ready to even think about beginning a .
day. The struggle to get back that lovely
feeling of restful sleep exhausts my already
weary self. Then there are the times when the
whole evening is like a night at the movies as
dream after dream plays through my head,-
causing me to rouse several times during the
night and ask myself, "What was that all
about?"
And so every morning, I wish that I could
have just a few more hours sleep. Dawn's light
shines in and the day begins, ready or not.
Rousing refreshed and rested is a theoretical
notion, the reality appears to have no place in
my existence.
I have been told a brisk walk will help me
with my problem. I take them. I have been told
to read a book. I do. I've been told not to eat
before bed. I don't.
I don't drink coffee at night and I'm healthy.
So, rather than tiring myself even more by
sweating over how to fix the problem, I've
decided to look on the bright side. And there
actually is one. You see, I have complained for
a long time that there really aren't enough
hours in the day for me to accomplish
everything that I must do. So now, I have
found some.
While my prone position may make it seem
that nothing is being done, I assure you the
time is well spent. At 3 a.m. I can be compiling
to-do lists or remembering things that need to
be added to them. I have spent time in silent
repose, ruminating over problems to be
handled, dilemmas to work out. I have had
• sudden flashes of insight, answers to a crisis
that seemed unsolvable just the day before. I
have organized schedules, worked out
appointments and solved conflicts all in the
dark of night.
After all, I might just as well be productive.
And with nobody calling me, nobody
interrupting me, I actually do get some things
accomplished in those extra hours of my
day.
Okay, I know that all of this may well
account for part of my sleep problem, but it's
unlikely to change. I've accepted that this
frantic mind will never have total rest.
and so consider myself an expert on blanc-
mange which appeared on the table with great
regularity."
"We had yellow blanc-mange with a blob of
red jam which was known as 'sunrise in the
desert'; white blanc-mange with red jam was
dubbed 'murder in die Alps. For variation we
occasionally were served pink blancmange
with red jam which we called 'murder in
Mayfair' ."
"Once in a while they also gave us a sort of
suet roly-poly pudding which we called 'dead
man's leg' - because that's what it looked like!"
As it's perilously close to lunch time, I won't
go into detail about toad-in-the-hole or spotted
dick. But trust me, they are a feature of Brit
cuisine. I didn't make them up.
Let me leave you with your appetite semi-
intact, and a few words about a mysterious
Doctor Buckland, who liked to tell fellow
members of The Explorers Club in London that
he had "eaten his way through the whole of
animal creation, and that the worst thing he
ever tasted was a mole - that was utterly
horrible."
Although later, Doctor Buckland confessed
to a certain Lady Lundhurst that there was one
thing that'tasted even worse than a mole, and
that was a bluebottle fly.
predicting earthquakes