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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2000-03-08, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2000. PAGE 5. Takes your breath away! So there I was, strolling through Victoria’s beautiful Beacon Hill Park alongside my favourite herborizational botanist. (Okay, the only herborizational botanist I know - or have ever heard of.) Anyway, there we were, the two of us, meandering through the underbrush. I would point at a shrub and she would say lycium halimifolium. I would gesture at a huge towering tree. Juglans nigra, she would explain. Finally we came to a scraggly leafless shrub festooned with hundreds and hundreds of little white berries. “What’s that?” I asked my herborizational botanist. “Indian Listerine” she replied. “Huh?” I parried. “Bite one” she said. I popped a berry in my mouth and chomped down - POW! - an explosion of tart, bitter tanginess filled my mouth. “Wow!” I said. “Tastes like...like...” “Mouthwash?” prompted my botanist. I nodded. She smiled and said “That’s why we call it Indian Listerine.” Imagine that. All my life I thought it was only us white folk who were neurotic about International Scene By Raymond Canon Phoning home Following is the third of my wife Sue’s comments on her month spent in the south of France: A week before leaving for Provence, I remembered that I wanted to get a Bell calling card. This is important for people to have when away from home, especially when outside of Canada. I called Bell and was told that it would take several weeks for them to send me a card. However, since I was leaving so soon, the Bell lady told me she would give me a pin number to use so that I could make calls if I needed to. 1 just had to write the number down, and she explained exactly how to use the number, and the steps that I would go through when making a cal) from France. The information wasn’t complicated, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper, which I stuck inside my wallet. I actually made four phone calls to Canada in the month that I was in France. These calls were made from public phone booths, which you can see in every town or village. The first time I made a phone call, I didn’t know where the phone booth was, so I went into a bar and asked the bartender, who explained where I could find one. I followed the Bell lady’s instructions, and sure enough, everything worked just fine, and it was easy to reach Canada. In order to make a call within France, you must have a telephone card. You can purchase this card at any post office. (Some of the post offices have public phones in them.) The mouth odor. Turns out the aboriginals were ‘way ahead of us. Call it halitosis, morning breath, jungle mouth - or you can call it money in the bank. A lot of business interests make an awful whack of money out of our oral odor neurosis. All those brands of chewing gum, breath mints, mouth washes - all designed to convince us that we don’t have bad breath after all. Some folks are never convinced. There is a medical condition known as delusional halitosis, in which the victims are absolutely certain they have terribly noxious breath. Delusional halitosis sufferers have been known to give up their careers, convinced that no one could stand to work with them. Others have even attempted suicide. There is one famous case in which the patient brushed her teeth obsessively, continuously, until her gums bled. Nurses reported that she went through an entire tube of toothpaste in just four hours. What’s painfully ironic is the fact that most sufferers of delusional halitosis have no perceptible breath odour at all. Theyjust think they do. Well, they may be delighted to learn about the latest weapon in the anti-odor arsenal - especially if they’re women. It’s a creation from Elizabeth Arden Incorporated called Lip Lip Hooray. It’s a lipstick that’s infused with a mint­ amount you pay for your card depends on how many minutes worth of calls you think you want to buy. To make your call, you have to place your card in a slot which is located in the front of the telephone box. The amount of time you talk is recorded somewhere (Does Ma Bell have a sister in France?), and when you use up all the time, you have to go to the post office again and buy another card. When you make that call to Canada^ you feel as if you could hug that Canadian operator who is speaking to you from so far away. I found the operators to be most efficient and helpful, and I didn’t feel quite as far away from home as I did before I talked to those people, who are part of a lifeline to Canada. 1 found that most French people assumed we were Americans. We wore our Canada pins, and made sure to tell people that we were Canadians. People’s attitudes changed for the better when they found out where we were from. They knew of Canada, and were glad to meet us. The only unpleasant experience regarding my nationality happened at the airport in Paris. I was looking around inside a candy shop, trying to decide how to spent the last of my francs before boarding the plane for Toronto, and the manager of the shop came over and asked if he could help me. I told him that I had 118 francs and that I was trying to decide how to spend most of them before leaving France. He pointed to a box of almond paste candy and said that all Americans were crazy about that kind. I told him that I wasn’t American, I was Canadian. flavored breath freshener and zinc citrate - a chemical that neutralizes sulfur compounds that contribute to breath odour. Can’t you just hear the TV ads already? “New Lip Lip Hooray - it’ll take your breath away!” For a price of course. Lip Lip Hooray lipstick is on sale in select New York boutiques right now. It’s selling like hotcakes - and it’ll only set you back about $22 a tube. Which would buy an awful lot of Clorets. Personally, I think I’ll stick with Indian Listerine. It’s even cheaper. It’s important to keep a sense of perspective when it comes to bad breath. Even the best of us can suffer from it. Why, I once knew an Indian yogi who spumed almost everything the material world had to offer. He wore nothing but a large white robe; ate less than a chickadee - didn’t even have a MasterCard. Living on little more than nuts and berries, he was quite thin - frail even. Except for his feet. Going barefoot even through the winter, had hardened his feet considerably with a thick layer of callouses. Now you would think a man who lived such a pure life would be free of earthly afflictions, would you not? Alas, I am sad to relate, my yogi friend suffered from a pretty fierce case of jungle mouth. Which made him, well... Kind of a super-calloused fragile mystic plagued with halitosis. He shrugged his shoulders, gave me a disdainful look and said, “Americans ... Canadians ... same thing!” I told him that it certainly wasn’t the same thing, and that just because we both spoke English, it didn’t mean that we were the same. He wasn’t impressed, and just walked away. I should have told him that the French and Belgians were the same because they both speak French. That would have been interesting! When I told Ray this story he replied, “Try telling that to the Swiss!” Letter angers writer THE EDITOR, I was greatly disturbed by Mr. Steffen’s letter to the editor in your Feb. 16 edition. Although he states that he does not want to bash a competitor, it is clear from the content of that letter that he is blatantly doing so. Instead of being disgusted by the said offence and condemning a youth who made a mistake, he should have commented on the ighorant person who called his wife a sicko. Too many people are too quick to judge. We have all made mistakes in our lives, more than likely in our impulsive youth but with community and family support most of us became responsible and caring adults. Yours truly Anne Watson. That’s two-thirds No, the correct information is two-thirds. Anyone reading last week’s column was probably puzzled by my claim of having been a parent for almost one-third of my life. Other than the fact that it brought delicious amusement to my family, it was certainly not the information I had intended to proffer. What you saw was instead another example of the type of confusion which typically occurs when I attempt to put together numbers and words. Actually, this mistake was something which almost made me proud. I at least got the numbers right; they were simply reversed. Believe me, this is not what can usually be expected when I traverse the maze of mathematics. Generally the subject has been the bane of my existence. Through the course of my lifetime it has made me the fool on many occasions. Certainly in the early going I could handle the basics but by the time I attempted high school algebra the situation was pathetic enough to be laughable. Seeing x-y=z, find y threw me into a panic of gargantuan proportions. Rather than face the frustration, the ultimate impending failure, I shut down. I could literally feel the switch go off in this dim bulb. Letters had no business in mathematical equations as far as I was concerned. To even try and rationalize otherwise exhausted me. Thus I suppose to some it would seem folly that having made a decision recently to pursue some academic courses in my spare time, I chose one mathematically based. Ironically, I’m not doing too badly. The main reason for my choice was that I wanted to be reawakened. Day in and day out we do the same things and setting my mind to tasks unfamiliar was something i thought would keep the brain cells, at least those remaining, fresh. Also, I wanted to learn something that would benefit me and I believe this particular course has points that I can revisit in my normal routine. Finally, I felt a strong desire to prove I could. Basic arithmetic was never beyond me, but the bizarre forms the more ■ advanced mathematics can take humbled me. I wanted to get over the terror I felt when presented with even the simplest numbers and equations. And so, I raised my calculator and prepared to do battle with my old nemesis. While I may not have taken total control. I’m holding my own very well, thank you. However, what has proven the most interesting is that I have discovered how I learn. Words and explanations for what must be done have me blanking. I must picture the steps in my mind in order to answer the question. This was a revelation that I fear may have come too late. I remember reading once about a school somewhere in the U.S., strictly for girls. The concept is to teach them math the way girls need to be taught math. Girls, they say, learn differently than boys thus requiring different methods to get the point across. The students, the article said, are excelling. Perhaps, had I known then what I know now about my way of learning, I wouldn’t have felt so inferior in high school. Also a week ago I might have said I’d been a parent for almost two-thirds of my life.