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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2000-06-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2000. PAGE 5. Other Views Time to get a life, webheads! Consider, for a moment, the celestially- vaunted phenomenon we call the World Wide Web. It's been touted as the greatest technological breakthrough since the discovery of fire, the wheel and possibly Bobby Hull’s hair transplant. Now consider the White Mana Diner on Tonnele Avenue just outside of Jersey City, New Jersey. It is not a thrilling diner, even as diners go. but even so, it is firmly entrenched on the World Wide Web. Any evening you can eschew the pleasures of a good book, a walk in the park or making love with your sweetie and go instead to your computer and type in www.njo.com/dinercam. In moments, your monitor screen will blossom with a clasp image of the White Mana Diner. You will see semi drivers and diesel mechanics opening the door, doffing their ball caps and bellying up to the counter. You will see, by way of background, an unending anaconda of cars and trucks flying by on Tonnele Avenue. You will see, if he’s on shift, Bob Burke, King of the Spatula as he greases the griddle, slaps down patties and flips them to perfection. I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering why the hell anyone would bother to punch up Diner Cam and watch something just a little more vital than a test pattern. Beats me, chum. But people do it. Fourteen thousand people a day do it. “A guy from China called,” says Mario Not universally popular in Brazil Canadians can generally accept the fact that they are not disliked too much throughout the world. We assume that our external affairs, both in diplomacy and commerce, are conducted with decorum and evenhandedness and have, therefore, no equivalent of the “Ugly American” that is so often thrown in our neighbours’ face. That is generally true but I can tell you about one country right now that thinks that Canada has anything but the above mentioned characteristics. That country is Brazil and it all revolves around the construction of twin- engined commercial aircraft. I have told you on occasion about the success story of Bombardier, the maker of snowmobiles which has graduated, in a very short period of time, into the number three producer of commercial jet aircraft. What I did not tell you is that number four is Brazil and they make just about the same kind of aircraft; in other words they compete head- on with Canada. The Brazilian company, Embraer, has been told three times by the World Trade Organization that it is offering illegal subsidies on aircraft which it is selling on world markets. So far it has refused to do anything except, of course, to appeal the WTO ruling. It would, it said, be willing to withdraw the subsidies from future sales but it refuses to remove the subsidies that it offered on aircraft already sold. As if the situation was not nasty enough to begin with, it got worse when the Canadian government was told by the WTO that it could carry out retaliatory measures against the Brazilians, if they did not obey the ruling. Canada did just that, in a manner that would have made the French or Americans proud. They published a list of imported Brazilian goods worth about $700 million a year which would be blocked for the next five years. This made the Brazilians sit up and take notice and they are now wondering what they Arthur Black Costa, the owner. “He thought only McDonald’s makes hamburgers. He wanted me to show him a hamburger. So we held one up to the camera.” “They’ll call from Texas. They’ll want you to wave. That’s it. Then they hang up. I guess it makes them happy or something.” And it’s not an isolated phenomenon. Take the case of the Cambridge Coffee Pot. A bunch of scientists working at Cambridge University were frustrated a while back. Too many times they doffed their lab coats and hiked over to the common lunch room, only to find the coffee pot bone dry. Being scientists, they jerry-rigged a technological solution. They set up a camera, trained it on the coffee pot, then hooked it up to the Internet so that when they were in their lab and felt the need for a caffeine fix, they could check, via the computer, to see if there was any coffee in the pot. A fast, cheap and simple solution for the dozen or so java-addicted Cambridge scientists - but why is it that others are visiting the Cambridge Coffee Pot site? And when I say ‘others’ I mean hundreds of thousands of visitors each week. Raymond Canon The International Scene can do to Canadian firms that have invested in their country. Some of the blocked goods listed are shoes, fruit, coffee, terry cloth, steel and industrial parts used in manufacturing. In short, you can see the beginnings of something that normally takes place whenever there is a trade war: the consumer gets hits hard. To cite one example, I would imagine that many of my readers have, at one time or another, bought a pair of shoes made in Brazil. To the Brazilians, such retaliation is tantamount to using a shotgun to kill a fly and the WTO is to rule on whether this Canadian counter-measure is adequate or exorbitant. In the meantime some cooler heads on both sides are starting to enter the picture and it remains to be seen if their views will prevail or whether we will have a full-fledged trade war on our hands. I should point out that Bombardier and the Canadian government are not innocent in this realm of under-the-table payments. Ottawa got its knuckles rapped for subsidizing development costs of Bombardier jets but the WTO deemed that to be less sinful than the Brazilian action. In any case Ottawa has taken action to Final Thought Whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery! - Anne Frank Firing up their computers so they can watch a coffee pot. Webgeekdom is flourishing this side of the border too. Last month the news came out that employees in the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans aren’t spending all their time counting trout fingerlings and salmon fry. An analysis of internet use by federal fisheries workers right across the country shows that at least 10 per cent of internet traffic is to sites that are, as the analysis snootily puts it “clearly not work-related”. No kidding. The analysis shows that popular destinations for bored Fissures workers include NHL, football and baseball sites, the Sony Playstation Web Page and (surprise, surprise) pom websites. As a matter of fact a one-week in-depth survey found that, on average, there were about seven visits every day to sex and dating web sites - for each of the department’s staff of 10,000. I’m shocked and appalled, do you hear? Shocked and appalled. The bright side - if there is one - is that at least our Canadian webgeeks haven’t sunk to visiting Jersey diners or Cambridge coffee pots. But it’s still pretty pathetic. Philosopher Marshall MacLuhan once predicted that communications technology would turn our planet into a Global Village. Not quite, Marshall. More like a Global Playpen. comply with the WTO ruling. In a totally different case Canada is also retaliating against the European Union for banning Canadian hormone-treated beef, after the Europeans were told not to do this by the same WTO. All in all it means that the trade boys at External Affairs in Ottawa are busy people these days. Trade relations are not all wine and roses these days; just as often as not it is a case of whine and rose thorns. Writer supports Alliance Party Continued from page 4 didn’t choose to include that gave the lie to the position that they were trying to make. It is undeniable that there have been, and may be still, extremists in the Alliance. To brand the entire Party as intolerant right wing radicals is to say that all anti-abortionists are murderers of abortionists. I suspect the truth is that there is considerable discomfort over the success that the former Reform party has achieved. It is not a new thing, either, to take pot-shots at people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians, as Preston Manning and others in the Party do, and dare to take a stand on matters of principle and conscience. That is Considered by the intolerant to be intolerance, of course. Should the day come when these “bigots will be running the government, fomenting their poison ...” I suspect that it will not be because the Canadian populace is so desperate to see any alternative to the governing Liberals; give Canadians a little credit, please. I will welcome such a day and I will not be ashamed to have them govern “in my name." Jim Carne RR2, Clarksburg, ON Bonnie Gropp The short of it Yes, Mr. Shakespeare, the world is a stage I sit, surrounded by strangers, cramped in my seat my nose assailed by a mix of odours, some overpowering, some pleasant, some very much not so. My head aches with the beginning of a cold, my eyelids are heavy from lack of sleep. I am pettily annoyed by the extremely obese woman beside me, the constant cuddling of the teenagers in front of me, whose joined-at-the-head pose obscures my view, and by the running commentary of the elderly woman behind me. Then the house lights dim, the stage lights come up and to paraphrase Mr. Shakespeare for me the play is now the only thing. It is testament to the entertainment value of theatre that what is happening before me can generally distract me from the annoyances which often accompany being in the company of a crowd of strangers. There will be duds, but typically a commanding performance, the language and themes of a well-crafted script, the visual beauty encourage my focus. I am able to forget that I am not at home enjoying La-Z- Boy comfort, an audience of one for the talents of so many. Unfortunately, the other evening, despite the play's many compelling attributes, outside influences eventually became too much, insinuating themselves into my enjoyment of the production. It became more of a struggle to shut them out than to acknowledge them so that by the second half I had come to anticipate the play-by-play behind me and wondered exactly how far the young paramours seated before me would take their love scene. Again, in the words of Mr. Shakespeare, "All the world is a stage" and it was playing out all around me. Challenged to remain centred on the actual production, my attentions zig-zagged between stage and audience. The former gave me a glimpse of grief so intense as to drive one to madness. There was passion, melodrama and humour. The latter also had passion and melodrama, the ingenuous teens caught up in the wonder of young love, the need to touch, oblivious to a world around them, little suspecting that that ferocity of feeling is seldom forever. There was madness in my real drama as well, for why else would any rational person speak out loud during a live production? And there was humour everywhere — the 50ish woman with the multi-hued punk rock hair-do, the young girl struggling to come up the steps in her spandex, very-mini mini skirt, the professorial fellow earlier overheard expounding his devotion to anything Shakespeare, now snoozing in his seat. Thus, having gotten over my annoyance by falling back on another favourite pastime — people watching — something struck me. I do love a good theatrical production However, society is such an interesting, eclectic mix of humanity it occurred to me that for true live theatre you need only look at life. People are so interesting and our lives full of dramas, mini and very, very real. We love, we laugh. We are capable of wonderful acts, deeds of good will. We also harbour a dark side, most often kept hidden, but at times allowed to break through. Watch anyone and you can’t help but think righF*again, Mr. Shakespeare, the world is a stage and all we men and women merely players.