The Citizen, 2010-12-16, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2010. PAGE 5.
Suppose you met a Martian in some
intergalactic saloon and, what with the
language barrier and all, you could only
show him/her/it one photograph to explain
who you were, where you came from and what
it was like there – what photo would you
choose?
An A-bomb cloud over a Bikini atoll? That
kid facing down an army tank in Tiananmen
Square? Jesus on the cross? Buddha under a
tree? Armstrong’s moon footprint? Paul
Henderson’s goal?
I’d like to make the case for a simple black-
and-white head and shoulders close-up of
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
It’s all there, ladies and gentlemen – in the
Hydra snaggle of hair, the kohl-rimmed
alligator eyes, the tomahawk beak,
prognathous jaw, the smouldering Marlboro
dangling off the lip. Welcome to Planet Earth:
objects may not be exactly as they appear.
And the lines, Lord Lucifer, the lines. This
is a face modelled on the Dakota Badlands.
The Rolling Stones lead guitarist has wrinkles
on his wrinkles. He has more crevasses and
arroyos between his Adam’s apple and his
hairline than a Sharpei with a hangover. “Just
look at him,” said British music journalist
David Quantick, “He’s got a face like a prune’s
wallet.”
Well, he’s earned it. The Rolling Stones first
went on the road a mind-numbing 47 years
ago in 1963. They played virtually every night,
sometimes two performances a day, for the
next three years.
“We played well over a thousand gigs,”
writes Richards, “almost back to back, with
barely a break and perhaps 10 days off in that
whole period.” They’ve barely slowed down
since.
Not surprisingly, hard drugs sashayed up to
the stage and gave the boys a come-hither
wink.
Turns out that Richards and non-prescription
pharmaceuticals were a marriage made in
heaven – or in hell. Richards quickly
gravitated to cocaine, heroin – or ideally,
cocaine plus heroin. On the street they’re
called speedballs; Richards calls them “the
breakfast of champions”. When it came to
drugs, Richards was adaptable. He writes
lyrically of humping around “a slab of hash as
big as a skateboard” and of ingesting a
blizzard of uppers, downers, even
chugalugging a fifth of Jack Daniels just to
pass the time on a limo trip to the airport.
Richards poured it all down his throat in
quantities that left his fellow druggies gasping.
He claims he once stayed awake for nine
straight days before toppling over and
smashing his head on a speaker. He also says
“For many years I slept, on average, twice a
week. That means that I have been conscious
for at least three lifetimes.”
A semanticist might want to quibble over the
word ‘conscious’. Still, a New York music
magazine voted Richards “the rock star most
likely to die of an overdose in the next year”.
That was in 1974. The magazine’s long since
folded but Richards rocks on.
Even Richards got the message about heroin
after being busted five times – he gave it up in
1978. But he remained true to Dame Cocaine
until she led him up a palm tree in 2006.
Richards fell out of the tree and onto his head,
requiring brain surgery.
And now in 2010 Richards has published his
autobiography. It’s a fascinating read and far
from the usual warmed over feelgood mellow
memories of a geriatric celebrity. Richards is
just as down and dirty as ever. He slags his
lifelong co-star, Mick Jagger who he refers to
as “Brenda” and says, “I haven’t been to his
dressing room in twenty years.”
But nobody – not even the author – seems to
have an answer to the simple question: how is
Keith Richards still alive? Others tried to keep
up with him. John Lennon was murdered;
Brian Jones wound up at the bottom of a
swimming pool; Gram Parsons OD’d and died.
Richards maintained that he survived because
“I was very meticulous about how much I
took. When I was taking dope, I was fully
convinced that my body was my temple.”
Yeah, right, Keef.
There’s another possibility. Ozzy Osbourne,
another of rock and roll’s Undead, also made
the news recently. Ozzie, like Keith, is in his
sixties now. He, too, is famous for drinking
rivers of booze and inhaling small mountains
of chemicals over a 40-year period. He
actually ‘died’ twice in drug-induced comas.
Recently Osbourne became one of only a few
hundred people in the world to have his
genetic makeup deciphered and analyzed. The
results show that Osbourne is six times more
likely to develop alcoholic dependency than
the average bloke. They also trace his ancestry
right back to Neanderthals.
Hell, my mother could have told them that.
Makes sense, though. Neanderthals (I think
of them as our older, dumber cousins) were by
all accounts tougher and more resilient than
the pink, hairless bipeds the rest of us sprang
from. Neanderthals were muscular, craggy,
decidedly hairy and ummm, not pretty.
Kinda like Ozzy. And Keith.
My guess is an autopsy will reveal similar
Neanderthal tendrils in Keith Richards’ genes.
Assuming he ever dies.
Arthur
Black
Other Views Rolling Stone explains life
Well the snow may have started late,
but (to borrow a boxing term)
instead of peppering us with jabs,
Mother Nature went for the knockout punch
right at the opening bell.
Sure we lost the warmth in a hurry, with
summer turning to fall in what seemed like a
weekend, but we escaped the white stuff until
December, for which many of us were no
doubt thankful.
But we’ve had just under two weeks of snow
and, as of Tuesday, many Huron County
students have revelled in a week’s worth of
snow days.
And while I have recently grown to curse the
voice on the radio every morning telling me
which roads are icy and snow-covered and
which schools are closed, nearly a week of
school closures brings me back to a time when
these announcements were a blessing for me,
not a curse.
School concerts and Christmas chats with
Grade 1 students are a big part of The Citizen’s
holiday plans, so closures, resulting in
postponements, can lead to stressful times in a
business with a deadline that moves for no man
(or snow storm).
Couple that with the that’ll-put-hair-on-
your-chest experience of driving through snow
squalls, white-outs, snow drifts, black ice and
high wind and you have a season that while it
may put some hair on your chest, it’ll drop a
few grey hairs on your head while it’s there.
However, seeing children playing in the
snow while they should be in a classroom, I’m
reminded of eating my cereal, watching my
cartoons and waiting for my mom to shout
from the kitchen that school had been
cancelled on a snowy day.
No five weekends could match the
unabashed joy of one snow day. You were
supposed to have weekends off, but a snow day
had originally been designated for something
else. It was truly a gift from above (literally).
None of your friends had plans, everyone
was up early, so it was time to take advantage
of a day where snow literally cleared your
schedule for you.
Contact sports were always my favourite on
a snow day. Because on the fluffy snow
foundation on the ground, hockey body checks
and hard football tackles didn’t result in
injuries, just a brisk dive into a snowbank and
maybe some snow slipping down your shirt.
But things are different now. Driving
conditions are paramount and work
responsibilities are carried out from home, as
opposed to putting the homework off for one
more day.
And while I may have one word for the
weather we’ve seen in the last two weeks, I’m
sure that area students would probably have a
much different word for it.
So as cars get stuck in snow drifts and Good
Samaritans lend their muscles to pushing them
out (as I did on Saturday, earning a box of
chocolates for my efforts) the divide on winter
continues to grow.
’Tis the season for skiers, snowboarders and
snowmobilers to be at war with those who have
long drives to work in the snowbelt. In the end
though, we all knew it was coming. We’re
Canadians, we’re Huron County residents and
after all, winter tends to come every year,
bringing the snow right along with it.
So as we all look at the blank white canvas
out the window, we all see something different.
Some see a driveway to shovel, some see a
white-knuckled drive, some see a playground,
but none of us should see a surprise.
Baby, it’s cold outside
Ontario’s Liberal and Progressive
Conservative parties have reached a
so-called agreement to avoid nastiness
in next October’s election that is
unprecedented, but raises more questions than
it answers.
Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty and
Conservative leader Tim Hudak met privately
to conclude the agreement after the
Conservative complained a McGuinty news
release listed his wife, Deb Hutton. among
Tories who had been at the public trough.
Hutton was a senior aide to Mike Harris
when he was Conservative premier and her
party later rewarded her with a lucrative public
post and Hudak argued it was wrong to target
the wife of a party leader.
McGuinty said Hudak asked for their
meeting and the two got together in the
premier’s office within a few days.
The leaders gave few details of what they
had agreed to. McGuinty said he and Hudak
had a great conversation about the period up to
the election and it is important the parties
provide an ongoing dialogue and ensure what
they say does not cross the line.
Hudak added the parties have to debate the
issues, not their families.
The leaders did not specify otherwise what
words or actions the pact forbids. Hudak’s
wife was very much a partisan Conservative
who was handsomely paid later with public
money. Does this mean a party now cannot
criticize a backroom politician who was paid
with public funds because her husband leads a
political party?
Will other relatives of party leaders,
husbands, sons, daughters -- politicians run in
families in Ontario – similarly be immune
from criticism? How will the rest of us know
if anyone breaks this pact, except by one of the
two leaders saying it is broken?
Do the Liberals have a list of their own
politicians whose relatives have been at the
public trough, whom the Conservatives are
bound not to mention in return for the Liberals
dropping any reference to Hudak’s wife?
This is a premier and opposition leader who
have barely had a civil word, nothing but
insults, to say to each other for the past two
years.
The premier also has been unable to keep
watch to avoid recurring huge waste by his
government and a long waiting list of tasks he
never gets around to.
How does he find time to deal within a few
days with an accurate and comparatively
minor complaint involving an opposition
leader’s wife, which is not an issue that would
last anyway – is this some sort of leaders’ club
that looks after its own?
New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath was
not invited to the talks that produced the
agreement and has complained, but she should
think of her exclusion as a compliment to her
party.
The NDP does not get nasty in election
campaigns, but presents policies. The last time
it was accused of being nasty was a decade
ago, when then leader Howard Hampton
pointed out McGuinty closely physically
resembled an actor who played a deranged
hotel keeper who murdered a woman in the
movie Psycho.
The incensed Liberals kept pressing for an
apology, but nobody was suggesting
McGuinty had a murderous streak in him and
it obviously was a mild attempt at humour.
The most important question is whether this
peace agreement will last. The Conservatives
have had difficulty keeping together on issues
in much of the last decade, particularly as a
succession of their extreme right-wingers
accused colleagues of being pale pink
imitations of Liberals.
Hudak has instilled some discipline and has
the party generally working much more
together.
But he has extreme right-wingers currently
trying to push out his longest-serving MPP,
moderate Norm Sterling, and it is difficult to
rule out their using extreme language in the
process.
The Liberals do not have the same rifts, but
include some of the most notorious
blabbermouths in politics, and either party
could let their tongues run away with them and
there no longer will be peace in our time.
Eric
Dowd
From
Queen’s Park
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Good behaviour pact shaky
Never bear more than one trouble at a time.
Some people bear three kinds – all they
have had, all they have now, and all they
expect to have.
– Edward Everett Hale
Final Thought