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The Citizen, 1991-08-21, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21,1991. PAGE 5. If you could just feel what you see Got your camcorder yet? If not, I figure there's just you and me left, chum. Camcorders are the fastest selling item down at my local camera shop and that's pretty well the story right across the country. Customers are snapping up camcorders like whiskeyjacks at a bush barbecue. I went to a wedding last weekend. Every third guest was coming on like Francis Ford Coppola, prowling around the reception with camcorders screwed to their eyesockets, each trying to find a special angle or a unique shot. The world's gone video camera crazy. I don't figure I'll every buy one. I'd have to sponsor a Taiwanese factory hand to come over and brief me every time I wanted to use the thing. Here's a brochure description of a new camcorder I could call mine for a mere $1699.99. AFM Hi-Fi with built-in Stereo Mic., 8:1 power zoom lens with Macros, 4 Mode Program AE (Auto Exposure), Variable High Speed Shutter (27 speeds, up to 1/10,000 sec.) Clean/Still/Slow/Frame « The International Scene Cambodia - a basket case BY RAYMOND CANON If it is one country I feel sorry for, it is Cambodia - a country whose people must be wondering if real peace will ever come to give them a chance to pick up the pieces and return to some form of normal life. For as long as any of them can remember they have been afflicted with some form of military aggression with a case of genocide thrown in. Whereas all the surrounding countries have returned more or less to some form of peace, the poor Cambodians are still looking forward to the day when they become part of the rule and not the exception. In case Cambodia has not been the topic of conversation at your household lately, I will give you a brief history of that unfortunate nation. Al one time, along with Vietnam and Laos, it was part of the French colonial Empire known as French Indo-China and, when the French were finally forced to leave, it, along with the other two parts mentioned above, became a separate nation. However, when war broke out again in Vietnam as the North and the South came to blows, the action spilled over into Cambodia as the eastern part of the country was being used by the North to supply their forces in the South. The famous Ho Chi Minh trail came to the attention of the Americans who started to bomb it with monotonous regularity, a bombing which included some of the same B-52's used in the Gulf War. The country had been run by a moderate government headed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk but, unfortunately for the Prince and his followers, they were driven out by an extreme left-wing movement so popular in the area at the time. This movement, call the Khmers Rouges, was headed by a man called called Pol Pot and, at the risk of using a bad pun, I can say that under him the country really went to pot. He practiced a brand of genocide seldom seen on this planet. They methodically killed off all the intellectuals they could find including anybody who knew a foreign language and reduced the whole country to a common Advance. 2-Page Digital Superimposcr. I don't know if they're selling me a video camera or a Chalk River Atom Smasher. This is bewildering stuff for a guy who was raised on the Kodak Brownie Box camera. The Kodak Brownie, I recall, had precisely three features: a knob that you cranked to advance the film; a hole that you pointed at whatever you were taking a picture of; and a hole that you peered into to make sure your subject was centered, smiling and not picking its nose. And that was it! A camera so simple a chimpanzee could operate it. Compare that to the above-mentioned camcorder, which has lenses and eyepieces and microphones and display panels and more buttons, dials, knobs, turrets, bells and whistles than the dashboard of the Millennium Falcon. Doesn't seem to faze the younger generation, though. They've taken to camcorders as easily and enthusiastically as my generation took to Elvis. In parts of the U.S. kids are allowed to hand in "video" term papers now. They go through encyclopedia film footage stored on optical disc, dub off what they want, edit the result, throw on a voice-over narration and, hey presto! A term paper, hi-tech 90's style. This year, some Calgary schoolkids got to commute in comfort aboard "video buses" equipped with video monitors and VCRs. denominator so low that the people were little removed from the stone ages. The Vietnamese and the Cambodians have never been what you might call friends and, after the Communists in North Vietnam had taken over the South, they decided to deal with their communist "brethren" in Cambodia who were far too radical to suit even the Vietnamese. Vietnam had a vastly superior army and thus it did not take too long to drive the Khmers Rouges back into the hills from where they had come. The next step was to put in a left-wing government more acceptable to Vietnam, even as the latter left a good piece of their army there to make sure that nobody, not even the Khmers Rouges, tried to make a comeback. Incidentally, I should point out at this point that the Khmers Rouges have been more successful than they might have been if they had been just another left-wing army. They have been bankrolled by the Chinese right from the beginning while the Russians have been looking after the Vietnamese. However, as we all know, Russia has fallen on hard times and has no more money to foment revolution all over the world. The Chinese, on the other hand, still go on THE EDITOR, Re: Arthur Black's column “The Art of Warping Reality” (Aug. 5). Arthur Black's column suggested that he had been in Noithcare offices. In fact, Mr. Black saw another article and copied from it, getting a few things mixed up. He has never been here, or spoken to us to check his facts, even though he wrote an article about us. Articles like Arthur Black's that poke sarcasm and cynicism at the Northern Ontario community lifestyle, make it very difficult for our tiny organization. Community life is especially difficult in Northern Ontario right now. Northcare is classified by the government as an environment organization, the only one representing Northern Ontario municipalities and municipal resolutions to promote Crown Which means that students with their own camcorders could watch replays of recess all the way home from school. That’s another reason I don't plan to buy a camcorder. I think it's a fad. It's going to go the way of the sack dress and the hula hoop. Because ultimately all the camcorders offers is replays. And how many of those can you watch? Sure, the baby's first steps, the graduation ceremony, Niagara Falls, weddings, picnics...but then what? Life is not about reruns. It's about going on, not living in the past. Carlton Fisk knows that. Back in the mid­ seventies Filk belted a homer in a World- Series game that became a classic, like Bobby Orr's floating-through-thc-air Stanley Cup winning goal. Since then, Fisk's famous home run has been a replay feature of just about every baseball retrospective aired on TV. I've seen it dozens of times. Bet you have too. But Carlton Fisk hasn't. He refuses to watch it. “I tum it off or go out of the room whenever it comes along” he says. “I want to keep it fresh in my head. I want to keep hold of the memory of what it felt like, as opposed to what it looks like on the screen.” Ah, What it felt like. A wise man, that Mister Fisk. Wouldn't be surprised to leam that he doesn't even own a camcorder. supporting the Khmers Rouges but they have been coming under pressure from the West to cut back or even cut out their aid. How successful this pressure has been is problematical but it did result in e Vietnamese agreeing to withdraw all (well, most) of their army. Without Russian financial aid they simply could not afford it. With the Khmers Rouges taking Pol Pot shots from the hills and the "puppet" government of Vietnam more or less in charge in Phnom Penh the capital, the time has come for Prince Sihanouk, who is certainly the best known and probably the best liked by the Cambodian people, to try his luck at getting a moderate government back in power which is beholden to no foreign nation. To give you some idea of the difficulties, the Vietnamese say that they will accept no government which is in any way supported by the Chinese; the latter say that they are ready to listen to any proposals as long as they include the dismantling of the present Vietnamese-backed government. Progress is being made at glacial speed. It is likely to be a long while before peace returns to Cambodia. land and multiple-use and our Northern Ontario lifestyle. Northcare is tiny, compared to other environment organizations that operate with millions of dollars. Northern Community Advocates, (Northcare for short), gets funding from membership and groups across Northern Ontario. With less than 10 per cent of Ontario's population in Northern Ontario it is very difficult to raise funds, compared to southern Ontario environment groups. Northcare spends its time working for responsible land and water resource management plans for Northern Ontario. You can get more information at Box 1405, North Bay, P1B 8K6, 705-495-1199. Judy Skidmore Executive Vice President Letter from the editor Caught in the middle By Keith Roulston I don't know about you but this talk about big increases in the cost of electricity scares me.The problem is not increasing the cost of electricity also scares me. I hate the idea of paying more for power (did I really hear something about a 44 per cent increase over the next three years, on top of the huge increase we had this year?). Il means my costs at home will go up at the same time as increased costs al the office will make it harder for me to make money to pay the extra costs at home. Ontario's economy, already hard hit by Free Trade and the recession, will be hurt even more. Much of the province's industrial strength has been built on cheap electrical power that attracted industries. If our power is as expensive as the U.S., there will be one more reason for industries to move south of the border to get cheaper labour and taxes. Yet I know in my heart of hearts, that we can't keep going on the way we are. We in Ontario are some of the most inefficient users of electricity in the world, in part because it is so cheap. Until a few years ago Ontario Hydro was encouraging us to heat houses with electricity, one of the least efficient ways to heat houses. Canadians like to pride themselves on bcipg environmentally conscious, adopting the Blue Box recycling program and all, but the truth is, most of us won't take many steps toward energy efficiency until not doing so hurts us in the pocketbook. We didn't insulate our houses until the energy crisis of the mid-'70's sent fuel oil prices soaring. We kept driving gas-guzzling cars until we got worried that we might not be able to get gas for them. We were good boys and girls for a while there but our basic yearn for luxury got us again once the crisis was over. By the late 1980's the size of engines in cars was creeping up again as comfort, not efficiency became the main concern of the motoring public. Canadians complain about the higher gas taxes we pay and slip across the border to buy cheaper American gas, but few people want to cut down on their driving, drive slower or drive smaller cars to use less. We may talk about how terrible the pollution problem is in Toronto, worry about the greenhouse effect or worry about the mountains of tires produced by all the driving we do, but we all want somebody else to solve the problem. We won't be willing to accept our own responsibility in the matter until it hits us right in the pocket book. Let's face it, we can't go on forever as we've been going. We can’t keep finding new parts of the country to flood to keep up the flow of cheap electricity like they want to do in northern Quebec right now. We have to know that the more nuclear power plants we build the greater the chance something will go wrong with one of them. We have to know that someday we'll have to find a solution to the problem of nuclear waste that so far we’ve been able to tum our back. The only solution is to change, to cut down on the amount of wasted electricity. The problem is that right now we're stuck in the middle and it's going to hurl to get to be an energy efficient society. In so many things these days, we seem to be caught in the uncomfortable middle. We're suffering the pains of trying to make our society internationally competitive and a lol of people will lose their jobs in the effort. We're suffering trying to break the cycle of national debt, and people are hurting as government programs are cut. The intriguing thing is that so many of the people who can understand the need for suffering to balance the budget to make us efficient enough to compete, can't understand the need to pay the price to be energy efficient. They can read one bottom line, but not another even bigger one.