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BASIC BlflCk by Arthur Black In praise of doing nothing Lazybones, sleepin' in the sun How you 'sped to get your day's work done? Never get your day's work done Sleepin ' in the noon day sun Well, the Dog Days of summer summer are behind us, and that s a pity. It's the only time of year when hyperextended humans get to behave like; well, dogs. Just lying around, soaking up the rays, copping snoozes and scratching where it itches. The hot summer sun makes it hard to rush about the way we do the rest of the year, like Type- A Chicken Littles. I love the Dog Days. They legitimize laziness and I am a certified lazy guy. Which would make me an endangered species if scientists scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health had anything to say about it. They've been tinkering with monkeys' brains, trying to make them more, you know, productive. They've discovered discovered that, by suppressing a particular particular gene they can turn an ordinary, happy-go-lucky chimpanzee into an obsessive, goal-oriented worry wart that doesn't know how to relax. "The monkeys become extreme workaholics," a researcher burbles, "as evidenced evidenced by a low rate of errors performing tasks, irrespective of how distant the reward might be." In other words, they've managed to take a perfectly happy, well-adjusted animal and transform it into a neurotic neurotic working stiff. Great moments in science. I'd be worried about the Mental Health Institute boffins if I didn't happen to know that they are micturating into the wind. They haven't got a prayer of winning this war. There are just too many lazy folks like me out there. And not just on this side of the pond. A recent Associated Press survey of ten European countries declared the laziest people in Europe to be... the Germans! According to the survey, Germans spend an average of just seven hours a day on paid work and housework housework combined. Mind you, Norwegians take more time off - about 170 days per annum, which, if you do the math, works out to damn near half the calendar year. Sweden sounds like a sweet gig for a lazybones too. The Swedes have just introduced a program that will pay workers 70 percent percent of their salary for staying home for a year, enabling the jobless to 'gain experience by taking their place'. The only proviso: the stay-at-home worker cannot take a salaried position somewhere else. Oh, heck. Even as I write, there's a ELEMENTARY FRENCH TEACHER conference being held in a small Swiss village near the Italian border. It is called the National Convention of the Idle. The organizers promise a full afternoon will be devoted to a debate on The Virtues of Laziness. Well, correction - not a full afternoon. There will be a break from 1PM to 3 PM for a mandatory siesta. Perhaps delegates will take something to read in their hammocks. hammocks. They can choose from one of two books on the international international best seller list that are veritable paeans to laziness. How To Be Idle is a passionate screed written by an indolent Brit name of Tom Hodgkinson. Mister Hodgkinson argues that far from being a bad thing, idleness is our key to salvation. The economy, he says, should be geared to freeing us from labour, not harnessing us into 60 and 70-hour work weeks. He wants us to "throttle back the vast overheated engine of our industry, curtail its exploitation of our natural resources, reduce its output of waste and pollution, and provide provide everyone with lives of increasing leisure." Corinne Maier is even more radical. She's the French author of Bonjour Paresse which translates as 'Hello, Laziness'. Mme Maier contends contends that it is every good citizen's citizen's duty to slack off at work. In a chapter daintily titled "Business Culture, My Arse" she says most corporations are cesspools of nepotism where people get ahead by who, not what they know, so why not "spread gangrene through the system from the inside?" Not surprisingly, Mme Maier's book was not well- received by the State Electric Utility she works for. The company company has threatened her with disciplinary action and summoned summoned her to a hearing to discuss discuss her 'bad working habits'. Regrettably her moment of dl p =i $i æ ..tiffljj i" ji i Kendal Hills T R. E E S truth has been postponed several several times because the necessary necessary personnel haven't been on hand to conduct the hearing. It's all those staff vacations. The average French worker works about 300 hours less each year than the average North American. Sounds like Mme Maier's compatriots don't really need to read Bonjour Paresse. 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