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Page 4, News, Tuesday, April 17, 1990 Editorial: Tel.: 825-3747 The Terrace Bay-Schreiber News is published every Tuesday by Single copies 40 cents. Publisher............. A. 'Sandy' Harbinson Laurentian Publishing Limited, Box 579, 13 Simcoe Plaza, Terrace Bay, Subscription rates: $16 per . ' Ont., POT-2W0 Tel.: (807)-825-3747 Fax (807)-825-9233. Second class _ year / seniors $10 (local); Office Manager. seeeeeserees Gayle Fournier : mailing permit 2264. Member of the Ontario Community Newspaper $27 per year (out of 40 mile News ODOT is scns cnctnts Angie Saunders Assn. and the Canadian Community Newspaper Assn. radius); $36 in U.S. Advertising Rep.......... Sheryl A. Knighi fed SCL SAENGER LS I'd like to introduce to you... The News office is presently working with all new staff. All new except Gayle Fournier, whose been here for about 50 years (5 actually). Wonderwoman does the subscriptions, classified ads, the bookkeeping, and is also the head hoacho, boss-lady office manager. Sheryl Knight, the new Advertising Representative, has been here for about a month. She's a very strong-willed, hard workin' gal who can whip up advertisements that should hang in an art gallery instead of being printed in a local newspaper. Sandy Harbinson, our publisher, is the hardest working man I've ever seen. He works about 120 hours a week (that's on a slow week) and somehow manages to publish 2 newspapers. We've decided to buy him a Superman outfit so he can fly between the Terrace Bay and Nipigon newspaper offices. Addie Beaulieu helps us label the papers on Monday. Then there's me, Angie. I don't like writing about myself, therefore, my two co-workers have this to say, "Angie is a gifted writer, considering she's hidden away in a cave in the far end of the office. She's stuffed in there like dressing in a butterball turkey. Only the best for our pal!" All of us at the News have been trying to build up the reputation of our newspaper. If you've noticed, we've changed the front page, the look, and the content of the paper. No more "4-page papers." The papers in the last month or so have been 12 or 16 pages. There's been more local news instead of lawn care tips. The ads, which help pay for the paper, have improved immensely with Sheryl's help. Now we would like the public's input. What would you like to see in the paper that would further improve the quality? Would you like more sports, columns, ads, or maybe you do like lawn care tips? You can write the Terrace Bay/Schreiber News at Box 579, Terrace Bay, POT 2WO or phone 825-3747. $ LANE, MS OR LESS f "Letters to the editor' are very important to the readership and to the community which the newspaper serves. The letters act as a forum for discussion, a means to inform the public or authorities of a concern, or sometimes they can provide a great topic of conversatio over the fence or kitchen table. They also provide ideas and suggestions for and criticism about local issues. They can be funny, angry, sad, or a little of everything. © Write one today, sign your name, and help provide a service to all. Write: Box 579 Terrace Bay, Ont. Angie Saunders POT 2W0 Everybody talks about the seconds to either let him out fact that when they are on your TV and does Mister This really happened, weather, but nobody does anything about it. Everybody thinks that Mark Twain wrote that, but he didn't. A pretty well . utterly forgotten scribbler by the name of Charles Dudley Warner penned that observation 'way back in 1897 in an editorial that appeared in the Hartford Courant. Somehow, history bungled it, and now the whole world thinks the credit belongs to Mark Twain. That doesn't surprise me. Weather is a treacherous topic best untrifled with. But the hell with it. It's a blustery, cruddy late Spring day; there's a pair of worm- lusting robins hunched over on my front lawn like a couple of winos on a streetcomer; there's a leak in my basement, a draft under the back door, my cat's got spring fever, which means I~ have to get up every three | minutes and_ forty-five or bring him in...and I feel like picking on somebody. So let's beat up on... The weatherman. You know what bugs me most about weathermen? Not that they're wrong all the time. As a matter of fact, they're not. Their forecasts are reasonably accurate--at least as reliable as Old Man Maidle's down the road. He keeps track of squirrels' acorn stashes and the thickness of caterpillar pelts. He also has a whole bunch of agricultural rhymes about the weather. Rhymes like "Crick don't flow; watch fer snow"; and *COWs= Inthe --cC1over,; summer's 'bout over." I figure Old Man Maidle's weather poetry is dead accurate about 50 percent of the time--which is about the same as the guy with the Magic Marker on TV. No, it's not the weather forecasters' accuracy (or lack of it) that bothers me. It's the wrong, they...never apologize. It's true! They can tell you on Friday that Saturday's going to be a great day for a picnic, and you can go to the park with your little hamper Arthur Black of egg salad sandwiches and thermos of Freshie and wind up clinging to a floating picnic table in a deluge that makes the Johnstown Flood look like a sunshower. You get home that night. and turn Blow Dry Pompadour apologize for his goof? Nah. He smiles and banters about the Blue Jays with the Sports Jockette and points a well- manicured (dry!) finger towards the low pressure trough over Baffin Island that is going to, he says, make Sunday a 'great day for a picnic'. : Once--just once--I'd like to see the weatherman pop up on my TV screen right after the newscast, all decked out in manacles and prison greys. I'd like to hear him confess incompetence for missing yesterday's blizzard, plead > guilty to lousy forecasting in general, then commit the weatherpersons equivalent of hari kiri--falling on his telescopic pointer in front of the Canada Weather Map. It won't happen in my lifetime of course--but I would have settled for watching TV in Britain the -- night after the devastating hurricane of 1987. folks. Following his newscast, the BBC news anchor turned to weatherman Ian McCaskill and said, on live TV "Well, Ian, you chaps were a fat lot of good last night." Ian defended himself meekly, pointing out that they had forecast a "rather windy, showery airflow". "No kidding" responded the news anchor witheringly. "If you can't forecast the worst storms for several centuries... what are you doing?" Poor Ian McCaskill. He and all the other British weather forecasters really didn't have a leg to stand on-- particularly when it was revealed that weathermen in France, Spain and the Netherlands had forecast the hurricane, using data obtained from the Weather Centre in... Reading, England. If only Ian had double- checked with Old Man Maidle...