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Page 4, News, Tuesday, October 15 1991 "Kditorial The Terrace Bay - Schreiber News is published every Tuesday by Laurentian Publishing Limited, Box 579, 13 Simcoe Plaza, Terrace Bay, Ont., POT-2W0 Tel.: 807- 825-3747. Second class mailing permit 2264. Member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspaper Association. Your kinder, gentler newspaper You may have noticed some of the changes we have been making here at The News lately, such as our new 'Community Briefs' section on page two. This section allows us to put more information in the paper -- interesting stories that might other- wise not have been told because of the paper's size. This week, we're introducing a few more changes. You may have noticed an 'Inside' box on the front page. This box will be appearing every week now, and will give you an easy reference to some of the stories you might otherwise miss. We've also re-designed page 5. Alongside Larry Saunders (who himself has undergone a bit of a design change) we're plan- ning on running a new column. Each week I will pose a question, alternating each week in Schreiber and Terrace Bay, to people in the street concerning a topic of (I hope) local interest. So when you see me standing in front of the post office, camera and pen in hand, please don't cross the street or hit me or anything. And one last column we hope to add next week is called "Cook of the week", in which I track down the best, or most interesting, local cooks and get a recipe from them. Incidently, if anyone has a good recipe for Haggis, please let me know. I haven't had good sheep intestines in months. As we slowly emerge from the recession, we're going to have more editorial space, and that means more stories, more photos, and, we hope, more readers. If you like the changes,please let us know. If you don't like them, or if we cut something you did like, let us know that as well. As a matter of fact, write us for any rea- son. I've been editor now for almost a month and I still haven't received one letter from someone in our coverage area. It's start- ing to get embarrassing. Proud Heritage To the editor: It was such a pleasure to attend the 10th anniversary of the Northwestern Ontario Sports Hall of Fame. This year was especially pleasing because I was inducted as part of the team that won the 1966 Canadian Senior Little League Baseball Championship. Other honoured athletes came from Marathon and Red Rock. Perhaps the lesson to be learned from the tremendous accom- plishments of the people of Northwestern Ontario, is that if we can win and lead in sports, we can do so in our civic and voca- tional lives. Rather than pleading for outside assistance for our problems, let's dig down, as in sports, and lead in life by creating North- western Ontario solutions to our problems. We have succeeded in our sports heritage, and I'm sure we can succeed with a high quality life in Northwestem Ontario, making it the envy of Canada and the world. Larry Hebert, Thunder Bay Seniors $12 (local); $29 per year (out of 40 mile radius); $38 in U.S. Add GST to yearly subs. ? : ; Publisher............ Single copies 50 cents. iow Subs. rates: $18 per year, Advertising Mgr Bi iss. cc. ..A. Sandy Harbinson ae. Linda R Harbinson ...Darren MacDonald Sales Representative. .....Lisa LeClair Sra te Gayle Fournier Gece Cheryl Kostecki Admin. Asst........ Production Asst A British viewpoint Canada is a country which excites the imagination of the British people. - British Prime Minister James Callaghan, September 1976 In a bulldog's eye. - Arthur Black, Canadian columnist, October 1991 Actually, I'm being unkind. The idea of Canada does trigger the imagination of the British people - but only in the oldest and most hallucinatory way. Consider this passage from a recent edition of the Manchester Guardian - one of Britain's "quality" newspapers. A correspondent by the name of Ralph Whitlock is musing over the contents of a letter he has received from a Canadian friend. Ralph writes in the Guardian: "Some of the encounters of man with wildlife are frightening...Elks (sic), moose and other ungulates are known to be unpredictable...Bears overturn § beehives and frighten } everybody..Also, coyotes are getting familiar with man and losing their fear of him...One even dragged a 16-year-old from a campsite in Banff." The amount of sheer balderdash in the foregoing passage is quite astounding. The only bears most Canadians ever see play football for Chicago. Your average Canuck wouldn't know a live elk from a tame Rotarian. And a coyote "dragging a 16-year-old from a campsite"? 'Arf a mo' there Ralph, lad. My encyclopedia tells me the average coyote runs about three and a half feet from pointy snout to tip of fluffy tail. And a mature adult weighs in at a whopping 30 pounds soaking wet. The Queen's wussiest corgi could clean a coyote's clock. Old Ralph isn't the only Brit to view Canada through Hollywood-coloured sunglasses - or to blab about it in the daily papers. A British actor by the name of John Sessions recently whined and mewled all over the pages of The Independent about his terrible four-year ordeal le SEAS Se eee et PAS Le peer See eee | PS Arthur Black life in the Great White North. As a matter of fact, it drove him to the slough of despair, the edge of madness and beguiling thoughts of suicide. Would he ever come to Canada again? He would rather go to New York and be short or stabbed to death, he told slack-jawed Independent readers. "At least" he sniffed "New York is civilized." What bothered Mister Sessions most about his sanity-sapping prison sentence in Canada? "The hideous blizzards" he wrote. "You simply couldn't walk above ground from November to March." Well, I've never passed a winter squatting on an Arctic ice floe or crouched =< shivering in a log cabin == listening to the trees crack and the wolves how! in the = wilds of B.C.'s Northern interior. But then, neither has ; Mister Sessions. Those ghastly lost years he moans about were all spent within the city limits of Hamilton, Ontario. Clearly Mister Sessions hatred of Canada goes beyond stupidity or even malevolence. The man is deluded. But why? Why do the Brits get Canada so wrong? I think the rest of Europe is to blame. Continental Europeans have never been kind about the English. They laugh at English stuffiness and the wretched English cuisine. Worse. Europeans joke about English...you know. Sex. A woman French cabinet minister calls les Anglais the world's most undersexed people. A Czech humourist cracks "Continental pcople have sex lives. The English have hot water bottles." That explains the English penchant for fantasy - Canada is a mere plaything for a sexually deprived Dirty Old Country. Canucks unite! We have nothing to lose but SS a ee |