WY The Gactiddar Sun AS PUBLISHER JON JARRETT SHARLENE IMHOFF DONNA JORY ADVERTISING REP. JOHN SNELGROVE CATHERINE ROSS PRODUCTION MANAGER ADVERTISING REP. DENISE GOLDSTONE NICOLE BEETSTRA CIRCULATION MANAGER PRODUCTION CLIFF WOFFENDEN PRODUCTION BRENDAN HALPER MARION ANDERSON REPORTER PRODUCTION Direct Departmont Phones General Office 365-5266 Cc 365-5266 365-7848 rene s+000365-2278, 9365-5579 cl Ads Display Advertising .... FAX cessor editorial comment Shame, shame, shame Good going Castlegar! Pat yourselves on the back. You've just won the “Hypocrite Award.” It’s how a cerned about your i a to tackle the big guys over watersheds, air and water pollution could so sadly fall short of the smallest effort to help assist with simple waste management. Andy Roberts’ recycling business was a good idea. It’s too bad that some residents in Castlegar didn’t care enough to help make it a successful venture. The Tequirements were simple enough; read the your garbage and place it into the appropriate cubicles. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Now that we’ve managed to chase away a decent chance for recycling our paper and glass, do you sup- pose we'll have to wait until the government increases our taxes to do yet another study to tell us we need to recycle our garbage? I'd be willing to bet my taxes on it. Perhaps we could specify that 50 per cent of this tax levy be used to teach sume Castlegar residents how to vend simple instructions. What is really , is the we're just set for the big businesses. After all, the ques- tions and show of environmental support in regards to the Celgar pulp mill expansion was a very good effort. Castlegar stood up for what it believed in. We made sure.the right questions were being asked. And we demanded answers. «How ‘seriously will our questions be taken in the future? so con- tok little knowledge cy What is a : meniscus? 2): Before i it was ever capital, what was Ottawa's main 2°: *°3): Who was the Emperor of Rome at the time of the birth of Christ? }) .What does the Latin tag, “Caveat Emptor” mean? 5) If. one has a temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit, bat would that be in Centigrade? : 1) The’ curved upper surface of liquid in a tube. ) Logging. : ). ugustus: (The, Octavian of. ‘Shakespeare’ 's play, julius Caesar’, ye ened te tae Sas gustus after he egrees foli ws. Subtract'32 degrees from 86: {to allow for: fact that: water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit), ich leaves 54. Nine degrees Fahrenheit is eauivalent to e degrees Centigrade, 80549 X5= 230.22. By Don Addis Consumers must read between the lines The great tidal waves of words that wash over your brain and mine don’t always mean what they say, So a man (woman) has to be wary — wary aS 2 rat at a cat convention— wheney- Ron Jeffels Syndicated Columnist er he reads, listens, or watches the screen that congeals the mind. For example, I’m a bit distrustful of that ad promising me — hand on the heart — that I’ll be able to speak- French, German and Spanish after only three months of instruction. Look, after three months times 250, I'm still trying to master the mother tongue: English with its half-million words, English with all its tortuous paths and tormented lanes, its dark groves and marshy reaches. So call me terminally stupid. That ad does. Now, German I used to know. Well, partially and imperfectly, but I did spend long years under short-tem- pered teachers bending over the works ° of Gocthe and Schiller,'I gave it up, permanently and forever, when J once tried to order strawberries in a German restaurant. The waiter smiled, nodded. assent, beat a retreat. . . and brought back an illustrated guide to the streets of Greater Berlin, T think it price of Grant’s Best Procurable is ris- ing exponentially these days, what with the PST, the GST and all the other imposts and impositions, And I've leamed healthy and salu- brious contempt for the language in any manual foal with the care, of com- takes longer than three months to Ieam a language. Perhaps a lifetime? And I’m not fully convinced about the merits of a career in the sorting, stuffing, sealing, stamping and sending of envelopes— even though another ad promises me big money, early retire- ment and the key to the puters, walcowive ovens, VCRs, modems, telephone answering machines and, of course, digital quartz watches. They're all designed, made and manufactured in strange, occult lan- restroont if I rush the I put that one ona level with ‘another offering me “exciting and rewarding government posts abroad” with salary, fringes benefits and living allowances beyond the dreams of avarice. My avarice doesn’t stretch that far, Not even when I'm dreaming. In marginal honesty and measured candor, I can't think of any govem- ment post, here or abroad, that would tempt me, with the possible exception of Senator or Procurer General for duty-free booze in Canadian embassies abroad. I could use that extra $156 a day for tuming up on the Hill. And the translation, I have the clear and distinct impression that the Dead Sea Scrolls or the bas reliefs on Inca temples would be easier to interpret. I've never yet found out how to stop that runner from racing across the dial or how to mute the chimes on my digital quartz. After much grief and many batter- ies, I’ve learned to tum my quartz over to the nearest six-year-old. He needs no language, no instructions. He seems to do it by sorcery or by rit- ualistic practice or by stirring the entrails of a once-was goat. And I wonder, vaguely, about the honesty — not to mention the grammar and syntax — of those recurring, never ending ads for bankruptcy sales of genuine, imported Persian carpets. The Persians are singularly inept at wonder that Bush managed to pull the rug from under their fect during the recent unpleasantness in the Gulf. And then, of course, there are all those liquidation sales of water beds. I like the pun, whether it's intended or not, but I’m all at sea about the authenticity of those offers. Think I'll stick to the springs, coils and ‘slats of the ancient orthopedic, I may have backache grill marks in the mom- ings but at least I don’t suffer from Permanent mal de mer. There's another thing I caution you against: seemingly ordinary words spoken with a strange accent. Take that cowboy dude on telly who orders me to buy B.C, Lottery tickets. Why is it that he uses a long, slurring, down-home, all g’s-dropped Texas drawl when most of us speak West Coast Wet? I think maybe he’s spent too many years herding the bull. RR. Jeffels is a Richmond free- lance writer and former principal of The Open Learning Institute. Slings. and arrows One of the ironies to which we have pointed in these columns in recent months is that just as the com- munist empire seems to be loosening up and a new breath of freedom sweeping across eastem Europe, free speech is being curtailed in the west. One example was the abuse heaped on those with politically ‘incorrect’ opinions. There was for instance the professor who expressed the opinion that some races were more intelligent than others. (Interest- ingly, it was not the whites who he placed at the head of the list, but the Chinese.) Activists broké tp His lec- tures, he was suspended from faculty for a while but what was most signifi- cant was that nobody dealt with him on the basis of his published research. One supposes that if he is as wrong as his detractors claimed, it would be easy enough to take his research apart and expose him as charlatan. ‘That didn’t happen. Instead we had the kind of ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’ approach that one associates with totalitarian regimes. Hannaford Syndicated a rs JUST REMEMBER WHEN You'RE DECIDING WHETHER To SUPPORT STRICTER. GUN LAWS ,OR NOT, GUNS DoN’'T KILL, \ ane #3 © the Gstlegar Soa Do! pean Jewry during the war was exag- gerated, it was not what he said that was attacked but him. Apart from a uniformly hostile press, meeting rooms were cancelled at the last minute as a result of pressure and upon one occasion he was assaulted. This, in the same year that the Israeli Yad Vashem Centre Christ may become illegal in Canada, because it may offend some members of our ‘cultural mosaic’, Such then is the flavor of the approaching intolerance; as the printing of Bibles is resumed in Russia after 74 years, doors are beginning to close to Christianity in the west. As former blacks and is building one for Ameri- can Indians, From separate dorms in college, will they move to separate neighborhoods? Is this now liberal- ism’s goal? Have we come full circle to ‘separate but equal’?” If this sounds de] ingly similar to the now-repudiated policy of ‘Another case of a shot messenger was last year’s Canadian tour by David Irving, are British hi ian who for Victims in Jerusalem and the Polish gove jointly their history, westem defenders of orthodoxy the i And soon. conceded that the number who died in Auschwitz was more like a million than the claimed four million. delights in the controversial. In his books, be has the allies for the war-time bombing of Dresden, charged the Royal Navy with i ¢ ile, people like Ernst This week, columnist Mona Charen points out another sad irony. “..Wassar College and Tli- id in South wein da should not feel too smug about the state of affairs in America, Our own native Indians are pressing their claims to self goverment and federal policy nois University were holding separate ivi for black ‘Zundel have been for say- ing this kind of thing.) More recently, in our own province, over the destruction of Convoy PQO17 and assaulted the public i image of Sir Winston Churchill Seldom, b any overt of religion in the public school system has been out- wed, that means in practice is has been have his critics been able to cope with the massive documentation which he iasa assembles in support of his claims, that Christi though here and there some New Age teaching may pass unchallen, Indeed, noted evangelist Michael We WILL BE ENCOUNTERING Some TURBULENCE FoR A Few MINUTES... {© 1991 Creators Syndcate. tre LIFE IN FIRST CLASS THe dy ye {gr Sun wr 1S POLITICALLY oC AND A MEMBER OF THE STERLING NEWS SEAVICE so i Established November 28, 1990 Second Class Malling Permit Pending “ Publiahod by The Castlogar Sun i Wookly on Wednesdays 405 Columbia Ave., Castlegar, BC. VIN Ga Hy, when he hes that the Green of s Regent College P wo account of the destruction of Euro- has that to publicly speak about the unique claims of Jesus graduates. At Vassar, according to the New York Times, black students felt that the traditi did not (A woman who pot ‘Canadian’ as her ethnic origin on her census form was harassed by cen- sus officials, who wanted something more particular. It tums out that this reflect black concems or culture. The Chicago Tribune reports that at Chicago’s Brother Rice High School, black seniors held a separate prom... The trend towards separatism on will affect federal largess to ethnic interest groups.) History can play some cruel jokes. Is it really to be that as the bad guys of the world, the communists and the college ip is Oberlin College on Obio has separate proms for black, Jewish and Hispanic students. Cornell has a house for aia African racists finally yield to and change their ways, that we in Neat America are beading down the road along which they have 50 recently begun to retrace their steps? From one Spin docs in a pickle There’s nothing like a flying visit to Toronto to get a new fix on the political problems facing the nation. Even if the trip was to attend a party celebrating the impending mar- tiage of one of the great catches of the y-D rdin’s smile has arts of scores of hard- bes who wanted ‘to'nail her seri . boss’s hide'to the wall: The “boss” in ““ question was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who Durdin’ served as deputy press secretary, winning the respect and ‘admiration of the: ‘Parliamentary Press Gallery in the process. i _ She i 6 be married next month, and political disaster to another scores of friends and admirers gathered here for the “Nups de Martha,” a star- studded bash to wish her well. And to find out what her beau, Tony Caldwell, has that the rest of us haven't. (How about hair for a start! — ed.) It was a pettest party, with Martha’s past and current boss, former Trudeau media guru Patrick Gossage, keeping things hopping. It is amazing how a switch from the public to the Private sector improves one’s oxnlook, to say nothing of one’s As always happens when eee with an interest in politics gather, the topic of conversation was — you Buessed it — Brian Mulroncy. In what’ the Trudeau Liberals call the “good old days," the sure cure to. a low rating in the polls was to get Trudeau on the road. A round-the-world: guest for inter- national peace ‘or a search for the elu- sive “contractual link": with Europe was always a good tonic for. Poor. polls, jally. with the ever patient Martha riding herd. on what PET. called “those ccumbs”* “in the press. . But.that, old (rick, deesn’t seem to: work for Brian Mulroney. His PR staff is marginal at best, and when Muldoon leaves the country the wheels fall off his goverment. And last week it was and all that) to say anything more. Tnstead we have a farce straight out of the Three Stooges. ‘That spectacle will continue before again. The PM had barely wiped the Bobby Rae doggy doo off his chin when the Mohammed Sadiq “Fast Mo” al-Mashat case back into the headlines. While Mulroney tried to make an impression on the international stage, back in the House of Commons the opposition was performing the Texas chain saw massacre on his cabinet. Now we've got a second version of the “truth” about what happened, and why it is public servants and not their political masters who must shoulder the blame. me ever there were a case when the old Liberal tactic of telling “just: enough’ of | the truth was called for, ‘this is it/38