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the HERALD Page Editorial Friday Jury 5 1991 Home Newspaper of Halton Hills Established 866 A Division of Canadian Newspaper Company Limited Guelpti Street Georgetown Ontario L7G 3Z6 K ROBERT Publisher and General Manager SUBSCRIPTION HATES 8772201 COLIN GIBSON Managing Editor DAN TAYLOR Manager Th on iwwi ind material ctnM mplorM and in National Th Hut IUbl of arfilng an hi In Mrand 11m amount paid lor actually Slings and arrows Ah the slings and arrows from a concerned reading public Any selfrespecting journalist worth his typewriter nowadays its word processor couldnt live without them It comes with the territory and believe me at times you feel as if it really is the wild west Perhaps Im a bit of a literary masochist as to a literary sadist Hit me hit no way I actually enjoy the poison pen letters and the angry phone calls questioning the legitimacy of my birth- It allows me to stay in tune with my readers their likes and dislikes and attempt to get their concerns or their frustrations in to my columns or editorials In this respect I will not change So and keep those cards and letters and the phone calls com ing I ran into this elderly gentleman recently and after I had helped him to his feet dusted him off and made sure he was alright we had a discussion about my editorials and my col umns I hate everything youve ever written for the Herald he ex claimed while dusting off the tire marks from his shirt Youre a rabblerouser and we dont need that around here he foamed Then why do you read my stuff I asked dabbing at my face with a Kleenex Because I love to hate you he replied sauntering off with an Errol grin In my earlier incarnation as a journalist I plied the jockstrap beat I was Sports Editor with the Herald when it was located on Main Street in Georgetown then transferred to a daily paper the Nanaimo Daily Free Press The top sports story in town was the Nanaimo Clippers a Tier Two Junior A team coached by former NHL and minor pro hard rock Larry Good old Larry had a philosophy for hockey as well as life Why go around a wall when The Clippers were declared provincial champions one year when I was the Sports Editor because the other provincial finalist refused to continue the series after three of their players required medical attention because of a between period brawl in the third game of the series The Clippers were good no doubt about it But they were also bad in the sense that any oppos ing playeY who dared to venture onto the frozen pond was con sidered fair game for a free ride through the protective glass and into the seats Former NHLers Barry Peder- son Robertson and Greg Adams toiled for the Clippers during my sports tenure and they were an exciting team to watch once wrote about Torrey Robertson who had the intellect of an unshelled peanut brought the fans to their feet when he laid a tremendous check on himself because there was nobody else around to hit Needless to say Torrey wasnt impressed with my prose and threatened to rearrange my facial features with his hockey stick In a moment of sheer stupidity I confronted about his threats and he told me not to worry It was his brother who had issued the threats because Tor rey never read anything in the newspaper but the comics Still with the Clippers I would receive phone calls at about oclock in the morning from so meone who claimed he was a player on the team and that he and some others who didnt like what I wrote about them were just waiting to get me alone in the dressing room Foolishly perhaps over the next several weeks I roamed the dressing room during practice and games but nothing ever hap pened After the season had ended at the teams awards banquet the mysterious phone caller came up to me and identified himself He was a and one of the very few eventempered players on the team When I asked him why he had made the phone calls he replied I thought it would make me fell more a part of the team We ended up friends Last week I wrote a column about my son and thought he might be a bit because of the personal nature of the offering He told me he wasnt bothered by the column When I asked him why he stated because he thought I was weird anyway Thotsmyboy You call them as you see them As I see it anyway Poets Corner GOODBYE EMPTY DREAMS Ill never forget the words Forever waiting bespoke Never sure That evening in the rain love him Its time to go our He loves her separate ways Broken promises I cant see you again Empty dreams I stared at him in silence Nothing Is the way Not knowing what to say It seems B Brooke Acton Thinking God dont let htm FOR MY MOM mean It Everything changed when my Please dont let him mother died she said walk away She didnt expand He offered no excuses I didnt ask her to Simply told me not to cry She didnt need to I my sad heart break in two Both being mothers and One final kiss goodbye daughters ourselves B Brooke Acton By Acton J Scientists debunk space aliens theory Naturally you were just as as tounded as I was by the recent news about scientists and space aliens I refer of course to the revela tion that a growing body of scien tific opinion now believes that space aliens do not exist at all Oh good lord First Santa Claus Then the Easter Bunny And now this I scarcely need stress how shat tering this revelation is to so many of the most cherished beliefs in Western Society I mean if space aliens dont ex ist then were forced to the con clusion that Morgan Fairchild despite all the welldocumented reports in the supermarket tabloids was not fathered by one This is dismaying to all of us And no doubt devastating to poor Morgan But apparently its true More and more scientists believe theres simply no basis for believ ing that intelligent life exists anywhere except on earth Or to put it another way given the state of affairs on earth just now intelligent life may not exist at all I know this to be true because I read it in an article reprinted from The London Evening Telegraph If youve ever read the Telegraph youll understand why Im so confident about its ac curacy No newspaper that grey and boring could ever be wrong To be honest I was never too sure how I felt about space aliens in the first place I suppose Ive always felt that they might exist and quite possibly possess Weirs World powers far greater than own In which case Id be much more worried about how they feel about me Still news that they dont exist explodes some very comforting theories It would for instance rule out the possibility that Brian was kidnapped by space aliens in and replaced by a lookalike android and was unfortunately just slightly Now granted this belief in their nonexistence might be one of those passing scientific fads Scientific opinion has been known to slip up occasionally Remember oat bran Still the scientist chap who wrote the article in The Telegraph did a pretty convinc ing job of destroying the various arguments which support a belief in space aliens For starters he posed the ques tion if space aliens exist then why havent they contacted us One of the conventional answers to this of course is that space aliens have deliberately chosen not to contact us knowing we just arent ready for this sort of thing But as the chap points out in The Telegraph this argument rests on the unlikely premise that all space aliens would wisely decide to stay away The guy has a point After all if there are billions and billions of aliens out there then surely a few of them must be weenies Another argument might be that space aliens simply lack the technology to contact us But The Telegraph notes that we ourselves are on the very verge of being able to send probes into dis tant galaxies As such if aliens exist theyre all more backward than we are This youll admit is quite a thought What if we are indeed the most advanced and in telligent of billions of species in the universe Its the sort of thought that in spires you with awe And with the sinking feeling that God had bet ter help the universe But most fascinating of alt was The Telegraphs most fundamen tal argument against the notion that life could exist on other planets Apparently its nearly a mathematical impossibility for life evolve before a planets sun bums out and that the rapid evolution of life on earth was the result of an amazing sequence of flukes and coincidences Gosh This newspaper article doesnt debunk the belief in space aliens It reinforces the nagging suspicion that there is really just one word that describes the human race Improbable Turner cries foul over editorial Dear Editor I stood in Glen Williams on Canada Day and sang the na tional anthem I was a proud Canadian as were the several hundred other people there Also on Canada Day I raised flags in and Caledon East I visited a festival in Village and talked to scores of people It was a positive day and folks spoke of renewed hopes for Canadas future Then I read the Herald and all the negativity and confrontation which created some of our na tional problems flowed right over me again Instead of celebrating whats right about Canada the Herald decided to focus us on whats wrong Your editorial sought to lay blame once again and foster the myth that our problems were dreamed up by a handful of peo ple- like me These people you describe as pompous and ar rogant navelgazers who put par ty politics ahead of their country Okay Mr Editor Can we please move on now We all know what the problems are How about helping find some solu tions How about moving beyond the politicianbashing and asking your readers what kinds of reforms theyd like so together we can fix Canada This is a great country and we are all blessed to live here But its not a perfect country And un til we stop trying to kick each others shins nut it wont be How about it Garth Turner MP Hal tonPeel Editors note Until politicians decide to take off their shin pads and suffer the pain ordinary Canadians feci there doesnt appear to be much room