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www.insideHALTON.com · OAKVILLE BEAVER Thursday, February 23, 2012 · 6 The Oakville Beaver 467 Speers Rd., Oakville Ont. L6K 3S4 (905) 845-3824 Fax: 337-5566 Classified Advertising: 905-632-4440 Circulation: 845-9742 The Oakville Beaver is a member of the Ontario Press Council. The council is located at 80 Gould St., Suite 206, Toronto, Ont., M5B 2M7. Phone (416) 340-1981. Advertising is accepted on the condition that, in the event of a typographical error, that portion of advertising space occupied by the erroneous item, together with a reasonable allowance for signature, will not be charged for, but the balance of the advertisement will be paid for at the applicable rate. The publisher reserves the right to categorize advertisements or decline. Editorial and advertising content of the Oakville Beaver is protected by copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited. Neil Oliver Vice-President and Group Publisher, Metroland West David harvey Regional General Manager JILL DAVIS Editor in Chief Daniel Baird Advertising Director ANGELA BLACKBURN Managing Editor Riziero Vertolli Photography Director Sandy Pare Business Manager RECOGNIZED FOR EXCELLENCE BY: Ontario Community Newspapers Association MARK DILLS Director of Production Manuel garcia Production Manager CHARLENE HALL Director of Distribution Sarah McSweeney Circ. Manager Website oakvillebeaver.com The OakvilleBeaver is a division of Residents concerned over future of NHS We are two Oakville residents who, along with many others, fought for several years to ensure the creation of a Natural Heritage System (NHS) in north Oakville, on the lands north of Dundas Street. Our goal was to preserve a place for nature as Oakville grows, and we were successful in our efforts. Even the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) agreed and stated in its 2008 approval of the North Oakville East Secondary Plan: "The primary purpose of the Natural Heritage component of the System is to protect, preserve and, where appropriate, enhance the natural environment. The focus of the Natural Heritage component is on the protection of the key ecological features and functions of North Oakville. It will also contribute to the enhancement of air and water resources, and provide for limited, passive recreation- Letters to the Editor Canadian Community Newspapers Association Suburban Newspapers of America THE OAKVILLE BEAVER IS PROUD OFFICIAL MEDIA SPONSOR FOR: United Way of Oakville ATHENA Award al needs." Town of Oakville Council will soon be making important decisions regarding how the trail system for the NHS will unfold and we are very worried. Plans to date have included a large number of trails throughout the NHS, some possibly three metres in width with one-metre mowed buffers on either side, paved, lit and even de-iced in winter. There will be a meeting to discuss the issue at Town Hall tonight (Thursday, Feb. 23) from 7:30-9 p.m. Please plan to attend or e-mail the mayor and council your thoughts. You can learn more about the issue by visiting www.oakvillegreen.org. Renee Sandelowsky and Iris McGee, founding directors Oakvillegreen Conservation Association Inc. Treatment is just plain wrong Did you know that Halton and Vaughan are the only two places in Ontario where a hospital patient can not transfer directly to assisted longterm care? The patients must go home first or sign up for private care ($7,000 per month for my father-in-law and $6,500 for my father). My father passed before Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) could force him out of the Oakville hospital. These are people who have worked their entire lives in Ontario (88 and 82 years old), paying taxes in hopes that they would be taken care of when they needed healthcare. Equal access to healthcare? Canadian-born seniors? Canadian Second World War vet? Who made a deal with who? This is just wrong. W. Hillis, Oakville HEART HEALTH: As February draws to a close, so too, does the month associated with all matters of eric riehl / Oakville beaver the heart, and the flag raised earlier this month outside of the Oakville Town Hall by Heart and Stroke Foundation representative Ernie Nock (right) and Mayor Rob Burton will be lowered. What shouldn't come to a close however are good heart habits either discovered this month or practiced year-round. Imagination lost when characters jump from page to screen ome things are best left to the imagination. It's an adage often adopted and uttered by people returning from a blind date, a movie sequel or a nudist colony. And it's an adage I uttered when I read that Brian Joseph Davis, a writer/artist from Brooklyn, N.Y., is using police software to create sketches of fictional characters -- (almost) bringing to life literary lions like Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Edward Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. While this process is not new, law-enforcement agencies have been using the technology for years, taking character descriptions from novels to produce sketches of the faces of those famous characters is. Alas, it's a process that has the potential to make me crazy. Ah, crazier. One of the wonderful things about reading is that it affords an opportunity to exercise your imagination, whereas watching TV or movies gives your imagination a good rest. When reading, you take the descriptions the writer provides of people, places and things, and then create images you believe accurately accompany those descriptions. S Like snowflakes, no two imaginations are exactly alike; thus, no two interpretations of a writer's words are identical. For example: have two artistically inclined readers peruse J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and then ask them to draw a picture of one of the forests the writer so beautifully describes. Chances are, you'll get two wildly Andy Juniper different pictures of the very same forest. Personally, I take my reading pretty seriously. I take the images I form when reading pretty personally, which is why I tend to despise seeing my favorite books made into movies. Take The Great Gatsby, for instance, the popular 1974 movie that was adapted from one of my all-time favorite books by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The sets were incredible, marvelously recreating the Jazz Age. The acting was superb. The screenplay decent. But the casting? Honestly, in my mind's eye, Jay Gatsby did not at all look or sound like Robert Redford. You may have heard that another adaptation of the classic 1925 novel will reach theatres this fall. Well, the very notion of Leonardo DiCaprio starring as Gatsby is already giving me untold digestive issues. It's not that DiCaprio, like Redford before him, isn't an incredible talent. It's just that neither actor is Jay Gatsby -- the Gatsby my imagination so vividly created via the words of Fitzgerald over the course of my readings of the novel. Regular readers of this column know the mad man-love I have for actor Bill Murray. To me, Bill is a god who has only truly stumbled once in his storied career when he portrayed protagonist Larry Darrell in The Razor's Edge, the adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel. Not that he didn't do a superb job in his first crack at a dramatic role, it's just that he wasn't at all (hell, not even close to) the Larry Darrell I'd conjured up. No, I don't ever want to know what Judge Holden or Edward Rochester look like when their particulars are fed through computer software because I have already pictured, so very, very clearly, what they look like in my mind. And you wouldn't want to mess with my mind. Would you? Andy Juniper can be contacted at ajjuniper@gmail.com, found on Facebook at www.facebook.com, or followed at www.twitter. com/thesportjesters.