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"A Family Tradition for 133 Years" PORT PERRY STAR - Tuesday, February 9, 1999 - 7 ------ The Rout Revey Stay | Question of the Week... Ontario's education minister Do you have a suggestion that you think would make a good question of the week? Call us at 905-985-7383. Ee looking like mobsters going down the hall, eventually they're going to turn into one. to worry about name brand clothing and com- peting with everyone else, and no one would make fo fun of them. and they have to learn to be themselves. They can't learn that by conforming. suggested LanieY . i ; I even uniforms for high a Evan Jones Rian Johnson-Harris Clare Mulhall Thom Keeble Yvonne Lunshof students. What do you think? I think they should. If you I think it would be a good You can't do that. People I don't really see a prob- I'm 100 per cent behind it, : have a bunch of guys idea. No kids would have need to be individuals, lem with it. I can see most if the kids are for it. They feel less competition as far people will have a prob- lem; they like the way they dress, and won't want to conform with it. as what to wear in the momming. It makes life a whole lot easier for the kids themselves. A ---- -- LETTERS With activities on the lake come risks To the Editor: Last Saturday, from the back window of our home on the lake, we and 30 stunned guests watched as young Mr. Breen lay belly up and dead still on the ice for three hours, calmly attended by a few of our stoic Durham Police. Even though I have occasionally railed in these pages against the bored boys who inces- santly, noisily and dangerously drag race their sleds up and down the lake at 160 kph plus, I was struck by the sadness and loneliness of this fellow's death. : All the predictable thoughts went through our minds and our conversations. If there had been traffic rules for sleds, it probably wouldn't have happened. If there'd been a speed limit, or more police out there, or at least some cheap signage on the drag strip. If the drag sledders didn't go so bloody fast that they have essentially no peripheral vision, or if they understood the right-of-way rules that apply on all lakes. If the sledders didn't race each other so intensely as to exclude all other sensory awareness. If the surface condi- tions had been less icy and more snowy. If there hadn't been so many distractions on the busy lake. If the sled racers were as well trained to control their machines as the organized motorcycle ice racers who compete just a few steps from the death scene. If the town had some real jurisdiction over what happens on its lakefront. If, if, if... We all seem to want the lake to be as well managed and as orderly as a pretty residential street. But the truth is that we are attracted to it precisely because it is unordered and governed mainly by the unpredictable rules of nature. It doesn't matter whether you are a dog musher, a teenage joy rider in an old pickup, a mom on snowshoes with her children, a daring aircraft pilot test landing on his new snow skis, an elderly ice fisherman, a novice hang glider, a muskrat peeking up through an ice hole...or a young man careening at the ragged edge of control on a brand new $10,000, 150 hp, 180 kph sled. We all have exactly the same right to be out there, the same obligation to be respectful of other users of the lake, and we all take the same chance of injury. No matter who you are or what you're out there for, it's a real kick to go out and muck around on a frozen lake. For Mr. Breen, who undoubtedly understood quite well the risk he was taking, it was just a bit too much of a kick. Peter Langmuir, Scugog Island Re _ World War Il bomber and for power used a memb "Phil Orde Is seen here with his homemade 'Snoscat' snow plane built in 1963 for use on Lake Scugog. The snowplane was built with a Tokyo tank (drop gas tank) from a . r Wh 2 n? id «SECA BS PHOTO COURTESY PHIL ORDE 4 cyl., 125 h.p. Lycoming engine. Editor's Notepad | > by Jeff Mitchell WHEN GRIEF TURNS TO SCANDAL Well, it just figures, doesn't it? You write a piece about groundhogs, and the next thing you know, the country's knee deep in it. | First there was last Tuesday, Groundhog Day, when it was revealed that Wiarton Willy -- the rodent to whom we turn on the day for a prediction on the duration of winter -- was stone dead, and therefore unable to prognosticate as advertised. There were statements from politicians, such as Mike Harris, who said he "grew up" with the groundhog (meaning what? They were pals? Went fishing together? Spent eternal summer nights gazing at the stars and planning great things? Talked about settling down and getting a little house, maybe kids in the future?); there was an announcement of the death in the House of Commons (Hansard reports it like this: Some Hon. Members: Oh. Oh.); Jean Chretien said something about it, but it was garbled. Preston Manning probably blamed it on social spending. Lucien Bouchard was likely offended. It went on and on. The very next day, grief turned into scandal. Turns out the groundhog lying in state in a little pine box with mourners gathered 'round wasn't Willy at all. It was some other dead field rat that had been stuffed God knows how many years before, with pennies covering his wide-open glass eyes. The real Willy had expired in his burrow and wasn't discovered until it was much too late. The remains were in no state for public display. There were calls for a Royal Commission, which went unanswered probably because involvement in the matter went right to the top (but began somewhere among the members of the Wiarton Chamber of Commerce). The nation was transfixed... for a few minutes, anyway. All of this goes to show you that we'll turn just about anywhere for amusement in these drab days of winter. We plan a festival starring a groundhog. Then we run front page pictures of a stuffed rodent when the death of said varmint prevents that lucrative event from occurring. Ah, well... when it comes down to it, any diversion from flu season is okay, eh? So what if we may appear to the rest of the world to be just a little bit -- uh -- goofy. If we want to gather in the dark and worship groundhogs, or bison, or wombats, that's our business. And nobody's gonna tell us what to do. | --