Pic of the Past
WASH DAY — Little Cecilia Fendall, left, and her friend Addie, help with the laundry using a wooden wash tub and wringer, circa 1913-14, south of Okotoks.
photo courtesy of Elaine Thomas and the Town of Okotoks Museum and Archives |
Column -
What does it take to get Oscar?
By John Barlow
Editor
What is the criteria to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
I really want to know because I am questioning my own intelligence.
Several months ago my wife and I went to see No Country for Old Men in the theatre, but at the climax of the movie, the sound went and we left the theatre frustrated. Up to that point the movie was excellent. I had to see how it ended. Then, when it won the Oscar for Best Picture I could not wait any longer and rushed out to the movie store and rented it. I watched it from the beginning mainly because Javier Bardem was the best villain since Darth Vader.
Then as the movie approached the climax I sat up on the couch eager to see what was surely to be an amazing conclusion to what critics have said is one of the best movies of all time.
I watched, and I waited. in fact I am still waiting. My DVD must have had a scratch on it because that simply cannot be how that movie ended.
I have not been this disappointed since seeing the Phantom Menace.
If you have not seen the movie, put the paper down.
In essence, Bardem killed pretty much everyone, got hit by a car, paid a kid $100 bucks for his shirt and walked off down the street.
Umm, okay, that pretty much sucked.
Now, I am sure the critics will say the ending was gripping as Tommy Lee Jones wraps it all up with some whacked out dream about chasing his dad.
What the critics are really saying is they have no idea what it means either. If anyone can explain it please let me know as I was up all bloody night trying to piece it together because I simply could not accept the fact it was that bad and I wasted three hours of my Sunday.
Want to impress your sweetie? Rent Once and she will be tying your skates for a week — it is excellent.
Editorial-
Move could be best for Pound Rescue
The heart of Pound Rescue is in the right place, but the facility is not.
Next month Okotoks town council will review its animal control bylaw and proposed changes could have a profound impact on Pound Rescue, a not-for-profit animal rescue centre operated by Gabrielle Barrie out of her home in Suntree. On March 17, a large number of local residents attended a public hearing at Okotoks council chamber to voice their support for Pound Rescue.
Okotoks Mayor Bill McAlpine said he supports the vision of Pound Rescue, but said he does not believe the facility belongs in a residential neighbourhood. He is right.
No one will argue that what Barrie has done with Pound Rescue is amazing and she has made an incredible sacrifice to ensure abandoned animals find a happy home.
Unfortunately for Pound Rescue, Okotoks has outgrown Barrie’s home-based charity. In a growing community reaching a population of 20,000 an animal shelter in a residential neighbourhood simply does not fit. Currently, Barrie is allowed up to 10 dogs and an unlimited number of cats on her property. To date, there has only been one complaint from a neighbour, but that one complaint sparked a review of Okotoks’ animal control bylaw.
Council knows this is the first of what could be many more complaints and administration also wants to tie-up a loophole that could allow similar shelters to appear in other residential homes. Council wants to nip this in the bud.
However, amending the animal control bylaw does not have to mean the end of Pound Rescue.
One option would be for the Town or another landowner to donate unused space in a building in the industrial area for Pound Rescue. For, say, $1 a year Barrie could lease the facility, but Pound Rescue would be responsible for operating and funding the shelter in the industrial area. Barrie could operate the charity out of her home (and keep up to three dogs in her own house as well as continuing to rely on the generosity of foster homes), but the bulk of the animals would be sheltered in an industrial setting away from residential homes and away from potential complaints about noise, odor and traffic. This would likely only have to be a temporary solution. Within the next few months Okotoks, along with other surrounding municipalities, will be looking at developing a regional animal shelter. Once the regional shelter is established it will likely lessen the workload on Barrie and Pound Rescue. Or, Barrie could work in partnership with the proposed regional animal shelter.
Regardless, McAlpine is correct in his view that although Pound Rescue is doing a wonderful service for the community, it has simply outlived its lifespan in a residential setting. Although Pound Rescue’s supporters may not see it yet, a move could be the best thing for the charity. As homes are bought and sold, there will likely be more complaints from Barrie’s new neighbours, not less.
Letters to the Editor -
High River needs to support regional animal shelter
Dear Editor,
Re: Regional animal care facility.
The Mayor of High River, Mr. Rempel, is quoted as saying that there could be a need on a regional basis but High River doesn’t have the same need as other municipalities. “Our administration asked our bylaw officers and there doesn’t seem to be a need in our immediate area.”
Ignorance is bliss, I guess, until someone calls you on it. I’m calling you on it, Mayor Rempel. Your bylaw officers don’t think you have a problem because Kim, who runs Heaven Can Wait right there in High River, picks up, rescues and takes all your abandoned, abused and homeless animals.
As I told council on March 10, the municipalities have neglected their responsibility towards abandoned animals for years and have allowed private charities to carry the load. The load is getting worse and it is 10 years past time for these councils to step up and at least look at solutions.That is all I asked High River Council for; it is in the minutes of their March 10, 2008 council meeting. I said, “All we need is one councillor who’s willing to talk about pregnant cats.” Just one councillor. I guess High River Council is just too important to make time. Besides, there’s no problem. Let Kim do it.
Cheryle Dobbyn
Turner Valley
Albertans seem to be guilty before proven innocent
Open Letter to Macleod MP Ted Menzies,
I am writing to ask if it is possible for you to introduce a bill in Parliament that would prohibit media publication of charges laid against an individual prior to having those charges determined in a court of law.
It is a common practice for the police to “pad” or lay as many charges as possible against an individual (some without merit) in order to give the Crown additional leverage in plea bargaining. Often the initial charges laid are either dropped for lack of evidence or dismissed at trial.
However, once the charges are published, the presumption of innocence becomes moot and the person charged is ostensibly condemned in the “court of public opinion,” guilty or not. This can be very damaging, especially for a young person in a small community, and may ultimately breed contempt for the law.
I appreciate that there is freedom of the press, but publication of false or unfounded charges before the accused has had his day in court borders on defamation and should be prohibited.
Don Devore
DeWinton
Reservoir’s costs were a ‘business decision’
Dear Editor,
I concede to your points there are limitations related to the legislation found within bureaucratic processes.
I agree it can be arduous for all parties involved to embrace and follow the processes as they stand. Perhaps changes do need to be made to “streamline and simplify”. Change does not necessarily occur by writing or talking about it alone, action must follow. How many citizens are willing to put action behind the injustices they speak about? Perhaps we only have to look at the number of non-voters in the recent provincial election for a clue. And ask why the citizens continue to vote for the government that made these rules.
With respect to your question would I have found it worthwhile had I “lost” the appeal; my answer is “yes”. It’s a better reservoir now because of my involvement.
I encourage you to contemplate: the Town of Turner Valley made a business decision to place a drinking water reservoir on contaminated land. There are consequences to decisions like these, the most obvious being the expense of locating and disposing the contaminates. Had the citizens been consulted, do you think the majority would have chosen this as the most ideal site for their drinking and bathing water?
Let’s be clear, the Town of Turner Valley is not a victim to the actions I took or to the process we had to work within. At any time the Town could have taken me up on my invitation to come to the table to discuss the issues. Instead they chose to dig their heels in even more. For what? To save face for a costly business decision that was flawed from the get go? To persuade taxpayers their decision was a sound one? In the end we see much more is being required of the Town.
Although you make good points about changing the bureaucratic process at higher levels, the real change needs to happen at the grass roots level, by inviting citizens to the table, ensuring their concerns are valued, heard, understood and acted upon. As the board observed and stated in their decision: …“the town develops its process in a reactive manner rather than on a proactive basis.” This is where the real change needs to happen, within all levels of government.
Roxanne Walsh
Turner Valley |
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More traffic lights are coming
There are more traffic lights in Okotoks! As you will have noticed the traffic lights are now operational at the extreme north end of Okotoks on 338th Avenue. I believe this now has us with more than a dozen sets of lights from the north end of town to the south end. It would be interesting to see how quickly you can make it from one end to the other. Once the 32nd Street bridge is built you can imagine there will be another dozen sets of lights north-south along that corridor. With progress comes more restrictions. I am afraid.
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Have you noticed the amount of grass fires reported around the area? I am glad I am not the farmer who decided to blow up his gophers the other day in the MD of Rocky View. This is the time to do it as you catch them before they start breeding, but the dry conditions can certainly cause a lot of havoc.
The MD of Foothills and the MD of Rocky View both have complete fire bans in effect with only propane barbecues allowed at this point.
We ask everyone to please be careful and do not throw lit cigarettes into the ditches as it does not take much to ignite a major fire. The other day I was driving south of Irricana and spotted a fire that started in a ditch that quickly engulfed a section of land.
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Back by popular demand, within the next couple of weeks you will notice Dr. Dave has returned as a columnist in the Regional. Dr. Dave is a Canadian who lives in Victoria and writes humourous columns about many embarrassing medical situations. We hope you enjoy his columns.
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Wow, it is almost April and within a few weeks we will be heading to Seaman’s Stadium to cheer on our Okotoks Dawgs. The first week of June their season will begin and I am told approximately 1,000 season tickets have already been sold. Get ready for another summer of Dawgs baseball.
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Earth Day will be held Saturday, March 29. Our local area will be participating with municipalities and residents around the world as we turn off our power for one hour from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. This means all power including television and radio. Maybe hard to do if we are in middle of a Flames game and what the heck will we do for that hour? Hard to imagine our ancestors did that every day and we will find it inconvenient for just 60 minutes. I wonder how many of us can actually do it?
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The Turner Valley Legion is helping organize Birth of a Nation Day on April 9. There will be parades and ceremonies in Turner Valley and Okotoks so lets all get out and show our support for our vets during this special day which also commemorates Canada’s historic victory at Vimy Ridge. |
Abkhazia: Russian bluff
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Last month Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, and most of the NATO countries recognized it. Russia condemned this as an illegal and dangerous precedent, and hinted that it might recognize other breakaway states like Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But early next month Russian President Vladimir Putin will show up at the NATO summit in Bucharest, in one of his last official acts before passing power to the president-elect, Dmitri Medvedev. He will not have recognized Abkhazia or South Ossetia. He was only bluffing.
It sounded serious at first. Early this month, Russia ended the trade restrictions it placed on Abkhazia and South Ossetia when they declared their independence from Georgia in the early 1990s.
Moscow is very angry about the way that NATO and the European Union have dismantled Serbia without permission from the United Nations, and it wanted to make a point.
Georgia accused Russia of “an undisguised attempt to infringe the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Georgia, to encourage separatism,” but all Moscow actually did was to ease the rules on trade between the two would-be countries and Russia. It did not officially recognize them as independent states, and it never will.
The back-story is that when the Soviet Union replaced the Russian empire in 1917, its new Communist rulers rationalized the patchwork quilt of smaller nationalities they inherited in the Caucasus and Central Asia into “republics” that formally respected the principle of national self-determination. But they never actually became independent, of course, and Moscow didn’t want to have to deal with dozens of them directly.
So the republics were ranked in three tiers, with 15 “Union republics” (including Russia itself) as the top tier. The lower tiers, having been granted “autonomy”, were bundled into one or another of the Union republics, with Russia getting the lion’s share of them. Georgia got several of them, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 it expected to keep them. However, the locals had other ideas.
By then massive immigration into Abkhazia, a subtropical area on the Black Sea coast, had reduced the Abkhaz ethnic group to only one-fifth of the population. Over half the 550,000 people living in Abkhazia in 1991 were Georgians. But in two years of vicious fighting an Abkhaz militia, backed by volunteers from other parts of the north Caucasus (and perhaps also secretly by Russia), drove out the Georgian army and most of the Georgian civilians as well.
It was unapologetic ethnic cleansing, conducted by a tiny nationality (less than 100,000 people) who feared that they were disappearing under an avalanche of immigrant foreigners. Now two-thirds of the previous residents of Abkhazia have fled, including all but a few tens of thousands of Georgians, and the Abkhaz are a large majority of the remaining population. But nobody recognizes the independence of their heavily armed little state.
Russia does not like the current Georgian government, which talks about joining NATO and the European Union. But Moscow has not recognized Abkhazia’s independence (or South Ossetia’s) because that would be a precedent that could be used by ethnic minorities in other “autonomous republics” in Russia itself. And there is a bigger problem, too.
What horrifies the Russians about many recent actions of the United States and some its European allies — the war against Serbia in 1999, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the creation of an independent Kosovo in 2008 — is that they are deliberately tearing up the United Nations Charter, the rules that the victorious powers drew up at the end of the Second World War in the hope of avoiding further great-power wars.
Attacking the UN is often popular in the United States. Republican presidential candidate John McCain now talks about a League of Democracies that would effectively bypass the UN (and would presumably authorize its members to invade anybody who needed a lesson). President George W. Bush acts as though such a vigilante outfit already exists.
The Russians, who lost 40 million who were killed in the last world war, think that this is a very bad idea. They are right. If the great powers were ever to go to war again, the nuclear weapons would come out and hundreds of millions would die.
The United Nations’ core rules are that no country can attack another, and that the whole international community will defend and preserve the existing borders of every UN member. These rules create much injustice, especially when oppressed minorities are seeking independence from intolerant majorities, but they are probably necessary. They have certainly been useful: no great power has fought another directly since 1945.
Kosovo was legally part of Serbia, even if most of its people didn’t want anything to do with Serbia. Giving it independence without Serbia’s assent and in defiance of the UN rules suits the Western great powers for the moment, but it undermines those essential UN rules that were invented to bring some order to international affairs.
If Russia one day recognizes Abkhazia’s independence without Georgian consent and Security Council approval, it will mean that Moscow has finally lost its faith in international law and accepted that the world has reverted to a jungle. For the moment it’s just bluffing, but to no avail.
The historically challenged dwarves who currently run foreign policy in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin don’t even understand what really troubles the Russians. |
