4 - Wednesday, December 12, 1990 — North Shore News

Videos utterly banal,
utterly sentimental,
utterly entertaining

WE HAVE a Sony Video 8 Handycam. It’s the fourth
videocamera we've had since Emily, our six-year-old, was

old enough to walk.

I didn’t actually catch her first
step on tape, but the fact that she
was walking — and I wasn’t
documenting it! — galvanized me
into buying a JVC right then and
there.

So I do have her third and
fourth attempt to walk, and it is
priceless stuff, Priceless that is, to
us,
The thing about home videos,
of course, is that outside of im-
mediate family and friends who
happen to be on the tape you’re
playing, nobody on earth wants to
see them.

For anyone else, they are stunn-
ingly boring.

There’s Emily dancing. There’s
Will swimming. There’s Mom try-
ing to hide. There’s Dad turning
the camera around so he can be in
the picture too. And there's Emily
again. My goodness. And Will.
Fancy that. And Mom again and
Dad again and more Emily and
more Will, and...

Then there’s the aunts and un-
cles and cousins and grandparents
and neighbors and visitors ... and
more aunts and more uncles and
more cousins and ... there’s Dad
turning the camera around again,
and look, there’s Emily one more
time...

It’s utteriy banal, utterly trite,
utterly sentimental.

That is to say, it’s the greatest
entertainment in the world.

I decided to add them up the
other day, and it turned out we
have 32 Sony Handycam tapes, in
addition to the 10 JVC tapes from
the early days of shcoting The
Life & Times of Miss Emily
Hunter and Her Family.

I mean, this is surely insane!
Nobody in history has been as
well-documented as my daughter.

The Son: tapes are mainly good
for 20 minutes each, although
lately I have been buying hour-
long tapes. The JVC tapes, as I
recall, were around a half an
hour. i believe that adds up to
nearly 15 hours of tape.

And that’s just in the last five
years.

Bob
Hunter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

A lot of this stuff has been
dubbed onto VHS tape, and some
of it has actually found its way
into Beta so we could send it to
friends over in Britain. This way,
it’s spread out so that in the event
of a disaster in one location, bits
of tape containing The Life &
Times of Miss Emily et al will
survive elsewhere.

In a nutshell, I have become a
confirmed videophile. My family
is so used to the camera coming
out that they talk to it casually,
make jokes, act out whatever roles
are required at the moment, and
generally behave like a well-
disciplined little video production
unit.

One of the tricks I use to get
everyone to accept the camera is
to remind them that they are talk-
ing to future generations, in-
cluding eventual boyfriends,
girlfriends, husbands, wives, kids,
grandkids, maybe even great-
grandkids, to say nothing of
possibly great-great-great-
grandkids.

It depends on how durable the
tape is whether it gets dubbed on-
to something else before fading,
and how the technology of video
evolves,

But one thing is certain, assum-
ing the human race manages to

avoid totalling the planet, this re-
cord of Miss Emily's life will be
carried ferth into time, handed
down from generation to genera-
tion, so that future Hunter
clanspersons will know exactly
what Great-Great-Great-Grandma
Emily was like — from the time
she started to walk.

All I have to tell me about my
ancestors are a couple of badly-
damaged photo albums going
back to a nameless couple in oval
frames in the frontispiece of the
older album.

They must be my grandfather's
parents. | find the man’s face
fascinating because his
cheekbones, nose and forehead
are exactly like mine. Or rather,
mine are like his.

Imagine having a video of
Great-Grandpa!

My wife, Bobbi, was particular-
ly lucky to have had a grandfather
who latched onto the invention of
the Super-8 movie camera when it
first came out in the mid-1950s.
Grandpa Dick Coe started
shooting the whole family, in-
cluding Bobbi, beginning at an
age when she wasn’t much older
than Emily by the time we got our
own JVC, one generation and one
major technological step later.

After Grandpa Dick died, we
got his total of four hours of
Super-8 film transferred onto
VHS, so that copies of the com-
plete set could be handed out to
the family.

When Emily looked at Grandpa
Dick’s footage on our TV screen,
she spotted a blond, blue-eyed lit-
tle girl who walked, talked, and
danced exactly like she did.

“‘There’s me, Mom,”’ she said.

Mom laughed. ‘‘No, sweetheart,
that’s me when I was your age."*

An absolute clone. This ‘s ia-
formation that, as I say, is utterly
without value for anybady else,
except — maybe someday —
geneticists, anthropologists and
historians.

I wouldn’t dream of boring
anybody with it. Except the stars,
especially Miss Emily, who just
never seem fo get tired of seeing
previous versions cf themselves
dancing, swimming, trying to
hide.

a

NV teachers now in strike position

UNIONIZED NORTH Vancouver
served the North Vancouver District 44 School Board
(NVSB) with 72-hour strike notice last week, are now

in a legal position to strike.

But contract negotiations between the two sides are

teachers, who

continuing, and the union said it has no plans at this
point to walk out of North Vancouver classrooms.
Meanwhile, contract talks are also continuing be-

tween the West Vancouver District 45 Schoo! Board

(WVSB) and

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the 300-member West
Teachers’ Association.

Vancouver

‘Tough environmental
laws now in limbo

VICTORIA — EN-
VIRONMENT ministry
documents show that
former environment
minister John Reynolds was
prepared to get tough, and
stay tough, in his bid to
have B.C.’s 23 pulp mills
clean up their act.

By John Pifer
Contributing Writer

But the status of proposed
Stricter environmental laws is
unknown, after Reynolds resigned
his Cabinet post on Monday in

Resignation

From page 1

crucial issue in the whole matter
was that Reynolds had been about
to order 1994 levels for toxins in
effluent now, rather than wait for
the result of a joint UBC-UVic
study commissioned to determine
the level.

The regulations Reynolds had
been about to introduce called for
only 1.5 kg of chlorinated organic
compounds per tonne o7 pulp.

Vander Zalm said the results of
the UBC/UVic study ‘‘will be
listened to,’’ and that the gov-
ernment had agreed to force pulp
mills to achieve a standard 2.5 kg
of toxins per tonne.

But Reynolds said that it would
be a mistake to wait.

“What if the university study
said the discharge should be zero
— no parts per tonne of toxins?
No, we should have enacted it,
and then reviewed it when the
universities’ report came in,’” he
told the North Shore News.

But Environmental Watch
spokesman Terry Jacks said
Tuesday that Reynolds had ulter-
ior motives in resigning his en-

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the wake of Premier Bill Vander
Zalm’s veto of the regulations
which had been approved by the
Cabinet Jast week.

The North Shore News has ob-
tained the press package that had
been prepared for, but not
distributed at, the press con-
ference yesterday.

Its 29 pages include:

*a roll call of 130 industrial and
municipal polluters monitored in
June, July and August;
*a list of 262 charges laid under
the waste management, water,
pesticide control and fisheries acts
from April 1 to Sept. 30 of this
year;

See Hit-list page &

questioned.

vironment ministry post.

“He's (Reynolds) got aspira-
tions about being our premier,"
Jacks said, adding that Reynolds
was no different from the other
four environment ministers he’s
dealt with during the six years he
has been lobbying for B.C. pulp
mills to clean up their act.

**He’s done absolutely
nothing,’? Jacks said. ‘‘He’s all
talk and no action. We've still got
10 pulp mills at this moment not
complying with their permits.”’

Jacks said he believed the
tougher regulatory legislation for
pulp mills that Reynolds was
pushing for was on the right
track.

But he said, ‘‘The whole thing
was manufactured. Reynolds cares
about John Reynolds. He doesn't
care about the environment. Look
at the guy’s record.”’

Reynolds said Monday he
would remain an active member
of caucus, ‘‘and I wish to make it
clear that I am in full support of
the government’s policies in other

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