After he and his wife
straightened that out, you may be
sure the next thing he said was,
““Whar’s the news, Penelope?’’

It’s 3,000 years later now and
everybody is oversexed or tries to
be, so that part doesn’t much
matter any more. But the Cana-
dian who’s been abroad still
comes home with a hunger for
news, written in his own English
language in his own metropolitan
papers and spoken in English on
his living room TV set.

So he burrows through yellow-
ing stacks of newspapers, saved
for him by the house-sitter, and
when the nightly national news is
broadcast he hunches over the
idiot lamp the way he used to do
in the early 1950s when it was a
novelty.

Surely, he tells himself, his pro-
vince, his country and his world
can’t be the same as when he left
home. Something new must have
happened. Didn’t it? Didn't it?

If it did, the news people aren’t
ready to tell him.

The national press, as the east-
erners call themselves, continues
its steamy love affair with itself.

A fired Globe and Mail editor
won a financial settlement from
his paper. It wasn’t much money.
If the manager of the local roller
rink had won as much it mightn’t
have made !he news pages at all.

But when it comes to one of
their own, the interest of the press

Paul
St. Pierre |

knows no limits.

Maclean’s, which calls itself our
national magazine, devoted several
column inches to reporting the ed-
itor’s victory party, together with.
the names of the chichi guests.

The same issue of Maclean’s
devoted a full page to the
lucubrations of a columnist who
usually deals with the Ontario
Bolshevi& Menace.

This time she was moved to ask
herself whether she was a
ballbreaker because she had expe-
rienced more than one husband.

Her tizzy was set off by yet
another Maclean’s columnist. He

Economist addresses NDP

WENDY HOLM, a resource
economist and consultant in eco-
nomic and policy analysis, is
scheduled to be the keynote
speaker at the annual general
meeting of the North Vancouver
federal New Democrats on March

Holm has a strong background
in agriculture, public policy,
resource economics, competition
policy, marketing and trends.

She is the president of W.R.
Holm and Associates, the im-

Institute of Agrologists, the B.C.
director of the Agriculture In-
stitute of Canada, director of
Vancouver City Savings Credit
Union, the editor and contributing
author of Water and Free Trade
and a consultant to the govern-
ment and the private sector.

The meeting will be held in
room 213 of the Canadian Inter-
national College, 2420 Dollarton
Hwy. in North Vancouver, siart-
ing at 7:30 p.m. .

NDP members and the public

claimed to have dated this lady
who was now hearing bluecbirds
sing again. Eastern bluebirds.

It’s great nudge, wink and gig-
gle material for the easterners, but
do their editors ever pause to con-
sider that almost all of the rest of
us out here would prefer to be
told where to find cheaper parking
or how to make clam chowder?

We would even prefer to be told
what’s happening in Parliament,
without the Centre Block gossip.
You can’t get hungrier than that.

Is any other news vouchsafed
the returning traveller?

CTV nonvouches.

On the night of the New
Hampshire primary in the United
States, CTV devotes all the front
end of its national news broadcast
to the event.

Talking heads, all tame, were
paraded through our boob tube
and all spoke of the frightful,
limitless importance of what had
happened.

The one thing nobody told us

Friday, February 28, 1992 - North Shore News - &

What’s the news? Same old thing

WHEN ULYSSES came home from a long, hard odyssey
the first thing he said was ‘‘Penelope, who were all those
oversexed bastards hanging out on our front porch, the
ones I had to put to the sword?”

was what happened.

CTV editors have achieved what
the industry has long striven for: a
news report fre n which all facts
have been rem oved to make room
for commen‘s.

Neither will CTV, CBC nor any
major newspaper ever report one
highly significant fact about the
New Hampshire voting. How
many voted?

Almost half the Americans have
dropped out of the democratic
process. Would you like to know
how many eligible people voted
and whether they were more or
less than four years ago? Don’t
ask.

As to other news, the sky is
falling, as usual.

This time it’s an ozone hole
over North America and Europe
which may or may not develop,
which may or may not be danger-
ous, which may or may not be
something which happened a
thousand times before we started
taking measurements and stirring

up the neurotics.

Yuppies are too young to
remember, but the generation just
before them went through the
same falling sky stories. It was
called Strontium 90 then,

There were daily reports of how
many of us were condemned to
die of cancer because of French,
Russian and American bomb tests.
Hardly anybody remembers now,
but they don’t need to: there’s a
new reason for our sky to fall.

Why can’t they teli us some-
thing useful, like how to find lost
socks?

Somehow, the news when you
come home seems exactly like the
news the day you left. Israelis and
Arabs murdering each other,
ceasefires in the Balkans and tor-
rents of twaddle about productivi-
ty. .

As Penelope doubtless told
Ulysses, ‘‘Just the same old

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