THERE IS nothing that strikes terror into my heart than
being alone in a room with any human below the age of
five. On the whole, I’d rather be microwaved for 20
minutes and then fed to the cat.

Pauli
Hughes

Jt’s not that I lack courage gen-
erally. Show me a burning build-
ing, and I’ll be the first to run in
there to save your canary.

But thrust a person of the tiny
persuasion in my direction and my
knees begin to wobble like a cou-
ple of really frightened wobbly
things.

I just don't understand
members of the shrunken side of
society. They are as foreign to me
as denizens of Pluto, and no mat-
ter what I do I can’t open the
lines of communication.

I don’t care what you’ve heard
about the benefits of a good, ‘‘ht-
chy kitchy koo!"’ accompanied by
achin tickle. It just doesn’t cut it
anymore.

Whenever I try the practice all I
get for my trouble is a septic in-
dex finger and a hostile glare that
would frazzle the feathers ona
bronze eagle.

Part of the reason for my dif-
ficulty is that I’ve never been

HUGHES’ VIEWS

blessed with the pitter-patter of
little feet.

My wife and I knew the recipe
all right, but somehow the whole
thing never came together to look

N. Shore needs
to act on rapid
transit dilemma

Dear Editor:

Of all the issues facing the
North Shore today, none is more
etucial than transportation.

Obviously the automobile will
not disappear. But we have over-
done it and it is about to destroy
us, We continue using the
automobile when it would make
far more sense to provide alter-
fatives and build a rapid transit
extension to the North Shore.

We are spending ever larger
sums of social resources and taxes
to pay for the roads we need to
accommodate the rising numbers
of automobiles in the District of
North Vancouver, now more than
two per househoid. These are
resources and funds we should use
to preserve the quality of our
drinking water, to build secondary
treatment facilities for our sewage
and our storm waters, not to
speak of public health, recreation,
social and cultural facilities.

Instead, we are racing to
destroy our environment.

According to 1991 GVRD cal-
culations our cars pour 650,000
tons of deadly toxins into Van-
couver’s air each year, and this
figure is rising.

Eighty per cent of air pollution
is caused by the automobile. It is
destroying our lungs, showing up
in mother’s milk and causes skin
cancer. Its poisonous emissions
accumulate on the roads and are
washed untreated into the oceans,
affecting marine life.

If you want to know what the
automobile is doing to your ner-
vous system just observe the peo-
ple behind the wheel on their way
to work.

The automobile is creating
havoc with the family budget:
more than $2,000 is spent on car
insurance in North Vancouver
District. By comparison the
average household is spending less
than $1,000 for municipal taxes.
That has to pay for policing,

roads, fire protection, parks, rec-
Teation, water, sewage, waste
removal, public health, child-care
facilities and social programs.

Too cowardly to tell the public
the truth about the true cost of
our fast deteriorating road system
needed to accommodate the
automobile, the District of North
Vancouver is even selling land to
pay for the upkeep of roads. That
is money we should use to re-
build the infrastructure badly in
need of replacement.

It is in fact illegal to use land
sale money for that purpose. But
we get around this policy by call-
ing it road ‘‘re-construction,”’
implying it is a capital expenditure
when in fact it is nothing more
than road patching and should
come out of generat revenue.

We drive cars to work, even
though traffic is getting worse.
God only knows what would hap-
pen if a bridge went out of com-
mission.

Unless we find more cost-effec-
tive, faster and healthier modes of
transportation, we will destroy the
very liveability that attracted us to
North Vancouver in the first
place.

We are now facing the moment
of truth. Either we use our
resources and our tax money more
efficiently — including transpor-
ting people as opposed to moving
cars — or we will face disastrous
consequences.

Even planning for future rapid
transit corridors now would save
the taxpayers money in the Icng
run since it can prevent costly ac-
quisition of higher-zoned land
within the needed corridors in the
future.

But unfortunately, even that
was turned down by district coun-
cil. 1 rest my case.

It is now your turn to make
your views known.

Ernie Crist, Alderman
North Vancouver District

Friday, January 17, 1992 ~ North Shore News -— 7

INSIGHTS |

Baby-sitter for hire

like the pictures in the magazines.

Finally, someone took away our
oven,which really put a fork in
the souffle. Nevertheless, we still
enjoy tossing the ingredients
around every now and then just
for old times'sake.

My friends are always foisting
their offspring on me. Once they
find out I don’t have any
children, they look at me as if 1
had a prize-winning banana grow-
ing out of my forehead.

They say things like, ‘Oh! You
don’t have a little one? How un-
fulfilled you must be! Why don’t
you take care of Sparky here
while I run down to the market?”’

They are always out the door
too fast for me to nail their
tongues to the carpet,

Four hours later they step over
my bedraggted body, collect
Sparky — whose real name is At-
tila the Midget — and then disap-
pear, leaving me to call my own
ambulance.

Just the other day I was in-
troduced to the next-door
neighbor's offshoot, an engaging
gargoyle with all the charm of a
grease sump. His father pounded

on the door:

“Look, Paul. Would you mind
taking care of my boy here? The
Pope’s in town and wants to talk
to me! Can’t take the kid. You
don’t mind, do you? Mustn’t let
His Holiness down. Bye!”’

He was gone before I could ask
him what the Pope could possibly
want with a Jewish parking lot at-
tendant.

It was probably one of the
single, most terrifying experiences
of my incredibly terror-packed
life.

Everything started out fine. Lit-
tle whatshisname sauntered into
the living room and parked his
self on the sofa.

Not once did he try to drown
the dog in the toilet bow!, feed
Drano to the fish, or any of the
other cute things kids are wont to
do.

For a minute there, I thought |
might be all wrong. Perhaps I’d
stumbied on the perfect child.

**So! What’s your name fella?”’

Nothing. No response. Zip. He
just stared at me, wearing on his
shrivelied mug this strange Mona
Lisa expression.

‘‘Want to play a game?”’

Nothing.

“I Spy With My Little Eye?”

Stull nothing.

‘*Hide and seek?”

Nope.

“‘Five card stud?”’

This went on until I had ex-
hausted every game on the planet
and was working on a few Mar-
tian amusements I’d heard about.
Still, I couldn't shake that eerie
stare. 1 swear the kid was analyz-
ing me.

It turned out he wasn’t a child
at all, but a dwarf psychiatrist.

“OK,”’ I said, giving in. ‘*Let’s
talk about me!"’

When his father found me I was
lying on the couch muttering some
gibberish about a fluffy puppy
called Tippy that I had when I
was four. There were tears in my
eyes.

“T bought him with five (snif-
fle) silver (snuffle) dollars I saved
of my very own. And he ran
away! (Much blubbering here.) ”’

I was never quite the same after
that episode. [ can’t so much as
look a child ia the eye any more
without getting heart flutters.

Flectric car one answer to pollution
problems affecting the environment

Dear Editor:

At the turn of the century
the automobile was in its in-
fancy and to possess a car was
for most people a pipe-dream.

Transport was in the main
by rail, horse or your own two
feet, the atmosphere was vir-
tually unpolluted by today’s
standards and | would imagine
most people exercised more
than they do today — they
walked.

In other words, the car was a
blessing, but at the same time a
disaster in disguise waiting to
happen.

The disaster is now upon us
and we and the atmosphere are
now suffering from the after
effects of almost 100 years of
gasoline pollution.

The answer is — the electric
car.

We knew about its
possibilities years ago but it
was too much trouble, there
was nothing good about it —
except that it would not
pollute. It was sluggish, would
not go far or fast and would
cost too much to promote. In
any case, we had lots of gaso-
line and cars ran much faster
and further on gasoline, so

why bother?

Why bother, indeed. The
automobile lobby and the oil
lobby would soon tell you to
forget it. The big three and the
oil companies have been in bed
together for years and there is
no divorce in sight.

Oil barons or no oil barons,
the electric car is already on its
way, in limited quantities. We
can say goodbye to the internal
combustion engine in 10 years.
We will have to or we will all
choke or ‘‘croak.”

C.D. Cooper
North Vancouver