The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Page 4, News,, Tuesday, October 2, 1990 pat ee Re RA AR Editorial . Tel.: 825-3747 The Terrace Bay-Schreiber News is published every Tuesday by Laurentian Publishing Limited, Box 579, 13 Simcoe Plaza, Terrace Bay, Ont., POT-2W0 Tel.: (807)-825-3747 Fax (807)-825-9233. Second class mailing permit 2264. Member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Assn. and the Canadian Community Newspaper Assn. Single copies 40 cents. Publisher............. A. 'Sandy' Harbinson east er ae ae Ad Manager................ Linda Harbinson year / seniors loca ; H we $27 per year (out of 40 mile AG Representative Fees Halyna Worth st radius); $36 in U.S. Admin. Asst.................. Gayle Fournier = FD. The tale of a misused political tool Senate and the GST The blatant misuse of power by both the Liberals and the Conservatives concerning the Senate and the GST has caused an old question to resurface. That question is 'What should be the role, if any, of the Senate in Canada?' Mulroney continues to point to his mandate from the 1988 election as justification for stacking the senate (despite his attack on John Turner for the same thing in 1984) with people who will do as he asks. He tells the Canadians that the GST is in the best interest of Canada, and that the non- elected Senate has no right to stop the legislation of a democratically elected majority. While Mulroney may have a point, his behavior is not acceptable for a prime-minister. It is his job to explain what is good about the GST (and what is bad), instead of pretending to be in an elite class, which knows better than, what he sees as, the ignorant masses. _Unfortunately the Liberals have missed a great opportunity to do something constructive. The senate report on the GST is nothing more than a pile of criticisms whose only aim is to score political points. The Senate spent a great deal of time and money to discover, to their amazement, that most people don't want the GST. With this information they went about delaying the tax, although the . Liberals will not likely remove the tax once it is put in place. The Senate could have done something constructive, instead of just saying 'no...don't do this'. This is especially distressing to the public, when all three parties agreed, that the manufacturers sales tax must be replaced by a goods and services tax. That was before the GST became a hot issue though. When will the abuse of the Senate end, or when will the Senate be abolished. It was intended to be a 'sober second thought' for legislation, but has instead become a 'sleepy second job' for politicians in decline. Greg Giddens BUT, SOIQE THINGS Just won', Go W4y / It's not that I'm afraid to ~ incinerated by the Church as a pie in the face from God Roman Empire. Uh-uh. thick and heavy. I don't know - kerchiefs untied, he'd choked die. I just don't want to be there when it happens. ~ Woody Allen. Ah, yes. Death. The final taboo. Go into a bar, slip on to a bar stool, strike up a conversation with the person next to you and chances are pretty good that before you're halfway through your first Sasparilla, you'll hear more about his or her political beliefs, religious convictions and sexual orientation than you ever wanted to know. But if you ask the stranger about death? Zipper lips. Clam city. And a sidelong We-Don't-Allow-Weirdos-In- Here glare from the suddenly chilly bartender. We're a civilization of inveterate gabbers--except when the subject is death. Which is a pity, considering it's an appointment we all have _ to keep. Of course, some exits are more spectacular than others. Joan of Arc went out, quite literally, in a blaze of glory, heretic. Zeuxis the Greek, on the other hand, underwent a more ignominious finale. Zeuxis, a painter who lived around 500 BC daubed a satirical portrait of an old woman that made him laugh so hard he blew a blood vessel in his head and died on the spot. Death can be, as someone once said, like a pie in the face from God. Take the case of Allan Pinkerton. You would think the founder of the world- famous Pinkerton's detective agency would go out in a hail of gunfire or at the very least on silken sheets attended by the best physicians money could rent. Not'so. Mister P. stumbled one morning while taking his morning constitutional, biting his tongue. The wound turned gangrenous and Mister Pinkerton died. Or consider Claudius I. One would expect such an august personage to expire with all the pomp and majesty aie 8 a Numero Uno in the Claudius choked on a chicken feather--a chicken feather that, ironically, his personal physician had thrust down the Emperors throat to induce vomiting. (Claudius' wife, i Arthur Black seems, had been Slipping her hubby poisoned mushrooms in an attempt to become sole custodian of the family jewels.) Indeed, in the game of death, irony often lays it on if curiosity killed the cat, but it certainly didn't do Sir Francis Bacon any favours. Riding through a snowstorm in his carriage one day, Sir Francis had a brainwave that stuffing dead bodies with snow might slow down decay. He stopped his carriage, got out and purchased a chicken, killed it on the spot and stuffed it with snow. Alas, Sir Francis never got to write up the experiment. He caught a chill from his chicken-buying spree which turned into a fatal bout of pneumonia. 2 The award for Most Grotesque Death goes to Thomas May, a 17th century English historian. Mister May was fat. Very fat. So fat he had double chins on his double' chins. May's pendulous jowls got to be such a logistical problem that he took to tying them up with bandannas. While shoveling down dinner one day, Mister May began to hiccup. By the time bystanders got his throat to death. Let us close the coffin lid on this grisly chapter with the story of Yousouf Ishmaelo, a world champion Turkish wrestler who toured North America in the late 19th century, defeating all comers and amassing a fortune--which he converted into gold coins and kept in a leather pouch that he wore day and night. What safer place? The man was a mountain of muscle. Who could take it from him? Well, an old Mat Mama who fights under the name of Mother Nature, actually. Yousouf and his money belt went down with his ship off Nova Scotia. He could easily have swum-to safety, you understand--but not with a belt full of gold around his waist. And Yousouf stubbornly refused to part with his leather pouch right to the end. Which is not a fate I'll ever have to worry about. My wallet's so empty I ae use it for flotation.