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'Page 5, News,-Tuesday, July 3, 1990 The neighbourhood sales kid Kelly Beck is seven years old. She has long, blond hair and shy, hazel eyes and this kid could sell exercise bikes to dead people. Kelly is the neighbourhood sales person. While other children all duded up with 10-gallon hats and cap guns play cowboy and native per- sons, Kelly is going door-to-door along Sunset Bay sending her prospective customers scurrying for crawl spaces with handfuls of Extra-Strength Tylenol. It's not so much what she's selling because quite often Kelly's not really sure. In fact for a while Kelly had arf older girl working with her door-to-door. This was before Kelly could talk. When 'William J. Thomas Kelly was old enough to talk she told me the older girl's name was Disrict Sales Manager and she had her fired. Kelly, now affectionately refers to her house as The Home Office, her brothers and sisters as Account Executives and the yel- low school bus as The Company Car. Kelly's so smooth she doesn't even bring the product around with her anymore. She carries an order form and a pen. That's it. A great sales person, as Kelly says, doesn't need product - "Thell the Thizzle, not the stheak!" I know I'm her best customer. Even if I were her only customer Kelly Beck would have made more in commissions last year than the guy with exclusive sales right to car phones in Mississauga (I know as soon as her mother reads this to her I'll be sorry for mentioning "car phones.") Kelly's key to success is not the product, it's the pitch. Her weak, almost inaudible knock at the door says: "I'm embarrassed to be here and I'm sorry to bother you but two slathering rottweilers and a hail storm aren't going to move me away from this door so get out here I don't have all day!" Once the door is opened, you're done. Kelly shifts from one foot to the other, locks those pretty-please eyes on you, thrusts the pen and paper toward you and without mentioning what she's selling she says: "Ja want sum?" The cloth, for all intent and pur- poses, has been cut. The choice is clear: sign or be guilty of cru- elty to second graders working their way through Wainfleet South Elementary School. It's. easier to say no: to Revenue Canada than Kelly Beck, the Mary Kay of kids. You sign. I've got jars full of, Girl Guide continued on page 6 Royals are welfare recipients Whenever a magazine or tabloid newspaper, be it British, Canadian or American, wants to sell a few more copies of its slush, all it has to do is slap a pic- ture of one of the Royals on its cover and add a tantalizing head- line. You know, such as "Di and Chas. go separate ways; Divorce imminent?", "Fergie is Bad Mum: Leaves Baby at Home to go World Gallivanting", "Prince Edward. Gay or Not Gay? Only he knows for sure", "Prince Phillip had Secret Affair; Queen much Displeased." See pages two and three for sensational rev- elations. It doesn't matter that most of the stories vomited out on pages two and three are as close to libel as possible without actually stray- ing over the legal line, or are too funny for words for their sheer nonsense. The only thing that matters is that it sells. Why? Why this eternal fasci- nation with The Royals? Meaning, of course, chiefly the British since most of the European ones don't seem to be in the newsworthy category. Apart from falling down on their royal behinds in public or uttering some fatuous remarks about how they are willing and eager to once Olga Landiak more take up their royal duties in those countries from which they either fled or were kicked out B.C. (Before Communism), they are too dull for words. This, according to the media who, nev- ertheless, hound them for tasty little tid-bits to be splashed next door to the latest vulgar display of flesh by some eternally grin- ning model, starlet, or amateur prostitute caught in the bed of some well-known politician or evangelist. But back to The Royals, the biggest group of "welfare recipi- ents in the world," as one of our dear aboriginals put it so suc- cinctly some years ago at the time of yet another of those costly and boring Royal tours. he, and the rest of his particular tribe, were agitating for more welfare of their own, and were more than a little annoyed that much of our govern- mental bucks were being spent on such dumb things as rich Royalty, when he and his people were hav- ing a hard time keeping up the payments on their second colour television, the V.C.R., the latest pick-up and new snowmobile. Maybe a little jealousy there, hmmmmm? On the other hand, maybe he had a point. He should have thanked the Great Thunderbird or whatever, that we were only being soaked for a tour and not for the up-keep of these Royal Drones. What mighty words he might have spoken if he, along with the rest of us non-aborigi- nals, were tax-responsible for Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and all other such Royal ' Residences, together with the enormous salaries to keep these Royal "Welfare Bums" in the Style to which they have become accustomed because of their Blood-and-Lineage Due. What is all this fascination with people who eat, sleep and do you-know-what like the rest of us? Are we so child-enraptured by the mere titles of "King, Queen, Prince, Princess, etc." that we can't get enough of reading about the fairy-tale existence of such a privileged crowd cocooned and coddled in their tax-privi- leged lives? Together with the fairy-tale panorama of their wed- dings and coronations so skillful- ly put on after eons of practice, you'd swear the whole thing had been set up by a movie studio. Are we so bedazzled by a life- style so far out of the reach of most of us, that we eagerly scramble for salacious crumbs of information about their private lives to brighten up some corner of our own? But surely in this day and age of an affluence unknown to most of us Goldie- Oldies, there is no need to envy and sigh over this over-extrava- gant, over-indulged, over-expen- sive daily round of The Royals? Both are almost an obscenity in light of those portions of the world where starvation, decrepit housing and no amenities are a stark fact of life and not some fairy tale. Do we here in Canada need this Royal-Tie-That-Binds? Haven't we grown out of our "colonialism" yet? Do we still have to acknowledge H.R.H. as "Queen of Canada" and so have to put up with these tax-eating visits which are a Royal Pain in the Neck? Maybe we could make a Royal Exchange with the Yanks who so long for a Royal Family 'of their own and have to make do with the likes of the Kennedys instead; but maybe the remem- brance of the Boston Tea Party and why it was staged still ran- kles enough that they're just as happy to get a peripheral thrill out of our Royal Locusts who do their bit by opening American Car Washes and flogging British- made goods. As for us, I guess we're stuck with footing the bill for an end- less round of these Royal Visits and Tours for a long time to come seeing as how there's been an awful lot of additions to the Much-Too-Fecund Royal Family. Oh well, what else can you expect from Vicki's great-greats?? =] Saas On December 27, 1841, the naval vessel H.M.S. Beagle sailed from England for a six-year voy- age of exploration. History would probably have ignored that event - except for one special pas- senger on The Beagle. His name was Charles Robert Darwin. The father of the theory of evolution was only 22 when he left England that day. Until he sailed on The Beagle, Darwin wasn't sure what he wanted to be. He'd spent two years at the medical school in Edinburgh, only to figure out that he didn't want to be a doctor like his grandfather. Then he'd spent three years at Cambridge study- ing for the ministry, only to decide he didn't want to b ordained. : During that six year voyage, Darwin visited the east coast and southern tip of South America, then up the west coast to Ecuador - right on the equator. On the voyage west across the Pacific, the Beagle stopped at the Ecuador island chain called The Galapagos. On those Islands, NORTHERN INSIGHTS Darwin encountered the weird and wonderful species that he eventually wrote up in his classic work, The Evolution of the Species. There had been specula- tive theories about evolution pub- lished before Charles Darwin - including one written up by Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, in 1794. But Charles Darwin pre- sented scientific proof of evolu- tion, not speculation. The Evolution of the Species proved, once and for all, that species adapt, generation to generation, with each.surviving offspring selecting genetic traits that better help it adapt to its environment. Darwin's ideas were not by Larry Sanders accepted by the conventional thinkers at the time. Even today, there are debates offered by bibli- cal fundamentalists that Darwin can't be right - since God created "everything that is" in six days, before resting on the seventh. Those who reject the theory of evolution are called "Creationists" - and occasionally lobby for equal time in the sci- ence classrooms of North America. There's a similar debate about to rage, 150 years after Darwin sailed on The Beagle, sparked by the scientific discoveries being made on another set of Islands. But these islands are anything but tropical. The Slate Islands are on the east side of Lake Superior, just eight kilometers offshore from Terrace Bay. The seven Slate Islands cover only 35 square kilometers. They're incredibly rugged - with rock faces thrusting up over a hundred feet on some shores. The Islands are covered with dense boreal forest - untouched by logging or forest fires for more than 60 years. On the Slates, herbivores - ani- mals that eat plants, not flesh - are flourishing. There are no wolves, bears or lynx. No preda- tors killing the caribou, beaver or rabbits. Just like the Galapagos, the animals on the Slates are _ alapagos of Superior evolving unique characteristics. With no predators, the bunnies have evolved different breeding habits. On the mainland, rabbit populations peak every ten years. On the Islands, the rabbits have no population cycle - just a steady number, with a longer life span than rabbits on the mainland. The beaver population is denser than on the mainland. The beavers can be found hundred of yards from water, happily wandering well inland to find a juicy tree to munch, with no fear of predators. Normally, beavers are condi- tioned to stay within yards of the safety of their homes. The man who introduced me to all this is an unconventional wanderer, just like Charles Darwin. His name is Dr. Tom Bergerud, and he's regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on caribou. I went out to the Slates recently to talk to him. I found him napping in the after- noon~ sun in front of his