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This Victoria Day weekend, while you restock the cottage shelves and open the windows to the comâ€" ing summer, firefighters across cotâ€" tage country urge you to do a fireâ€" safety checkup as well. * Change all smokeâ€"alarm batterâ€" ies and install one alarm on each level and outside sleeping areas. * If your alarms are more than 10 years old, replace them. ___ * If your cottage has a fireplace, or gas or propane appliances, install at least one carbon monoxide alarm. * Choose fire extinguishers for kitchen areas and garages, and conâ€" form to watercraft regulations. Enjoy a fireâ€"safe summer. Waterloo Region‘s Emergency Medical Services organization and its director, John Prno, deserve CPR training a must Maybe I‘m just starting to get impatient in my old age, but there are a couple of things that are really beginning to annoy me. _ _ â€" Particularly since I take a great deal of interest in new technology and new ways of doing things. (Part of this is based on selfâ€"preservation â€"I will be very easy to replace if I decide to be an old stickâ€"inâ€"theâ€" mud). Why is it then that despite all these ways of sharing information and making things happen much more quickly, it still takes forever for various levels of governâ€" ment to achieve anything. That is, unless it‘s in their best interâ€" ests, in which case things can move at lightning speed. â€" A few cases in point here come from the powers that be in the provincial legâ€" islature. A couple of weeks ago, the MPPs were able to gather their forces quickly enough to pass legislation ordering Toronto transit workers back on the job after a strike. Beyond the interesting question of why bother to give people the right to strike if you‘re going to legislate them back, it was rather fascinating to watch the speed at which government can move if it wants to. Of course, they will tell us it‘s because transit is an essential service in Toronto. That is certainly true. The flip side of that, I suppose, is that everyâ€" thing else isn‘t essential. There are some people who might disagree. I would think the residents of Caledonia might find that a bit unsettling. On the other hand, the provincial government was able to move fast to approve a new holiday promised during the election campaign. That onty took a couple of months. Perhaps, in the mind of the government, it‘s more important to give people the day off than it is to ensure they feel secure in their own home. Is it any wonder we have become so cynical? The province moves quickly to force convenience stores to build walls to hide packages of cigarettes from view, but it apparently can‘t do anything to stem the explosion of illegal cigarette sales. Enjoy a fireâ€"safe summer Government lacks honesty In the real world, we‘ve become faster, more effiâ€" Don Warden Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs congratulations for supporting a regionâ€"wide program that would provide free CPR training to citizens The program, called Community Awareness and Response to Emerâ€" gencies (CARE), is being organized locally by EMS, St. John Ambulance, the Canadian Red Cross and the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Their goal to eventually train at least one person in every household is timely given the recent experience of Paul Schnarr, who suffered cardiac arrest during a hockey game at RIM Park. Schnart‘s teammates perâ€" formed CPR on him until an arena worker grabbed a nearby defibrillaâ€" tor to jolt Schnart‘s heart back to life. CARE is developing a twoâ€"hour training program to teach citizens how to use a defibrillator together with basic CPR techniques. Heartâ€" attack victims have just six minutes to get help, according to medical experts. Victims who receive CPR or defibrillator before paramedics arrive are three to four times more likely to survive than those who don‘t. This information is vital to someâ€" BRIAN BOURKE COMMENT cient and more capable of handling issues. In the government sector, it seems things have slowed down. I‘m all for respecting tradition, but ways of doing things dating back more than 100 years may not be all that useful in today‘s world. Things change so quickly now it only makes sense that government comes along with it. The rest of us have had to adapt, haven‘t we? That doesn‘t make me an advocate AN for the old "majority rule" idea. There RKE are plenty of cases where, sadly, the majority doesn‘t have the slightest hint of what it‘s talking about. In fact, that‘s what strikes me as odd. We have information at our fingertips and research is readily available. There is no lack of expertise on any topic. Yet governments take months to collect informaâ€" tion, and often put off decisions for years if they bother to do anything at all. s Why do we put up with it? And why do all levels of government continue to operate in their outdatâ€" ed fashion? Please, just givt me someone who is going to speak their mind without a great deal of concern for partisanship. Someone who will tell me the truth, act quickly and admit it when nothing can be done. It‘s called honesty. And it‘s a quality that is sorely lacking. Brian Bourke, a member of the 105.3 KOOL FM morning crew, can be reached by email at bbourke@koolfm.com. I wonder, sometimes, in moments of reflection, if it might have someâ€" thing to do with selfâ€"importance. I cerâ€" tainly know people who seem to believe the longer it takes to get someâ€" thing done, the more important it must be. Or is it the growing desire among people in official capacities to try to find a consensus? That‘s OK, we should search for agreement on some issues, although, in reality, no matter what decision is made on any issue, a sizeable portion of the population will always disagree. In Waterloo Region ambulance response time is somewhere less than 16 minutes from the time you pick up the phone and call for help. Generally, this means it is game over for someone who suffers cardiac arrest unless he/she receives prompt CPR from someone trained in the technique. one like myself who has a cardiac medical history that includes an angioplasty procedure. _ Odds of survival for outâ€"ofâ€"haspiâ€" tal cardiac arrest are about five per cent, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Immediate CPR ups the odds to 20 per cent or more. Add in the use of a defibrillator and the survival rate shoots up to 50 per cent or better. Next we need to speed up the time it takes for emergency units to respond. This could be assisted with a single, modern dispatch centre. And while we are at it, let‘s look at the logicin the need for seven sepaâ€" rate fire departments to serve a comâ€" munity of 500,000 people. CHRON Don Willcox ‘m writing these words on Mother‘s Day, and I‘ve got a song Istuck in my head. Fittingly, it‘s called Mother, and it‘s the melancholic lullaby from Pink Floyd‘s landmark album/movie, The Wall (which happens to be playing at the Princess Cinema for one night only next week}. In the song, David Gilmour sings, "Hush now baby, baby, don‘t you cry. Mama‘s gonna check out all your girlfriends for you. Mama won‘t let anyone dirty get through. Mama‘s gonna wait up until you get in. Mama will always find out where you‘ve been." Mother, should I build the wall? It was one of the first shows on his In the Flesh world tour, and we were thrilled to hear several songs from The Wall, opening with In the Flesh, followed by The Thin Ice, | MARSHALI and the historic rock anthem, Another â€" MAAA RAIS Brick in the Wall T When I noticed the screening of The Wall listed on the Princess Cinema calendar â€" and when I got the tune stuck in my head on Mother‘s Day â€" it got me thinking about all the ways the song has worked its way into my life over the years. In 1999, after many years of loving The Wall album, I finally had the opportunity to hear Mother performed live, when my wife Sylvia and I saw Pink Floyd‘s creative genius and frontâ€" man Roger Waters in concert at the Molson Amphitheatre. Looking back on the music of Pink Floyd, I‘m also reminded it was 20 years ago this week Sylvia and I travâ€" elled by train to Toronto to see Pink Floyd (the band‘s first tour without Roger Waters) play to a soldâ€"out audiâ€" ence of 70,000 at Exhibition Stadium. Sylvia and I were not yet "officially" dating, and J can vividly remember calling her on a pay phone from Waterloo Town Square months earlier, wanting to know if she‘d like to go see the concert. To get good seats on the floor, I smonyinnasi dn i on spent the night huddled in a sleeping bag, in the alley, beside Sam the Record Man in Kitchener, waiting for tickets to go on sale the next morning. It was Sylvia‘s first rock concert, and I was thrilled to share with her the Pink Floyd experience â€" the lavish stage shows, overâ€"theâ€"tap laser lights and a giant inflatâ€" able pig floating above the outdoor stadium. The concert ended with us standing on chairs for the final encore, Run Like Hell, as a remarkable display of fireworks lit up the night sky. For me, it was my second time seeing Pink Floyd, as I had seen them previously at Exhibition Stadium, on that same tour back in September 1987. Tickets for the fall concert went on sale seven months prior. But because it was a school day, my mother insisted 1 not miss class to stand in line for tickets. Instead, at the age of 56, she herself stood for hours among hundreds of Pink Floyd fans, concertâ€"goers and scalpers on King Street on a frigid cold February morning to ensure I had seats. The concert had been hyped for months on the radio staâ€" tion Q107, and, at the age of 16, I truly didn‘t know what to expect. I soon learned that seeing Pink Floyd live for the first time is an amazing and unforgettable experience. Some fans, I‘ve heard, have described it as a "sonic orgasm." As a teenager, I didn‘t fully appreciate my mother‘s efforts and her selflessness in waiting in line for tickets, but in reflecâ€" tion on Mother‘s Day, it‘s a fond memory of her doing someâ€" thing great for me. Now Sylvia is the mother of two young daughters, and the song Mother has added meaning for me as a parent. Though the lyrics have some dark Freudian undertones and allusions to the Oedipus story, they have always embodied a more posiâ€" tive meaning to me. So in the spirit of Mother‘s Day, I‘ll quote a lyric from the song Mother: "Ooooch babe, you‘ll always be baby to me." Pink Floyd‘s The Wall plays at the Princess Cinema on May 21 at 9:20 p.m. For more information, go to www.princesscinemas.com. Marshall Ward is a visual artist and independent filmmaker, currently teaching life drawing at the Waterloo Community Arts Centre. Email is welcome at marshall_ward@hotmail.com. WATERLOO CHRONICLE + Wednesday, May 14, 2008 * 9 MARSHALL