Tuesday, December 2, 1997

Winter 1997

Dec 2 - Woooaaahhh!!!!! Big gap here - former prime minister's wife's p.o.ed at me and have started dating nice lady who probably will read down to the end of this. Hola! :)
Dec 3 - Flamenco. Whirling dresses. Sangria.....

Portrait - Spanish flamenco dancer

MontrealDigital, via DeviantArt , Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0

Friday, November 14, 1997

James Brown, Lulu's, Kitchener, 14 November,1997

Lulu's Roadhouse was a converted K-Mart in Kitchener that had a bar that ran the length of one wall, and they claimed it was the largest bar in the world. I saw James Brown with a huge band there, the Ramones and The Proclaimers (my pager went off and I went to Lulu's before it opened to use the payphones in the lobby, I heard "500 Miles" and thought it was a recording being played for the cleaning crew. Then the door rolled up and it was Craig and Charlie Reid live onstage doing a sound check for their show later that evening!! I'd seen them a few times so I just went to Toronto and dropped off film) . Brown was really disciplined and precise. Everyone was moving like clockwork.

CKCO reporter

Friday, September 26, 1997

WHAT THE DICKENS? Town Proposes dressing up welfare recipients as Dickens Characters

WHAT THE DICKENS?

copyright 1999, 2009 Mark Bellis

SIMCOE, ONTARIO, SEPT 26, 1997 - Welfare recipients could be saying "God bless us every one!" for their Christmas dinner if an idea presented to Simcoe town council goes ahead.
"It was just an idea" to have people on social assistance play Dickens characters like Tiny Tim, Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past said Mary Alice Reid, co-ordinator of Ontario Works for the Haldimand-Norfolk region, which includes Simcoe, a town of 14,000 south of Brantford. Ontario Works, better known as "workfare" is a provincial project to provide employment for people on social assistance.
Reid is at pain to say that the idea, which she presented to town council earlier this month after a brainstorming session with Yvonne DiPietro, manager of the local chamber of commerce, was not to single out welfare recipients, but to have them participate along with other volunteers as characters in period costume from the Victorian novels, which ironically dealt with themes of social inequality and the wretched lives of the poor in 19th century England.
"Hey, why not?" said Randy Pond, co-ordinator of the committee that puts on Simcoe's annual Panorama Christmas festival. "We would kind of like to liven up the town."
Pond said the town puts up 60 displays and 100,000 lights in Wellington Park near downtown, but thinks the Dickens characters could help direct the 60 to 100,000 tourists Panorama attracts to the town, into the park, with features larger than life nursery story characters, like Humpty Dumpty, some of which are animated, as they strolled around downtown. Pond says that his understanding is that the workfare recipients could not fill existing positions with the festival, such as Santa Claus, who Pond says will throw the switch which turns on the displays in the park at the start of Panorama, after fireworks and a children's party, or the position of Pandy Rama, the festival's mascot, which Pond describes as an "overgrown, loveable, squishy - maybe that should be 'huggy' - Panda" since it was Pond's understanding that the workfare project could only create new jobs and not fill those that are already in place. Another drawback Pond noted was that "somebody has to pay 2,000 dollars" for costumes for the characters.
Charles Dickens' best-known story is "A Christmas Carol", which features Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser who despises charity, and Tiny Tim, a handicapped boy, whose father works for Scrooge. Scooge pays Tim's father too little to take the boy to a doctor, but nevertheless, Tim's catchphrase is "God bless us, every one!".
The festival runs from November 29 to January 1.

Charles Dickens, via Wikimedia Commons

Saturday, August 30, 1997

Hemp Growing in Ontario

PAIN COURT, AUG 30, 1997 - Jean-Marie Laprise is standing in front of 45 acres of 8 foot tall cannibis plants that he wants to turn into the rebirth of an industry.
"I'm convinced we can grow hemp and make a profit at it." says Laprise, who is in the process of harvesting 100 acres of hemp he has planted this year in Pain Court, literally "short loaf" in French because of the poverty of the original settlers forced them to bake shorter bread loaves, a small francophone community northwest of Chatham.
Laprise, who says his family has been farmers since the first colonists came to Canada from France, says that hemp cultivation was widespread in Ontario before 1938, when it was made illegal along with marijuana. Both hemp and marijuana are varieties of the Cannibis sativa plant, but hemp has a THC content hundreds of times lower than that of marijuana. THC is the active ingredient in cannibis that gives a feeling of well-being.
Laprise is building a primary processing facility to separate the fibres from the hemp stems. The fibres are used to make rope, cloth, mats and can even be made into a sort of Fibreglas-like plastic. Seeds from the plant can be eaten by animals and man, and oil can be extracted for cooking, medicine or food.
Laprise, who farms 1500 acres of vegetables and soybeans, says his neighbour Claude Pinsonneault suggested he start growing hemp experimentally because it provided a substitute for less renewable resources like trees, improved soil quality, and unlike cotton, the main source for fibre in North America, it can be grown without pesticides. In fact, Laprise and his researcher, Peter Dragla of Ridgetown College near Chatham, part of the University of Guelph, say that hemp appear to reduce the number of nematodes, small worms in the soil that attack soy bean plants. Laprise says that nematode infestation is so bad in his region that "lots of fields aroud here can't grow soy beans anymore."
Laprise has been growing hemp for two years under permission from Health Canada, which allows experimental growing of hemp. Under the The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act adopted this year, regulations allowing for the commercial production of hemp could be developed. Currently, Health Canada requires that the hemps seeds be heat sterilized so they cannot grow before they are sold, something which Laprise says reduces the quality of the oil, but he hopes the new regulation will change that.
Laprise has given the coordinates of his fields to the police, who search for marijuana growers from the air. Even up close the plants look the same as marijuana, but Laprise says no one would want to try growing marijuana next to his hemp to disguise it from police, since he grows male plants that produce lots of pollen, and marijuana growers separate male plants out to stop the female flowers from being fertilized, which maximizes the THC contents. "No one would even want to grow marijuana near here" Laprise says, since the pollen carries a great distance.
Peter Dragla, originally from Romania, where he said his grandparents always wore hemp clothing they grew themselves, got the seeds used in the experiments from eastern Europe and France, which he says grows hemp extensively. Dragla left this week for a ten day visit to Europe to observe hemp production there. Dragla says he wants to develop strains from the European plants that would be best for the Ontario climate.
Laprise says he has the largest hemp growing operation in Canada. Health Canada says 107 hectares of hemp are under cultivation in Canada, 90 of them in Ontario.