The tongue: a slippery slope

Dear Editor,

If the human tongue is the world's greatest weapon of mass destruction, its flippant use has destroyed many, and, if money is the devil's invention, we often pursue it with insane obsession, there's a good chance we're walking a slippery slope.

I'm lumping money and talk together because 90 per cent of my phone calls are not from old friends or lovers; they're from people trying to get their hands on my money. The little they know!

I'm trying real hard to act wise and philosophical here. We've been talked into believing that global warming will drown us all. Even Prince Charles, no less, is talking like that. They've got him brainwashed too.

I know better because I go to Lock's Cove every summer and row my boat through Lock's Tickle. It separates the mainland from Lock's Island. I don't know the Lock that the cove is named for; he probably came from Notre Dame Bay. I like the people who came from Notre Dame Bay.

At any rate Lock's Cove is my scientific testing ground for rising sea levels that is attributed to global warming. The water in the tickle is "shoaler" now than at any time in my memory, and me and Lock's Tickle goes back over 60 years of memory.

I got on father's nerves, knocking holes in the punt when I was 10. I'm knocking more holes in the punt now that I'm 73. The tickle has not gotten deeper, it's gotten "shoaler." And don't try to tell me that the tickle is silted up, thus making the water "shoaler," because every time an easterly sea makes, it bores through the place in foaming breakers.

I almost got washed up on the point last summer when a breaker caught my 14-foot punt. You can tell the people in Samoa they've got nothing to worry about according to my scientific observations in Lock's Tickle. It's all a matter of people using their tongues before they put their brains in gear.

This swine flu thing. It may kill me, I don't know. Something has to and at 73 I won't have long to wait.

Before I get too morbid, let's say that I thank God and whatever or whoever for my continued good health. Where are the figures to back up the lethal consequences of the H1N1 flu? They are not being reported. It's all talk with insinuations of calamity, either in the tone of voice or linking it to a former more serious flu.

The 1918 flu was bad; this don't seem to be such an epidemic. You can ask the doctor on this one, but if we artificially treat our bodies for everything, will our natural immune systems get lazy? I'm pretty sure that if I had someone to cut wood for me I'd get too lazy to cut it myself, in spite of my good health. But that may be a different thing altogether.

I mentioned money in the beginning; that subject will have to wait for another day. My cousin recounted how he bought a 200-litre drum of stove oil for $9 in 1967.

What would it cost today? It's still a drum of oil.

Respectfully,

Ray Elliott, St. Anthony