---

IN THIS ISSUE

• Carol Dilworth is involved in watching chimney swifts
• Geoff Goodship writes about the latest teenage happenings
• Doris Dignard and Jim Olson send letters
• Rob King describes the great Winnipeg flood of 1997
• The editor discusses a number of subjects
• Sites are recommended by Carol and Pat Moore

Responding to a request from Bird Studies Canada for chimney swift monitors in Guelph, Carol Dilworth volunteered:

CHIMNEY SWIFT MONITORING

Volunteers are asked, at a minimum, to count on Wednesday, June 16. They are assigned a chimney and watch it for one hour, beginning about twenty minutes before sunset. They record the number of birds entering and leaving the chimney, plus the number of birds within a 100-meter range. They also record the temperature, the cloud cover and the wind; guidelines are included on the recording sheet to help gauge the wind.

If you are willing to do more, you are asked to watch the same chimney once a week for most of the summer. That´s what I´m doing. It´s a chimney at a downtown business that moved last year. The building and several of its neighbours are going to be torn down; the hope is that we will have a new central library on the site.

Chimney swifts now nest in chimneys because so many trees have been cut down. Now the chimneys are disappearing or being covered over. Someone in the U.S. has designed a structure that looks to the birds like a good place for nesting and it is very successful, but the Canadian chimney swifts are not taking to it.

Tonight was my third time watching "my" chimney. It has rained each time. They seem to be very smart birds - they stay in when it rains. At least, they´re not making much of an appearance for me! The organizers tell me that there is a pair nesting there so I am very hopeful.

http://www.bsc-eoc.org/birdmon/chsw/about.jsp

ED. NOTE: On looking through the above site, I found that we do not have swifts in Alberta nor BC, but they are found from southern Canada (Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan) down through the Great Plains states to Texas, and east through to the Atlantic coast. Some newly- established populations have also been found in southern California.

Geoff Goodship writes about a youthful phenomenon:

FLASH PARTIES

How often have you heard "the younger generation are going to the dogs"? An archaeologist has claimed that the world´s oldest writings on cave walls in Europe make this same claim. Drugs and dropouts, deadbeats and do-nothings. What´s next from our young people? Has the online generation disappeared from all social conscience? Apparently not.

My grandson sent me a YouTube link to a flash party he organized recently. Rather than ask, "What´s a flash party?", I googled it.

1. Flash Party: A strange phenomenon wherein a group of people plans a secret event to take place at a public location. The planning usually occurs online. Flash parties are usually silly, fun affairs. A bunch of anime fans suddenly showed up at McDonald´s wearing blue afro wigs and singing strange Japanese songs ... flash party in action!

2. Flash Party: All of a sudden a small group of people become intoxicated, dance, then sober up and leave within a few hours. "WOOOOOOOO! FLASH PARTY! Okay, bye; see you later.

Before I give you the link to this flash party a little background might be helpful.

This flash party occurred at the Danish Embassy at the World Fair in Shanghai. Students from many countries attending a school in Denmark are attempting to write a manual of ways to improve life in our cities. If you look carefully near the end, you will see evidence of their work.

Here´s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCvmPxXXWOw

Young people having this much fun can´t be all bad.

CORRESPONDENCE

Doris Dignard writes: Carole Shoemaker´s volunteer story is a wonderful tribute to a person willing to give of herself for whatever reason. I wish her a long and successful trip among the whales. It reminded me of my trip to the mouth of the Saguenay. There is a lot of similarity between there and here.

Jim Olson writes: You mentioned having a chest x-ray following a suspected, probably non-existent, small stroke.

They may have been looking for signs of temporary dysphagia, problems with swallowing, which is common following a stroke and would be indicated by some fluid in the lungs. This would be true even if the fluid is only normal saliva going down the wrong way.

Swallowing is a complex process involving four stages and a number of different muscles and nerves.

The reason I know all this is that a friend of mine recently passed away following a stroke that was not treated early on (she lived alone and didn´t get medical help for some 30 hours) and dsyphagia played a critical role in her medical problems following the stroke.

If you really did have a stroke, however small, treat it as a warning shot because it indicates the possible need for something like one of the emergency calling devices that lets someone know you are in medical trouble. Some wrist models are quite sophisticated and are electronically programmed to detect a fall and automatically call for help (unless you intercede.)

ED. NOTE: So that is the reason for the unexplained x-ray! It would be a good idea, from the patients´ perspective, if they were told the reason for all the tests they undergo. An informed patient is a cooperative patient, I would think.

In these days of increasingly violent storms all over the world, it is illuminating to look back at the Winnipeg flood of 13 years ago. From the June 21st, 1997, Tale Spinner, here is a first-hand account written by Charles King´s nephew, Rob King:

THE FLOOD OF ´97

The last two weeks of April, 1997 in the Red River Valley was truly a remarkable time. I am glad I was here. I wouldn´t have missed it for the world. It was the Flood of ´97. An event. But to be in it! You saw it on TV, and you were moved. A great, slowly unfolding drama, and who knew how it would end.

Right from the New Year, concerns were raised by those whose business it is to pay attention to such things, that the potential for serious spring flooding was great. The whole Red River Valley was full of snow, far more than normal. And it was going to melt. But before that happened we got The Blizzard. The WORST STORM in over 30 years. Winter storms don´t normally slow things down much here. They come with the territory, you might say. This one stopped us. And then we got really worried. It was going to be bad.

And then the stuff melted. And we watched Grand Forks on our TVs. Many of you would not have heard of Grand Forks before April, 1997. A sleepy little border town of 50,000. But Winnipeggers know Grand Forks. It is the place where we (used to) go when we wanted to hop across the border to buy shoes or whatever. We know the place. And when it flooded, then burned, we paid attention. Serious attention. We felt for them, of course, like all who watched the terrible images. But it was different here. We became afraid. Afraid of that mass of water, because it was coming here. All of it. Soon.

Then a remarkable thing happened. We came together. For two weeks, as the water got nearer and nearer, the air became charged. All else was forgotten. There was only The Flood. And dikes. And forecasts. And sand bags - lots of sand bags. Six million of them. Sand bags became the stuff of daily life. Those who filled them, those who carried them to the danger zones, those who built the dikes, those who made sandwiches for those who were doing the filling, the hauling, the building. It was - a community. It was always hard work, often muddy, wet, cold. The school kids came out by the thousands, and worked hard and boisterously. Hippies and grandmothers, convicts and priests - even neon sign estimators - turned out to help. And we all worked hard, then went home and watched it on TV.

And the water, the Red Sea as it soon came to be known, came closer. And everything, except the river, and the fight against it, came to a halt. Imagine this, if you can - we stopped complaining. We stopped complaining about the politicians. And they stopped complaining about each other. We were all too busy, of course. The air was filled with helicopters. Army vehicles were all over the place, rumbling and rumbling. Every large truck in the city was either hauling mud, hauling sand bags, or hauling someone´s furniture to higher ground.

And the water came. And we held our breath as we watched it rise. We had the floodway, of course, the now-blessed floodway. Would it hold? The experts thought so. But they had never expected a flood of this magnitude. The Z dike - 40 kilometers long, built of huge sand bags and vast amounts of Manitoba farmland, built to keep the water from coming in the back door. Would it hold? Nobody could pretend to be optimistic about that one. Built in less than a week, 24 hours a day with the air force dropping thousands of flares so the work could continue at night! The kilometers of sandbag dikes, the last line of defence. Would they hold? We held our breath.

Thousands were evacuated, rich and poor alike, told to pack up and get out, with uniforms there to assist you if you demurred. Large sections of the city resembled - well, some said a war zone. I don´t know, I´ve never experienced a war zone. We held our breath.

On May 2, the Crest. And the tension broke. We took a breath. We were still in great danger, of course. But no longer was it coming. It was here. Now what? We watched the dikes, we prayed for the weather to hold. We waited.

And we went to the river. My wife and daughter and I walked down to the river on May 2. We weren´t alone. Thousands and thousands of Winnipeggers went to the river that night, and the next few nights. And we all stood and silently gazed at it, just ourselves, and It. The enemy among us.

The Red is only a five-minute walk from our back door. Churchill Park is the name of the long strip of land between our part of the city and the Red. There wasn´t very much Churchill Park on May 2, just a thin sliver of grass. A couple more feet and our house would be in the river too. Interesting.

And across the river was Kingston Row, a pleasant tree-lined middle- class area, but the lowest point in Winnipeg. Hundreds of homes huddled behind their pitiful sand bag dikes. Evacuated. In trouble. Just over - there.

Well, the floodway held. The Brunkild Z dike held. The sand bag dikes, for the most part, held. Now the river is going down. People are going home. And our community is, well, going back to normal too. Now we start bickering about who will pay for what. Now we have to clean up.

And now we are starting to see the destruction. How many hundreds of homes destroyed. How many farms destroyed, livelihoods lost, how many miles of roadway and railway washed away. How much MUCK is left. It´s bad.

But for two glorious frightening weeks we were together. We did it, together. We fought, we won. We might have lost. We could have lost. We had help. The soldiers came from across Canada. They helped us win. They were magnificent.

Our leaders led - that too is significant. Doesn´t seem to happen much. But for some, it was their finest hour. We praise them. And each other. Now, we have to clean up, and get on with things.

FROM THE EDITOR´S DESK

For some time now I have been receiving letters from subscribers who say they are no longer receiving The Tale Spinner, requesting that they be put back on the list.

I have not been removing names from the mailing list - they have been quietly disappearing, with no notice of their going. I can only suppose that servers are screening out more bulk mail, in the belief that they are screening scammers, but are notifying neither the receivers nor the senders of their actions.

My own mail program puts suspect mail into the junk file, where I can look through it to see if it really is junk - and it usually is - or is something I have asked for or subscribed to. I can only assume that some servers make the decision unilaterally and block posts that in their opinion are bogus.

If you should realize at some future time that you´ve not had a Spinner for some time, please write to let me know. Or you can read it online at either http://members.shaw.ca/vjjsansum/ orhttp://nw-seniors.org/stories.html. If you wish to contact me, you will find a link to me at the bottom of those sites. I am already sending 15 individual copies each week, and there are undoubtedly others who have just disappeared. I don´t want to lose any more of you!

On another subject entirely: The subject of volunteering has fallen flat except for three brave souls, Carol Shoemaker, Carol Dilworth, and Doris Dignard, who either have told their stories or will do so in the future. So I´ve decided to ask readers to tell us the names and authors of their favourite books - either from their childhood, or over the long years of their reading. Surely that will bring readers out of the woodwork - or wherever bookworms go. We all want to share our favourite books and authors, so this is your chance - tell us about those favourites. Please.

And that reminds me: In last week´s issue, I forgot to mention that Carol Shoemaker´s story about whale watching was accompanied by pictures, which you can see at the above websites. Check them out!

RECOMMENDED SITES

Carol Dilworth sends the URL for a NYT blog discussing the use of "fancy" words in news reports. Should newspaper writers use simple words in their writing, or more precise but obscure words? I have heard that newspapers´ language is geared tp people with a grade 5 education, and such readers would certainly not know the meaning of the list of fancy words in this blog:

Pat Moore recommends this site from Britain´s Got Talent:

Pat also sends this site for people having problems with the new Windows 7:

This new DVD convincingly makes the case that Canada´s oil sands are too dangerous, too dirty, and too expensive. Highlighting the local and global impacts of oil sands extraction, Breaking Our Addiction also makes the case that dirty oil sands crude vs Middle Eastern oil is a false choice. In this, the 21st century economy, a clean transportation future awaits if we choose to make it happen.

In his home of Namibia, John Kasaona is working on an innovative way to protect endangered animal species: giving nearby villagers (including former poachers) responsibility for caring for the animals. And it´s working.

Once again, for readers who are dismayed by man´s apparent inhumanity to man, I recommend this site to help restore your faith in humanity: