Riddle about chicken curry
Dear editor:
A young lass was visiting her favorite uncle, he was making some chicken curry. He asked her if she would like some. She said, “I can’t because Mom says that I am a vegan.” He replied, “Well your Mom is not here is she... do you want some?” The girl said yes and enjoyed a bowl of chicken curry. Who was right, the mother, the uncle or the kid?
Donald Smithyman
Oliver
Bike lanes were a boondoggle
Dear editor:
I refer to Amelia Boultbee’s comment regarding funding for the bike lanes and Daniel Pontes’ letter in Wednesday’s Herald.
It is fairly obvious to anybody who has followed the debate on this subject that some senior person on the council’s administration staff became enamored with the sales pitch for this bike lane system and has worked very hard to sell it to both their administration colleagues and to council. It has obviously become a very personal project. However, it has turned into a total boondoggle although most members of council appear to be too blind to see it.
There is a much simpler (and infinitely less expensive) method to constructing these bike lanes — rumble strips.
The demarcation line separating a bike lane from the normal traffic lanes should be a rumble strip. Drivers would be discouraged from driving along the rumble strip by both the discomfort and possible damage to tires. However, if it was necessary to clear the traffic lane for an emergency vehicle, it would be a simple matter to pull right over the rumble strip and wait until the emergency vehicle had passed. This would also have avoided the expense quite early on in the construction where, if I recall correctly, the City had to pay to have somebody's front lawn paved over in order for them to have access to their property.
There is also the question of the very expensive equipment which the Council has had to purchase to keep the bike lanes clear and clean.
If Mr. Pontes is correct in his list of cities in the process of removing some bike lanes, I predict that, in the not to far distant future, this council or a future council will have to find the money to remove all this expensive infrastructure and remedy all the expensive changes made to road junctions and traffic lights
Brian Butler
Penticton
Wallis Simpson saved Royals from disaster
Dear editor:
To comment on a recent letter about Wallis Simpson (Herald, March 12).
I think most people in Canada or elsewhere don’t even know who she was; her liaison with the then Prince of Wales, was nothing like the events involving Prince Harry and Meghan.
She does not deserve (and mostly has not) recognition in the Royal Historical sense. She was a twice-divorced American and was never accepted by the British people in general.
Although I was born and raised in England, I was too young to know about her affair with the then Prince of Wales, but I heard my parents and friends discussing it and once sneaked away a copy of the “News of the World” newspaper with interesting material.
Some years before all of this problem, Prince George, the then Duke Of Kent, married Princess Marina from Greece who became very popular and even had a color named after her — “Marina Blue” and we all wanted a dress of that colour! So the contrast between the two brothers choice of partner was a hot topic later on.
The Prince of Wales was known as the Playboy Prince — liking the good life, lots of vehicles and planes, and very many women in his life. One of my Uncles was a superintendent in the Metropolitan Police and served as “bodyguard” for the Prince. He is quoted as having said “I’ve waited outside more bedroom doors in Belgravia and Mayfair than I have had hot dinners.”
Wallis Simpson was well accepted by the nightlife fraternity in Germany which apparently was ahead of anything in England and she had met Adolf Hitler several times, introducing the Prince who became very interested in some aspects of plans for the future of Europe and was known to be a Nazi sympathizer.
After his abdication, the couple went to live in France, were married and given the title Duke and Duchess of Windsor. After France fell to the Germans, they fled to Lisbon, and he was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, far enough away for the British Prime Minister — Winston Churchill allegedly said, “He can’t do too much harm over there.” He apparently remained interested in Nazi activities, even from some distance.
So, in a way, her place in history is for Wallis Simpson saving Britain from being an acquisition of Nazi Germany, and as an outsider, encouraging that weak-minded man with his almost traitor-type interest as a known Nazi sympathizer, to abdicate.
As King, he would have been disastrous, the Government of the time certainly feeling relieved.
Marjorie M. Montgomery
Penticton
