No News is Good News

I've often wondered why we don't hear much about Canada in the news and, come to think of it, the same could be said about Central and South America.  It just occurred to me that the reason might be that not much happens there that is considered news worthy.  Central America and Venezuela have both been in the news lately, but that's just because bad things are happening there.  I've often heard people complain that we hear more bad news than good news, but maybe that's because people are more interested in bad news than good news.  As Uncle Ken has said, "Nobody wants to see a movie about Beagles making ice cream and sleeping in his deer blind."  News about kids and animals seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

There was a  good news story about kids and animals on TV this evening.  It seems that two young children were spotted on the edge of a busy highway in Florida.  It didn't say how they got there or if the two dogs that were with them were their own.  The dogs were leaning on the kids, holding them against the guardrail, which kept them out of the traffic lanes, and probably saved their lives.  When two passing motorists stopped to help, the dogs acted happy to see them, even though they were unknown to each other.  The motorists bundled both the kids and the dogs into their cars, called 911, and waited there till the police arrived.

I don't know where I got the idea that there were more renters than home owners in Europe.  Maybe it was because I was stationed in Berlin, which is a big city, and it turns out that Germany is one of the few countries that has more renters than owners.  Now that I think of it, I have seen British TV shows on PBS that are set in suburban areas that look a lot like those in the U.S. except that the cars are driving on the wrong side of the street.

Funny that people resent it when others around them are conversing in Spanish, but I don't remember the same thing happening when people spoke Czech or Polish back in the day.  Maybe that's because we grew up hearing those languages so they didn't seem so foreign to us.  The first time in my life that I remember meeting somebody's grandparent who didn't speak with a foreign accent was shortly after I moved to Cheboygan.  Turned out that their family had been here so long that they didn't even remember where they came from.