Weekend snippets:
Springtime means the dogs are out and their owners with them.
This is the time of year when owners place too much faith in their mutts, which are 97 per cent genetically similar to wolves and, no matter how friendly their are at home, often lose their minds around other people and animals.
Please don't be that dog owner that thinks that just because you love your dog that everyone should love your dog, too.
An off-leash dog out in the community is the equivalent of feeding four-year-olds brown sugar sandwiches and root beer for lunch and then telling them to go play.
Nothing good can happen.
For other dogs, as well as for many people, the sight of your excited hound bounding towards them is not beautiful, it's scary.
And dogs can't help themselves - they always want to be best friends with the people who can't stand them.
Be a good citizen and a good dog owner by presuming that your pet is a great dog, but can't always be trusted in public. You'll save yourself and others much grief.
And it shouldn't need to be said but your dog's feces are not a gift to the world.
If you've got the energy to walk your dog, you've got the ability to bend down and bag it.
It's great that Prince George and the region have UNBC as a way to keep young people in the area as they acquire higher schooling. That doesn't mean we should resent the kids who have the opportunity and the desire to study elsewhere.
This week, sports editor Jason Peters featured Avery Movold and Hannah Esopenko, two 16-year-old members of the Prince George Barracudas being recruited by American universities after high school to swim for their schools on scholarship.
Esopenko has been contacted by schools in Texas, Florida, Northwestern University near Chicago, the University of Denver and the University of Minnesota. If she's looking for the small-town experience at a big university, she should give the University of Georgia a hard look.
Athens, Ga., is bigger than Prince George but smaller than Kelowna and located two hours from Atlanta.
And she won't care, but if her parents listened to alternative rock in the 1980s, both R.E.M. and the B-52s came out of Athens.
As for Movold, she's being sought by several big American institutions as well, including Texas A&M, Louisiana State, Stanford and Harvard. Those last two schools are ridiculously difficult to get in to and both would rank in the top 10 of best English-language universities in the world.
What an incredible opportunity for both of these accomplished young women and their families to have to make such a difficult decision.
Neil Gorsuch was confirmed Friday by the Senate as the newest justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the U.S., the top judges in the land are celebrities and not just in the legal community. Even people who are not news junkies, in both the U.S. and Canada, know that the chief justice is John Roberts and can name several more of the judges, especially Clarence Thomas, Ruth Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
The appointment of a Supreme Court justice is a major event stateside and, as it was with Gorsuch, highly politically charged, even though the law by its definition is greater than politics and the Supreme Court is one of the instruments created by the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution to keep the president and Congress in check.
In Canada, however, a new appointment to the top court is often met with yawns and few Canadians can name more than one of the judges on the bench, including chief justice Beverley McLachlin.
Their job is no less important and, like their American counterparts, their decisions on everything from abortion to assisted suicide are felt by all citizens.
As Stephen Harper discovered all too often, it is also the Supreme Court's job to decide what is lawful, not the prime minister of the day.
As if the B.C. Liberals couldn't stoop any lower with their blatant handouts just before next month's election, they saved the lowest for last in Prince George.
Just before tonight's annual Bob Ewert dinner at the Civic Centre, where the region's medical establishment gather to raise money for the Northern Medical Programs Trust and to complain about the lack of government support, Shirley Bond and Mike Morris were handing out $12.5 million to the University Hospital of Northern B.C. in Prince George.
But get this - $4.5 million of that is devoted to improving the hospital's electrical system to prevent power outages. One of the worst-kept secrets in town and a story The Citizen had wanted to tell for two years but couldn't find a surgeon willing to speak on the record about it was how often the lights went out in the operating room, with people on the table and under the knife.
Now, surgeons at the local hospital have electricity more reliable than what Hawkeye, Hunnicutt and Hot Lips Houlihan had to deal with in Korea.
Thankfully, the B.C. Liberals spending orgy is over as the election officially starts Tuesday. The lawn signs will be less annoying than seeing the local MLAs hustling around buying votes with taxpayer dollars.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
