More environment articles, please

Although I enjoy your paper for its helpful listings and, yes, its new cool layout, I would like to see some more environmental coverage. Clearly the media is currently unconcerned with environmental issues. Perhaps advertisers don't like it, or perhaps readers are simply too engrossed in their distractions. Perhaps the reason is that the coverage is making people feel powerless and useless. Despite this, there is a growing need for coverage.

But coverage alone is not enough. Articles, well researched, should invite action on the part of the public so that the articles do not merely depress, nor distract, but incite action. Activism is not about bitching, but about rallying a critical mass to apply their energy and talents. There are many local and positive issues that are inspiring to the down-and-out, smoking, café-bound disenfranchised who have to be reminded that work is being done and that we don't just have to bitch about industry and government between espressos.

­Will Eizlini

Don't go to no'pro

I'm very rarely offended by anything, but Sasha's column last week ["For love or money," Oct. 16] was an exception. Is she being paid by the hookers and phone-sex pimps who place ads all over the back pages of the Mirror? If not, then why the hell is she telling this guy to shut up about being lonely and just get a hooker? I know that prostitution has existed for a long time and isn't about to stop, but that doesn't automatically make it a good thing. I can hardly think of anything good about it, especially since I've seen stripper and hooker friends of mine get hopelessly addicted to money and/or drugs and forget everything else they were going to do with their lives. I've also had friends on the customer side of things who've never been able to manage a real relationship after getting used to paying for sex. Do we really need to encourage this kind of thing? It's bad enough that the lack of jobs in this town has directly led to several women I know becoming strippers. Sure, they got used to doing it, but they would never have considered it if they weren't so broke.

I know that sex sells all kinds of things in our culture (why do you think the Mirror has a sex column?), but this does not legitimize the selling of sex. "Everything else is corrupted, so why not corrupt yourself?"is not the kind of message I expect from an advice column. Unless the person giving the advice is pretty corrupt herself.

­Louis Rastelli

Women don't need a manual to dump guys

Regarding Juliet Waters' review of How to Dump a Guy ["Breaking Up Is Good To Do," Books, Oct. 9]: I am revolted by the subject matter of this book, or at least as it was portrayed by the reviewer.

No offence. But I am gentle, kind, considerate, confident and good-looking. I also have enough patience to overcome any minor problems which could arise within a relationship. But I'm single. This is where the situation becomes complicated: I would love to find someone I could be close with, but when attempts are made, women don't even want to look at me.

Women have standards: you must look great, pack cigars, have tons of disposable cash and be willing to--yes, even with the quiet ones--undergo an intense interrogation by her friends, only for the whole thing to end with the intense heartbreak which follows a one-night stand. That's why I'm single: I don't wear a Rolex and my penis isn't a dispenser of one-night-only pleasurables.

Of course, there are the other women as well: the artful butterflies who are constantly being persuaded by other women activists or "men haters" that there is no such thing as a real relationship. You know who you are.

Montreal need not be so cold. The people are chilly--especially when they're reading books on how to dump a man.

­Michael Boudreau

City has no heart for baseball

I'm tired of people talking about whether the Expos should stay or go ["Give Claude Brochu a break," Hit & Run, Oct. 9]. Hit and run. That's what Claude Brochu should do: hit and run.

Expos president Brochu should demand money from the mayor of Montreal and the provincial government to build a downtown ballpark, because it looks like the corporations in Quebec will not do it. Demand a ballpark; if they are refused, there is no shortage of people in the USA who want to purchase the Expos--Buffalo, Virginia and a few other cities are waiting.

Montreal used to be a very popular baseball city. Jackie Robinson put Montreal on the world map. But after 1976 everything started to fall apart and the "heart" started to slow down, moving to Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and the USA, leaving people like me to write letters to the editor.

­Bob White