No question, we are SPOILED

We are one spoiled bunch of Christmas turkeys

                       by Robert LaFrance 

            After a couple of months of watching TV commercials and listening to people tell the world how they will simply pass away if they don’t get the latest electronic gadget, and how walking to their car exhausts them, I have come to the conclusion that we are all incredibly spoiled. When you start getting the idea that ‘roughing it’ is only being able to afford an iPod Nano instead of a Touch, something is askew.

            Surely we’re out of the recession now; people seem to be buying everything that isn’t duct-taped down. The phenomenon known as Black Friday was a good example of this. Over in the U.S. shoppers pitched tents in store parking lots so they could be on hand when the store opened for business. They could get an eight-person tent for $1.29 or a 5000-watt generator for fifty cents—plus tax of course.

            The iPods, X-boxes, and the StarMax 3010Js (whatever that might be) were selling like Ex-lax at a constipation convention all through November and December, even while our political leaders were telling us that their next budgets were going to hit us hard.

            In the midst of all this, I was talking to a couple who had just come back from Caribou and Presque Isle, Maine, where they had spent many hundreds of dollars. Since both the husband and wife had, in 2011, undergone expensive medical procedures in New Brunswick, I was tempted to ask if part of Maine’s sales tax went to help our medicare system in any way, but I didn’t bother.

            I can sit in my living room, in my favourite chair that is moulded to my every indentation, and listen to radio or watch TV from every part of Canada and the U.S. ‘Podcasts’ allow me to listen to my favourite shows at my own convenience. Remember when we would say: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could record a TV show and play it later?” I believe something called a VCR came along about then but now that is ‘veille jeu’ as they say in Paris, Ontario. An old game, or old hat.

Spoiled. I can send an email letter to Shanghai, China and receive a reply in five minutes. Marco Polo, sailing in the 13th century, took months to go from Italy to China. In our cars today we have tire pressure sensors because we’re too lazy to check the inflation of the tires. We have remote controls for an array of things; otherwise we would have to actually cross the room to change a setting. Remote car starters, the GPS, satellite dishes, heated seats in cars, and digital cameras. How energetic we are!

NASA put people on the moon, but I am not sure their Apollo spacecrafts had bigger instrument panels than my Chrysler Intrepid—and it’s only a 2000. I can use something called Skype and telephone Aunt Rennie in Liverpool, England by using my computer and a ‘digicam’. I said I CAN do that, but since she informed me I am now officially out of her will in favour of a tennis instructor named Glenn, I don’t bother. Besides, the downside of calling on Skype is that I would be able to see HER and she’s had a hard life, if you know what I mean.

I can request library books via the Internet and have them delivered to my home library (as long as Stephen Harper continues to allow the post office to charge only book rate for this); I can ‘Google’ any subject and get information on it in seconds; I can watch a soccer game from Lille, France at the exact instant it’s taking place there; I can take a photo of my great niece and mail it using my cellphone to her great grandmother in Montreal where it’s printed out before the little girl has time to say “did you use the proper DPI settings?”.

Every few months my cousin who lives along the Darling River in Australia sends me the Tompkins Family newsletter and I see what various cousins are up to. Mail is rather fast these days, and I don’t mean the kind that arrives in my mailbox outside, the one that used to be at the end of my driveway and is now 2.5 kilmetres away in a group box.

I recall when I went to university in 1966-67 (my career in higher learning) and I would write to my father and ask for money. It took three weeks for him to reply and he usually said he had already sealed the envelope or he would have been glad to send money. Houses are kept at 25ºC, food is ready-made and all we have to do is chew, we have every modern convenience, and still we complain.
                                                     end

Where in the world is my GPS?

The days are getting longer now – good thing

                         by Robert LaFrance

            There is something in the human soul that makes that human look out the window and, the worse the weather is, the more he wants to get out there on the road.

            I say ‘he’ but that was only for the convenience of my rather tortured English, for the list of culprits is about evenly divided between X and Y chromosomes. One Medford woman was famous for driving in the worst possible weather, and practically refusing to get behind the wheel if the sun were shining. “Where’s the fun in that?” she would ask no one in particular. One day last week she said to me: “I hate it after December 21^st because the days start getting longer—more daylight and safer driving. As I said - where's the fun in that?”

            Indeed, back in the early 1960s, during the storm that included a tornado which struck Henry Baker’s place, also in Medford, she jumped in her 1957 Plymouth Belvedere (with the push-button transmission, remember those?) and headed immediately over there to see if she could drive through a tornado. Alas, there was only one, so she had to be satisfied with driving through a vicious wind and rainstorm during which trees were toppling left and right.

            But that’s going back quite a way. If you can see a road or a street from your living room window, look out there and count 25 cars. The drivers of at least three of those are crazy persons, willing to go out on icy roads on summer tires and daring the guardrail to mess with them.

            Probably it’s time to be specific. You know that I am talking about one person only and you know it is neither Flug nor I since both of us are wimps, woosses, and scaredy cats. No, it’s my neighbours on the other side and down the hill a ways, along Highway 105.

Both Elroy and Jeanatan Fitzgovus are crazy about driving in bad weather. Let there come a severe thunderstorm with embedded tornadoes and they’re away in their 2007 Nissan. Remember that wicked rain we had a year ago? The one that took out bridges and moved houses? They drove around in that. In Muniac where the road almost washed out they zoomed by there and almost went down the fifty feet into the raging stream. And they thought that was a lot of fun.

Flug and I were home playing crokinole and cribbage and sipping on some lemonade.

                                                ********************************

Some people make life needlessly complicated, don’t you think?

Everybody knows by now that last Tuesday morning we had an earthquake in these parts. Its epicentre—and by that I mean its centre—was alleged to be somewhere in Tilley, near the late Hiram Kinney’s camp. Most of us thought it was indigestion, brought on by the Toronto Maple Leafs winning a game.

So there we all were at the club the next evening and watching the Channel 9 news which was telling us that the ‘quake had measured 4.8 on the Richter Scale, which at one time I thought was an instrument for measuring the weight of fish, so we were all discussing that and comparing it to the 5.9 ‘quake in 1982.

Bellison said he had heard about the ‘quake from an iTunes radio station, meaning he had to fire up his computer, open up iTunes, and so on; Handley said he had been listening to his satellite radio, and Myers found out from an Internet website and blog by a famous seismologist at UNB Fredericton.

“How did you find out?” I asked Gary Mawman Jr., who is about as high-tech as the average moosefly.

“Oh, I got up, looked at the wall, and saw that all my pictures were hanging crooked.” Gary is called a Luddite by some, he’s that low-tech, but I am starting to think the same way.

Who needs all this technological stuff (I hope that’s not too technical)? True, we all want to know what time it is, just so we’re not late for supper, but we really don’t need to know much more. Okay, it’s nice to be able to cook an omelet on an electric stove, that is, in a frying pan on an electric stove, but we don’t need anything more than a stove.

Maybe a fridge so stuff doesn’t spoil, but that’s it. Now and then I use the microwave to heat up some food, but really, let’s not get out of hand. Yes, I use a computer and word processor and email for this column and go to town in my 2011 car equiped with all kinds of bells and whistles, but that’s enough. No need to be high-tech.

Now where is my GPS? And by the way: Merry low-tech Christmas. Go X-Box!

                                            -end-

Reporters have to be truthful, sort of

Let’s get one thing straight – no Ford Edge

                         by Robert LaFrance

            Right off the bat in this column, I want to give my best wishes and salutations to our beloved editor—well, editor anyway—for many years, Mark Rickard, who is moving on to the Daily Gleaner. His contribution to the lottery pool will cause some financial repercussions, but we will just have to make do for the good of…well, us.

            Mark was officially done as editor of the Victoria Star as of December 6, and the obvious comment to make would be ‘now the mice can play’, but he is being replaced by an even harder rock. Enough said about that, before I get myself into even more trouble than usual. I’m hoping she has forgotten about that snide comment I made last March about her shoes.

            Although we all love and admire Mark, we Star slaves—er, workers—have to say ‘no’ to his request for a certain parting gift. I was thinking something along the lines of a new (or at least secondhand but in good shape) pair of slippers, but decided to ask him what he would like.

            “I think a Ford Edge would be appropriate,” he said, “considering how well I’ve treated you guys.”

            When I regained consciousness and had picked the phone up off the floor, I asked him if he meant one of those models you put up on your fireplace mantelpiece so you can gaze at it during long winter evenings. No, he said, you can go to the Ford dealer and get the Ford Edge I’m talking about. “I’m usually not much for hybrids (he wasn’t talking about roses) but the Ford Edge looks like something I wouldn’t mind having.”

            How much could it be? I asked myself this question the same way a carpenter shingling a roof in the rain says: “Am I gonna fall offa this thing?”

            ‘How much it could be’ was STARTING at $27,499, according to the Ford website. When, once more, Sydney Crosby-like, I came out of an unconscious state, I looked again, and Ford gave the realistic price range as somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000, depending on whether you want windshield and tires. After a quick consultation with other Star workers, I decided to break the news to him. “Sorry Mark, you know we all love you, but slippers it is.”

Best wishes to Mark in all his future urban endeavours, as they said under my school graduation photo. Only they said ‘Bob'. It would have been silly to say 'Mark' under my photo, since my name isn’t Mark. I hope he likes the slippers. We drove all the way to St. André - more than 5 kilometres - to pick them up from a retired gardener. He knew all about hybrids too, but after a while we realized he was talking about roses. Next time we buy a going-away present for a beloved editor, we shouldn’t stop at the club for lemonades.

                                                            *******************************

            You should know that I wrote the first part of this column directly after returning from the club where the lemonade was flowing freely. I will now remove that part about making the snide remark about the new editor’s shoes. If she is reminded that I said that, I will be reporting on garden parties and beauty contests until I dodder into retirement in 2021.

There, that’s done. Back to the subject of Mark’s going away present, I had arranged a conference call for later today with the Victoria Star staff. This arrangement was made while about ten of us were on the phone to discuss the slippers. It was then that Shelley (or was it Shirley? Gretchen?) from the advertising department said: “But, Bob, this is a conference call!”

            I never knew what a conference call was. Over the years I had assumed it meant that the boss would call all his or her workers in for a conference.

The bottom line is that the ‘conference call’ has already been made. Some thought that a pair of slippers wasn’t quite enough for a man who had worked so hard and accomplished so much over the years. I mean, he’s done a lot of work on his house and yard and has pretty much kept the Ford company afloat during the economic turndown, which I understand is like a recession.

            Printer’s devil Jock McAllenby, who hails from a country north of England, wanted to send him a card. “I dinna ken how we laddies and lassies can spend yon cash so free,” he said. “Or we cud get him ONE slipper and promise the other one once he gets settled in down there on the dirty city streets.”

            Here’s what we finally decided: We’re going to get him a pair of NEW slippers. It might not be a Ford Edge, but now he knows what we think of him. Truth is everything in journalism.

                                                            -END-

FREE HENK TEPPER!

Let’s get Henk Tepper out of that jail! 

                        by Robert LaFrance 

            What is wrong with this picture? Four or more answers will be accepted.

            As we all know by now, last spring a potato farmer from Drummond went to the Middle East to try and find more markets for his potatoes. While in Lebanon, he was “detained”. Isn’t that a wonderful word, detained? In fact he was not only detained, but imprisoned, jailed, locked up, incarcerated, put behind bars, held captive, caged, put away, confined, but, by gar, he wasn’t arrested. No he wasn’t arrested. Isn’t that interesting when police use every word in the language except the one that really fits? Henk Tepper was ARRESTED.

            Here’s the part where I ask what’s wrong with this picture. Number one, he has never been formally charged with anything, as far as I know, and yet he has been in a Lebanese jail since March. Good thing he wasn’t charged; they would have incarcerated (etc.) him and he would have spent those 245 or so days in a cell. Oh, wait a minute! He did.

            My second ‘what’s wrong’ question is this: Since it was Algeria that wanted Henk Tepper arrested, why is he in a jail in Lebanon? Oh, yes, I know all about that Interpol garbage, but Interpol didn’t ‘detain’ him; it was the Lebanese police. Interpol agents have no powers of arrest. They just ‘suggest’ to the local police that they arrest so-and-so. After that, it’s up to that country to do what’s right. Lebanon, that bastion of peace, tranquillity, and justice.

My third ‘what’s wrong’ question is: where is the Canadian government? Before this incident, I may have felt a bit safe going to a foreign country – although NEVER the Middle East – because the Canadian government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would be there if I needed help. Now I am nervous about going to Fort Fairfield. Just think, the government of Algeria might call Interpol who would call the Fort Fairfield chief of police who would arrest – excuse me, detain – me for spitting on the sidewalk in Mars Hill in 1997. After I had spent half my financial assets (approx. $36) on legal fees, I would then settle down to a long winter’s night of detainment. I couldn’t count on the Government of Canada to give me a hand, that’s for sure.

Let’s go back and look once again at Interpol. If you go to their website you will be impressed by how fair and careful they are. “Action is taken within the limits of existing laws in different countries and in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…Interpol differs from most law-enforcement agencies—agents do not make arrests themselves, and there is no single Interpol jail where criminals are taken. The agency functions as an administrative liaison between the law-enforcement agencies of the member countries, providing communications and database assistance. This is vital when fighting international crime because language, cultural and bureaucratic differences can make it difficult for officers of different nations to work together.”

How impressive when it’s down there in black and white, but I looked further to see if I could find any indication that those Interpol agents followed up on the arrests – let’s quit using that foolish word ‘detain’ – and could find nothing. Apparently these paper pushers and computer nerds of Interpol just finger somebody, tell a country to arrest him, and then go on to the next major crisis involving potatoes, turnips, or the illegal border crossings by Dervishes in Kazakhstan. One can appreciate that countries need to cooperate in order to fight drug smuggling, money laundering, and suchlike, but when a guy spends 70% of a year (so far) in a dingy cell in Lebanon for allegedly selling underpar potatoes in Algeria, doesn’t anyone in authority notice?

This is rocket science I know, but it seems to me that if I were prime minister of Canada and one of my citizens were nabbed, jailed, etc. in Lebanon, the first thing I would do is phone Algiers, the capital of Algeria. I would say: “Look, Ab, (the Algerian president is Abdelaziz Bouteflika) let’s talk this over. We’ll do lunch on Thursday. Let’s both fly over to Valencia, Spain – it’s just a short hop for you and I need some warm weather – and deal with this. I need all the farmers – and their votes - I can get, and this one is a hard worker. Okay babe? I’ll see you then.”

Back to reality, now that there have been a couple of rallies for Henk and lots of headlines in the dailies, radio and TV, surely someone in Ottawa has noticed. Come on, guys, get your fingers out and get going. Get Henk Tepper back to Canada!

                          -end-

The villain is television

Is there a GPS-laser surgery connection?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Some people think it’s pretty funny to give a tourist incorrect directions. My friend Flug is not one of those, but his brother Wizlett is. Last week a nice couple who said they were travelling from North Bay, Ontario, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, stopped by his house to ask how they could again find the Trans Canada Highway. The had taken ‘the scenic route’ that included Lower Kintore and Mack Furman’s diamond-studded outhouse with the porch. Quite famous in parts of Ontario. Flug was out behind the house and pruning some prune bushes.

            “The Trans Canada Highway?” said Wizlett, as if repeating the name of an obscure animal from the jungles of Burkina Faso. “The Trans Canada Highway? Well, you can’t get there from here, but I think I can direct you to a road that will take you to a road that WILL get you there, in time.” He went on to send them on their way to Kedgwick, up by Campbellton. “Once you get there,” he concluded, “you can easily see how to get back onto the Trans Canada Highway.”

            Wizlett was having quite a chuckle as Flug arrived for a visit. The Ontario car was just pulling out of Wizlett’s driveway. Wizlett told his brother all about the hapless couple who were now on their way to north-eastern New Brunswick. “That’s pretty funny, Wiz,” he said. “By the way, the man looked as if he had red hair and a handlebar moustache. Remember we saw his photo on the Internet?”

            Memory and some light slowly dawned on Wizlett’s heavy features. Scheduled for laser eye surgery in Halifax in four days, he had Googled the website called http://www.eye-see-you.com. His surgeon was to be red-haired guy with a handlebar moustache. He would be back from his Ontario vacation on the 28^th, the website informed.

            “Well,” blustered Wizlett, “if he can’t find the Trans Canada Highway, I don’t want him working on my eyes.” Flug gave him the number of his, Flug’s, optometrist. Wizlett had been putting off his eye test because soon he wouldn’t need glasses. Now he would.

                                                *******************************

            Still on the subject of talking to people, I was thinking yesterday – as I sipped a lemonade and watched a British football (soccer) game – it seems that every year we are getting further away from each other socially. Of course all that started in the 1950s when people began  buying televisions; up to that point people actually visited each other in their homes, went out to card parties, and saw each other in the post office and general store. After TV came along, they stayed home to watch Hockey Night in Canada and Milton Berle.

            In our case, living as we did in Tilley – north Tilley, on what is now called Churchland Road – we almost had the first TV in our neighbourhood. But no, it appeared across the road at Rose and Fraser’s place. Ours was to arrive a few months later when my brother, who was wealthy from his woods job at a dollar an hour, brought home a $525 Sylvania 21-inch TV. How he managed that I don’t know, but he did. It could be he has been making payments on it since 1961.

            Back to the TV across the road. Coincidentally, every Sunday evening our family would arrive at Rose and Fraser’s just before the Ed Sullivan show came on. Mum would bring some cookies and I would bring my cookie appetite. And those days, my friends, were the last days when people would routinely visit one another in their homes. Once every house acquired a television, there was very little visiting. Today some people refer to that nostalgically as ‘social interaction’.

            Which brings me to one of the latest devices apparently designed to curb ‘social interaction’. I refer back to the beginning of this column, when those two people stopped and asked Wizlett for directions. Rare as asking for directions has been, it’s now pretty much non-existent. The reason? The GPS, or Global Positioning System.

            Just think: if that couple had had one, Wizlett wouldn’t have had to cancel his laser eye surgery. Funny how things work. In this one case, a little less ‘social interaction’ would have been a good thing. Glasses aren’t so bad anyway. Without them, I’d have to drink lemonade out of the bottle.

The (baby) cart before the (wedding) horse

Cell phones were only in jails

                         by Robert LaFrance

            One book by Izaak Walton, the 17^th century English writer, is considered the ‘bible’ of fishing. “The Compleat Angler” tells the fisherman everything he should know about bringing supper in from the trout stream. Other books are considered ‘bibles’ in their own fields, and there are a lot of fields around. There are 800-page tomes about the many ways of building plywood cabinets, and there is the Bible itself, the world’s best-selling book that everyone owns but few read.

            Today I want to talk about the ‘bible’ of etiquette, or manners. Last week at a secondhand book sale I came across “Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette”.

            The later great humour writer Will Rogers used to say he was ‘just mangy with etiquette’ and I would say that description equally applies to me, at least the mangy part (according to certain relatives). When I started reading “Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette” it became clear just how mangy I really am. And you are too, if Ms. Vanderbilt is correct, so don’t look down your vulgar nose at me.

            Chapter one of the book describes just how a baby should be christened. After perusing this text, I was then aware of the mistakes we had made with our three kids and why they turned out so bad. Instead of phoning people to come to the church (this was the late 1980s and early 1990s and phones had just come to Kincardine) we should have sent short notes of invitation. The author even told us how to dress the boy or girl for the church ceremony.

            What rotten parents we were!

            One of the many things I did find curious about the book was the fact that this christening information came in that first chapter, but it was chapter three before we learned the proper way of putting on a wedding ceremony. The cart arrived somewhat before the horse there!

            Ms. Vanderbilt even laid out the ground rules for an elopement. The couple about to whip off to Minto for a quick ceremony in front of a JP are advised to inform all their friends and relatives before they elope, or while they are motoring down the TCH. She mentioned stopping at a phone booth along the way, one assumes because the only cell phones around at that time were located in jails.

            Growing up in Tilley, NB, I of course know about etiquette. Mother would clout me if I smelled up the house, but then I would question why she had cooked beans. I pointed to Sir John A. Macdonald, who was famous for that, and often referred to that old saying: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flatulence”. However, she would just whack me again for impertinence as well as flatulence.

            As one who buys lottery tickets every week, I was especially interested in the etiquette section about how one deals with servants. Once I win the big one, a butler, a gardener, and a couple of scullery maids (whatever ‘scullery’ means) will be practically mandatory. In the book, Amy Vanderbilt outlined how to give servants their instructions for the day: “Notes sent down to servants should always be pleasant and clear. It may be necessary to leave a note of criticism from time to time, but it had better be tactfully phrased.”

            I supposed what she meant by that was that servants can buy lottery tickets too, and with a little bad luck or bad investments you could end up as your cook’s valet.

            There is also a way to refuse the offer of a dance. If a woman were to say: “What! Are you crazy? Go away. I wouldn’t dance with you if you had just won the lottery like the guy in the paragraph above” that wouldn’t go over so well. Instead a lady would say to a gentlemen, according to this book of etiquette: “No thank you, I don’t believe I’m free right now.” This sort of response to a request for a dance might bring a polite ‘thank you anyway’, but there are those who might react with a little less politeness, as in: “I didn’t expect you to be free, but I have a certain amount of cash with me in case I met someone of your ilk.” When he regained consciousness…

            Finally – and I have to wrap this up because Flug and the boys are waiting for me down at the club – I need to explain something vital. Ms. Vanderbilt laid down some rules for all of you out there who smoke cigars. Remember this was the early 1950s. “A chewed cigar end, only too apparent when the cigar is removed during the course of conversation, is enough to repel all but the most hardy females.” At this point the comment that is hovering on my lips and at my fingertips will not find its way into this column. Bill Clinton can take care of himself.
                                                                     -end-

Fact: Scorpions like democracies

Saga of the cynical mechanic

                        by Robert LaFrance

            That first snowstorm is always a shock, isn’t it? My friend Henri Henry from out back of Bath says he can smell Florida from where he is. Henri owns a garage.

            He said that people started phoning as soon as the forecast came up on the Weather Channel. After the weather person had given the weather report and then the forecast for every street corner in Toronto, she said: “And it looks like the Maritimes are going to have some snow too.” By the time the word ‘too’ emerged from between her capped teeth, Henri’s phone was ringing.

            “I figure I have made enough money now to get me to Richmond, Virginia,” he told me Saturday evening down at the club. All day Friday and all that day he had been putting on snowtread tires. “The thing is, most people had perfectly good all-season radials and they had no need to panic. Unfortunately, on short notice like that, I have to charge double. I also plan to stay open on the Sabbath, which I would say should get me to southern Georgia. By Monday evening I will have made enough money to get me into the Day’s Inn Motel in Kissimmee, Florida for a week.”

            Henri is very cynical, I find. I wish I’d thought of buying a garage instead of planting an orchard, long since abandoned as a money-making project. If I were still working at that, my profit MAY have gotten me to Fort Fairfield, Maine, or possibly Mars Hill.

                                                ********************************

            Fall is supposed to be the time when you relax, sit back, and contemplate a winter of rest and watching reruns of shows that weren't good enough for you to watch when they were on the first time back in the 1960s, but now that they're ‘nostalgia’. All my stovewood is supposed to be piled and drying for winter, the house is supposed to be winterized (if that's a verb), winter clothes should have come out of the closet, so to speak, and all should be relaxed and ready for the season about to hit.

Did I leave you with the impression I had done all those winter preparations? Guess what?

               There are three cords of stovewood relaxing outside the shed window, the oil tank is gasping for a refill, and I have yet to put away a leaf rake or lawn mower. I did have good intentions about the wood, but you know what the road to hell is paved with. Other signs of the season: Baseball is over and the Cards won the “World” (Translation: U.S.) Series, the soccer players still playing all have goose bumps, and the avalanche of Christmas gadgets has begun falling on us.

            The mighty (bird) hunters are blasting away as if they were moving (on four-wheelers) toward Hanoi, halfton loads of stovewood go by here hourly, my apples are picked for the year – by the bears, who leave their calling cards - and I have put manure on my garden, as well as my column you are thinking.

            Fall is okay, it’s what comes next that I dread.

                                                **********************************

            Every week I read - via the Internet - a certain British magazine that rarely fails to have a whole whack of interesting items such as this: "A woman who picked up a bunch of bananas in Birmingham was stung by a scorpion".

            Could this sort of thing happen here? I'm advising all food consumers in Victoria County to avoid picking up bunches of bananas. We must take all precautions to avoid scorpion stings, on our constant guard. But who can blame the little critters for wanting a change in scenery? It’s a fact that scorpions like democracies.

            Still talking about wild creatures, mating season takes its toll on raccoons, skunks, moose, deer, and rabbits, does it not? The roads are littered with their remains. As they say on the Red Green Show, these animals have already been grilled, so they don't even need to be cooked. Ask any of the ravens feasting out there on the highway. Last Tuesday I drove to Woodstock for the annual Earthworm Festival and as I drove near the community called Connell I noted the corpses of: A raccoon, a skunk, a rabbit, a cat, a rabbit, a skunk, a raccoon and a pheasant. It is brutal in Carleton County.   

                                                      -end-   

The police tend to be skeptical (sceptical?)

A whack on the head with a shovel handle

                     by Robert LaFrance

          Since this column is called my diary, I should mention that on the evening of Sunday, October 23^rd, 2011, I watched Red Green at the Playhouse in Fredericton. It was his live show called ‘Wit and Wisdom’ but I can’t say I learned anything new because I already know it all. That’s what mother used to say just before she whacked me with a shovel handle. When I regained consciousness I knew I had been talking when I should have been listening. However, after that I couldn’t listen much anyway because of the ringing in my ears. The doctor called it tinnitus, but I knew its true medical name was ‘Shovel Handle’ (spadapus whackus in Latin).

          After the show, Red Green came out to the lobby to sign autographs, but it wasn’t Red Green at all. It was a shy, quiet, scholarly gentleman named Steve Smith, who plays Red Green. Instead of using Red Green’s voice, he spoke to fans in Steve Smith’s voice. I felt as if I had been defrauded. Here was this quiet voice coming out of Red Green’s mouth. Red Green, the rough-voiced head of Possum Lodge.

          I wish actors would quit doing that. Oh, I understand that maybe the next day, or sitting in civilian clothes in a restaurant that same evening, he would use Steve Smith’s voice because, at that point he would be Steve Smith, but as long as he wears the Red Green getup he should keep that persona. But that’s just me.

                                                  *******************************

          I’m going out this afternoon, as soon as I mow the lawn for the last time before the snow flies (he said optimistically) and buy some green paint. That should ‘improve my image’ as they say. Apparently all anyone has to do these days to get that old image polished up is to ‘go green’.

          I am waiting for the moment when asbestos purveyors finally clue in to this phenomenon. Over the past few months I have seen advertisements for items that are now ‘green’, but rarely is there any information on what has changed. Surely raw sewerage, asbestos, flu viruses, toxic chemicals and George W. Bush are next with this treatment.

          Last week I watched a bit of a World (?) Series baseball game between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals and what did I see behind the backstop but that former president of the United States, the one almost single-handedly responsible for the sick U.S. economy and the tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq. He was having a great time, sitting with former Major League pitcher Nolan Ryan. Soldiers returning home in coffins from Iraq didn’t seem to bother him in the least. He must have turned green, an operation that takes BAD and turns it into GOOD overnight.

          Look up and down the aisles of your favourite grocery store and you will see product after product that has the green label, showing that (for example) Product A, which last week was cited toxic to all human life, is now ‘green’ because in their packages they use 15% recycled materials. Wow!

          I know, I’m just too cynical.

                                        **********************************

          My dog Kezman has what I would call ‘a gustatory flamboyance’ if you know what I mean. I wish I did, but I’m not D.C. Butterfield who has a vocabulary the size of Conrad Black’s ego. What I mean by that phrase is that Kezman eats and drinks some very strange things, even for a dog.

          He prefers white wine, but one day last week after his supper (stuffed anchovy hearts with a peanut butter sauce, etc.) he got more than his share of red wine – a Merlot if I’m not mistaken. I had decided to bottle an order of the red wine since I was down to my last 498 bottles, and, getting the siphon straightened around at the beginning, I had about a litre of it overflow into a big bowl.

          I wasn’t paying much attention—like none—so you can imagine what happened when I dozed off while watching Jeopardy. It turned out that the only one in jeopardy was Kezman, whose nose took him over to that big bowl as it sat minding its own business on the kitchen floor.

          You know how some people get belligerent when they drink? When I woke up and went into the kitchen Kezman was ready for a Tilley scrap so, being from Tilley, I ran, and didn’t stop until I got to the Carleton county line. I’m telling you this just so you’ll know why I was buck naked and up a tree at 4:00 am down at Muniac Picnic site. The police were a little sceptical, but they tend to be, don’t they?

                                    -end-

Hitler had ONE good idea - the end

A collection of aphorisms, puns and nonsense

                    by Robert LaFrance

          Last week I read Adolph Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’. It had one good idea in it. On the last page it said ‘The End’. He wasn’t a nice person; I’m not sure if anyone else noticed this, but I tell you what: I’d keep an eye on that guy.

          When people categorize other people, they often use words like ‘redneck’ or ‘hippie’. My problem (because I like to be precise) is that there don’t seem to be enough nuances (as they say) of these words. For example, if a guy is a redneck, but not really serious about his status, why wouldn’t he be called a ‘pinkneck’?

          Two evenings ago at the club the Perfessor was talking to us – lecturing us – about Horace, the Roman poet (as opposed to the roamin’ poet) and in walked Flug. He obtained a lemonade and sat down with us. Trouble is, he never heard of Rome or Horace, and thought the Perfessor was talking about Hoss, the character on the old western TV show ‘Bonanza’. It wasn’t pretty, but it was entertaining.

          As we all know, euphemisms are everywhere, especially when it comes to things like dying. The latest one to appear is possibly the worst of all time. People have talked for years about others ‘passing away’ but now I keep hearing that so-and-so has ‘passed’ which almost sounds as if the person in question has been successful in his final exams.

          Eddie Stanton lives a few kilometres down the road and sometimes drops by to get some apples so he can attract deer so he can shoot deer so he can eat deer. We both went to high school in Andover (now part of Perth-Andover) and sometimes reminisce about those teenage years. “Remember Miss Sara Williams, our English teacher?” he said one day. Asking someone that is like asking a D-day participant if he remembers World War II. “Remember that day you asked if one of the other students was ‘a rebel without a clause’”? Yes, I remembered it well. The scars are almost healed.

          Speaking of old school days, I recall that the first time I heard about ‘necking’ and ‘petting’ I was totally baffled. I told my friend Eldred that I knew what ‘Petting’ was because I had a dog, but what is ‘necking’? It sounded a little painful, or maybe something giraffes did on a Saturday night. Please remember that I grew up in rural New Brunswick and wasn’t sophisticated like those from the urban cores of Four Falls or Anfield.

          So you don’t think we rely too much on technology? Apparently I do, even if you don’t. The power went off here about three weeks ago and I lit lamps and used flashlights to read a certain novel, but then I decided that I wanted to play a few tunes on the piano. I searched high and low (as they say) but could only find seven ‘D’ batteries, but needed eight for my electronic keyboard. After ten minutes I gave up searching and walked toward my chair where I had been reading. On the way there I happened to glance at a large object sitting there in my living room. A full-size upright piano, a real one and in tune since I had tuned it myself. We all need to go live in a cabin by a brook. By the way, the power is back on now.

          After my son had his latest birthday, he received a notice from a certain bank (the one that sponsors the Toronto FC soccer team) that now that he had turned nineteen and wasn’t attending school full time, he had to pay $8.50 a month service charge on his savings account. Since this was hardly offset by the 47 cents interest he received every month he closed the account. It may be time that our governments started looking closely at bank charges, especially ‘service’ charges like that. They charge the customer money merely for keeping his or her money that they, the banks, have invested. One thing that governments and customers should ask themselves is: “What SERVICE did you perform for that $8.50?”

          Two weeks ago I bought a new cellphone and it actually came with a manual. That’s what I said: a printed-out-on-paper real manual that I can read while sitting in a chair and relaxing while listening to Mozart’s latest pop tune. Those who aren’t into computers and other technology don’t realize how rare that is nowadays. Buy a computer program—or even a computer—and you will find that just about every manual is ‘online’, and just about as helpful as a strawberry to a guy who just realized his parachute wasn’t going to open.

                                                 -end-

A bit of gentle lawbreaking

Does illegal food REALLY taste better? 

                    by Robert LaFrance 

          My friend Flug is the type of guy who thinks that any food obtained illegally tastes better than the legit stuff, any product he buys ‘under the table’ is superior to that purchased on top of that piece of furniture, a Rolex watch bought in China for $250 works better than the real thing, and driving over the speed limit is just the thing to do.

I am here to tell you about the day that he received his ‘comeuppance’.

He had invited me over for supper and promised that trout would be prominent on the menu. He was whispering when he said the word ‘trout’. That wasn’t a good sign, because it always means Flug is up to something. I remember one time in Dundas, Ontario, when he invited me to help him pick mushrooms…but that’s another story. I’ll always remember that jail cell in Hamilton though.

Back to the trout, I went over to his bungalow to find that he had prepared a repast fit for a king—at least Mackenzie King if not King George V. There were those trout, fiddleheads, carrots, creamed potatoes, baked squash, and my favourite kind of pie. Hint: I have over one hundred apple trees.

          “Don’t you find that the fish tastes especially good, Bob?” he asked, as innocently as Flug can ask. I allowed as to how the pan-fried treat was delectable, mouth-watering, scrumptious, tasty, etc. This resulted in what possibly could have been the widest grin since Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat smiled at his tuna lunch.

          “I caught them this morning down in Bubie Brook,” he said. “Fishing season closed yesterday. I find that catching fish out of season gives them an extra good flavour. Remember that cod we sneaked onto our dory in Arnold’s Cove?  Was that not the best cod in the history of the world, and the fisheries officers in every direction?” That was my first and last foray into Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Enough said.

          Just then Flug’s nephew Stephen came in and slammed the screen door. He came into the kitchen where Flug and I were eating at an arborite counter. Stephen was holding a stringer of trout. “Look, Uncle Flug!” he said. “I just got these in Muniac Stream in Lower Kintore. The last day of the season too. I haven’t had many chances to fish this summer. Do you want them?”

          Are you familiar with the word ‘crestfallen’? I watched the crest of Flug’s face as it fell almost to the tile floor. “What do you mean, last day of the season?” he moaned. “I thought it closed yesterday? He indicated the calendar on the wall by his cupboard.

Stephen went over to look. “Why, that’s last year’s calendar, Uncle Flug,” he said.

If you ever saw a man crumble into pieces before your eyes, why, it ain’t a pretty sight. Poor old Flug had thought he was doing something deliciously illegal and here it turned out to be sadly within the law. He grabbed his plate and before I could say “I’ll take it!” he had scraped his meal into the dish owned by his dog Fifi, a Great Dane about the size of an outhouse. Good thing Fifi’s dish was made of steel or he would have eaten that too.

“The blasted government!” complained Flug. “They had to go and spoil the best meal I’ve had all summer.”

          He’s right; the government sure curbs one’s style. While on the subject of government perfidy, dumbness, or what have you, as I was writing this column I took a short break and sat down in front of the TV to watch a Parliamentary Channel show called ‘The Fifties’. They were talking about the Diefenbunker at Carp, near Ottawa.

          Let us all try and picture the period when it was built: here we are in the late 1950s, John Diefenbaker was Prime Minister of Canada, we are in the midst of the Cold War and expecting to be nuked by the USSR any minute, and every schoolchild (I was one) lived in fear all of our waking days, especially after a school practice drill where we learned to dive under a desk in case the Soviets dropped a big one on Loring Air Force Base near Caribou, Maine. I’m sure an a-bomb wouldn’t bother a school desk; they were maple, you know.

          The scene is set; what does the government do? They start work on a massive underground project that some called the Diefenbunker. It was a huge 4-storey network of tunnels where the entire top tier of Canada’s lawmakers (but not their kids and spouses) would go in case the USSR sent some missiles our way. All across Canada were government tunnels like this, each of them with all kinds of communications equipment. The question I asked myself was: with whom would they have communicated? Prairie dogs and space aliens?

          So, which one was worse, the government of New Brunswick not closing fishing season a day earlier so Flug could enjoy his meal, or Prime Minister Diefenbaker spending billions of dollars so that top government officials could have survived underground for a month?

          I won’t bother asking Flug’s opinion. I already know.      

                                  -end-

Adam in the uncritical Garden of Eden

No one criticized Adam

                    by Robert LaFrance

          Adam, there in the Garden of Eden, must have found life easy. He may have been lonely, but there was nobody—at least at first—to criticize him. One day last week, I had three people tell me that one reference I had made in a recent column was one they’d heard before. I was a plagiarist. I looked that up, and it wasn’t what I had thought all these years (one who gets up close and personal with farm animals). A plagiarist is one who copies other people’s writing.

I had stated clearly in the column that what I was saying wasn’t original with me. Referring to New Brunswick weather, I had said: “If you don’t like it, wait a minute.” We’ve all heard that for decades, so it was clear that I was quoting an unknown someone.

When I referred to Adam, I was thinking this: Whatever he said was original, since he was the only one there, and if there had been anyone to read his newsletter from the Garden of Eden, it would have been clearly the first time anyone had ever said those words.

That is, there was no one else there until one day Eve came along and started ribbing him about his column. “You’re plagiarizing yourself,” she snarled. “You said the same thing in your July 17 newsletter. And by the way, when are you going to fix the bathroom cabinet? It’s been like that for months.”

The good times never last, do they?

                              *******************************

On another topic altogether, I feel that I should announce that the next time people at a supper table go on and on about disease, pestilence, death, sickness and their downright grubby lives, I am going to do a Moose Thompson and throw the table, people and all out through a window.

          It is an amazing phenomenon. When a crowd of people—in-laws, outlaws and the totally lawless—get together around a table groaning with roast beast (See ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas’) the topic inevitably goes to injury, death, disease, etc. It can’t seem to go anywhere else. People compete to come up with the goriest stories.

          My usual method of dealing with this, after my patience is exhausted, is to say: “Hey, how about those Leafs?” Or: “Pass the pomegranate-rosehip salad, willya?” Of course we won’t have pomegranate-rosehip salad so that will shut them up for a while, and what are Leafs anyway? Don’t they mean Leaves? That’s not original, by the way.

          Like any antidote, this only works for a while, until the immune systems kick in. The first time I ever did it was at an Arbor Day supper at the Kilburn Church of the Intrepid Traveller. People were talking nicely about the coming baseball season, the spring weather, planting their mussel crop, and all of a sudden Aunt Freda said: “Poor Misty McHayla. She’s still in the hospital you know after her attack of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.”

          Fifteen minutes later almost everyone around the table had added their own example of a dread disease and, worst of all, seemed to revel in other people’s misfortunes. I believe the Germans call this ‘schadenfreude’. I had made a couple of feeble attempts to change the subject to something pleasant, like taxes or the 1958 Edsel, but everyone pretty much ignored me and continued on their tales of woe.

          Finally, I had had enough. In a loud voice I said: “Hey, how about those Leafs?”

          The shock was enough to halt Aunt Fannie’s recitation of her dog’s lingering death from Sickle Cell Anemia, which he had caught from her neighbour’s mutt. It even rendered Old Man Rivulet speechless. Other faces around the table registered some consternation as well.

          They tried; I’ll say that for them. Aunt Fannie mentioned crocheting, but soon drifted on to her niece’s accident with a crochet hook, the infection, etc. and Aunt Freda started talking about the nice spring weather, but that soon evolved into a story about her pet cat being drowned in last December’s freshet. The fact that Uncle Henry had also drowned trying to rescue that flea-bitten feline didn’t come up. Collateral damage.

          Finally I grabbed a case of Alpine lemonade and went out onto the porch to talk to my dog Kezman. I asked him how he was doing and I swear he answered: “I’m recovering now, but I was sick for quite a while. My brother Rover had it even worse…” I went inside and looked for the dog pound’s phone number. One of us had to go. Too bad I couldn’t do that with the human purveyors of doom.

                                            -end-

Odourless at Alert except on chili night

It was completely odour-free at Alert – outdoors anyway

                                     by Robert LaFrance

          This time of year—I just can’t help it—I start thinking about those poor wretches who are stationed in the far north of Canada, especially those on the military base and weather station at Alert, NWT (450 nautical miles from the North Pole).

          Yes, I know it is now located in Nunavut, but it was the Northwest Territories when I lived there from May 2, 1974 to May 20, 1975, and I am going to always think of it as NWT. The reason I think of Alert this time of year is that on every October 9^th, the sun goes to bed for the winter and doesn’t return until March 4^th.

          That’s a long, long time, folks, and during much of that time, especially December and January, the temperature hovers around –40º (either Celsius or Fahrenheit—they’re both the same at that point) and it’s not unusual for the wind-chill to be around –85ºF. The barracks I lived in were exactly 441 steps from the building where I worked at a top-secret government project called ‘reporting the weather’.

          Thank goodness for the armed forces base that was a quarter-mile away, and when I say thank goodness for the base I mean thank goodness for the Junior Ranks Club where I sometimes found myself ensconced. Those army guys’ tours were six months while ours were a year, but they spent more time in the club than we did because most of them had families. The army TOLD them to go there, but we had been asked. We were all in the club trying to forget. We weather guys tried to forget about our salaries that were mounting up in bank accounts in Toronto, and the army guys were trying to forget that they wouldn’t see their wives and kids for months.

          (To tell the truth, after a month there, we all forgot what we were trying to forget.)

          Some of the far north weather stations, like Eureka, 600 miles south, only saw a human from the outside world once a month when a supply plane came in, and some, like Isachsen, only got supplies in every two months or so. We at Alert were very lucky, because every Thursday morning, and sometimes more often, a military Hercules C-130 airplane came in, jammed to the gunwales with supplies for the soldiers, and some for us. Labatt was a popular name for supplies and a lot of Moose ran around after the plane landed.

          Why was there an armed forces base there? For two reasons: to proclaim Canada’s sovereignty over the area, and to listen to radio broadcasts from the USSR. One large double trailer at Alert was devoted to electronic surveillance and those guys meant business. One of our weather chaps was ‘overserved’ one night at the Junior Ranks Club and knocked on the door of the top-secret trailer. He was met at the door by a gent holding a machine gun.

          Of course all around that building were signs absolutely forbidding the taking of photographs. Some of our favourite pictures to send home were those of the signs and of the trailer itself, bristling with antennae pointed toward downtown Moscow. (This was during the Cold War, remember.)

          In early May of 1974, after seven months of training in Ottawa and Toronto, I boarded one of those C-130 freighters in Trenton, Ontario, and for the next eight hours my rear echelons were numb because the only place for humans on those planes was along the sides. In the middle was equipment and supplies. I sat on some webbed material that covered metal rods and looked at a jeep for eight hours. When Champlain landed in Acadia he couldn’t have been any happier than I was when we landed in Thule, Greenland. Overnight there, and on to Alert, another 90-minutes of butt-numbing vibration.

          The pilot made a low pass over the runway to persuade soldiers to get out of the way, and we were on the ground. We had interrupted a softball game that resumed as soon as the props stopped turning. It was 33ºF and they were wearing T-shirts and shorts.

          Although we got $1500 a year ‘isolation pay’, at Alert we had a full gymnasium (at the military base), a radio station, three bars, good food, and taped movies every night of the week. Indeed, we didn’t even have to go the whole six months without seeing the sun because during the fuel airlifts (Operation Boxtop) from Greenland we often hitched a ride,  and flying at 20,000 feet we saw the sun the whole way there and back.

          I was scheduled to go back to Ontario after 53 weeks, but due to a government glitch my name wasn’t on the passenger list that week. I had been written off the work schedule so I had no choice but to drink 'lemonade' for a week. Finally, a week past my sanity date, my Hercules C-130 landed in Trenton and when I got off the plane I was almost knocked over by the smell of flowers and grass.

         It was then I realized there had been no smell in Alert, at least outdoors. We don't need to mention chili night when the fragrance must had floated as far as Greenland, thirty miles away.
                                                   -end-