A very appealing sentence
by Robert LaFrance
Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, and not trying very hard to do it, the Beatles were the rage of the world. On the radio station I listened to, their tunes WERE the top ten and I think somebody singing about a sugar shack was 11th. John, Paul, George and Ringo were the bullies of the pop music scene. (I think John and Paul went on to become Popes, but I’d better check on that.)
So naturally they went to India to listen to Sitar music.
A sitar is like a combination of guitar, Hawaiian guitar, viola and mousetrap and the music that comes out of those things – to me, back then – sounded like a weasel just fed super-hot chili and tied to a tree. However, John, Paul, George and Ringo said it was the apex of the triangle we call life, so we listened. Ravi Shankar, who they said was the best sitar picker in Calcutta, was even on the Ed Sullivan Show and the audience cheered. He was even seen playing his axe on the Dick Cavett Show, and Dick said he was ‘amazing’. I went fishing.
The reason Ravi Shankar came to mind was that, according to news reports, he died at the age of 91 or so on February 28 of this year. The TV channel I was watching played some of his musical efforts – which to the western ear still sound like that weasel – and as I watched and listened, something was bothering me. I listened some more and finally realized what my musical ear was telling me:
Sitar music and rap “music” are brothers.
There is that same monotonous beat and that same repetition in the same places. The only difference I could hear was that the sitar sounds as if the dudes playing it don’t hate the world.
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In other notes, I have always had a problem with remembering things and…where was I? Oh yes, remembering things. About two days ago – or was it a month ago? – I heard this from CBC broadcaster Terry O’Reilly: “Forgetting is an essential human skill. It allows us to suppress details which we don’t need. Nature makes us forget in order to create space. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed with the details of our past.” And all this time I thought I was losing brain cells by the gallon every hour.
Not long ago (last week, last month, etc.) I wrote in this column about advertising scams, such as referring to a sugar-laden breakfast cereal as “part of this balanced breakfast”. Just this morning I read a fabulous offer from an international fast-food chain. I could get about forty dollars worth of hamburgers and fries, pop, and dessert for a dollar “at participating dealers only”. Perusing the fine print, I discovered that the only participating dealers were located in the Aleutian Islands and Argentina, neither of which I plan to drive the Toyota to, this month anyway.
By the time my adoring public read this column, the New Brunswick budget will have either been ‘brought down’ or ‘sent up’, depending on your opinion of budgets. I lean toward the phrase ‘brought up’, as in regurgitate. It’s been an interesting few months as the government and the daily newspaper I read worked hard to lower our expectations, but New Brunswickers aren’t high on expectations anyway. About ten years ago I interviewed a couple about living in the Great Depression. After informing me that depressions usually aren’t that great, they went on to say: “What depression anyway? We didn’t see any difference in the 1930s from the 1920s because we didn’t have anything in the first place. So whatever horrible things the 2011 budget has to say, none of us is very surprised.”
The faithful and long suffering reader will have heard my rants about the weird ‘justice’ system, which pretty much exists to check on which side has the better lawyer and to put forth such strange concepts as ‘concurrent sentencing’. The recent NB Court of Appeals judgment on a 2008 assault case near Miramichi illustrates yet another weird concept.
A guy was at a party and thought another guy had stolen some beer from him, so he sucker-punched the other fellow and beat him unconscious - five days in the hospital. The thug was sentenced to a 3-month curfew and 15 months probation. In mid-March of this year the appeals court ruled that he SHOULD have been sentenced to jail time. However, since he had served his curfew and almost all his probation, the court ruled he didn’t have to go to jail anyway.
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Is spring really a SADD season?
by Robert LaFrance
This time of year is notorious for sending people into deep depression because of the lack of sun and hence vitamin D, so much so that someone invented a name for it - Seasonal Affective Depression Disorder. It has to have a name, or it wouldn’t exist, right?
I think a lot of that feeling of sadness and depression is due to the vast amount of information we’re receiving, almost every minute of the day. If we aren’t watching TV news telling us about Libyans being slaughtered or the earthquake in Japan, we are looking on Facebook and seeing friends or children having a hard time, or listening to the radio news as we dodge potholes on Highway 105.
A couple of decades ago, someone tried to establish The Good News Network which only broadcast cheerful things like my grandmother winning the Daytona 500 in her Mazda, or cousin Herb being cured of an incurable disease, but that network folded in a matter of months. People don’t want to hear good news; they want to hear about others getting shot so they may breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn’t they. The German word ‘schadenfreude’ can be used here, meaning getting joy from the misfortunes of others.
Yesterday morning I awoke in a relatively cheerful mood (as cheerful as most of my relatives) and thought I’d go to town and get some grub for supper. Making the mistake of turning on the car radio, I was soon in a state of deep depression. By the time I got to the gas pumps and their latest increase, I was ready for six Valium and a case of single malt.
Too stupid to turn off the radio, I had listened to tales of that Japanese earthquake and tsunami, civil war in Libya, famine in Eritrea, pestilence in Bangladesh, flooding in Pakistan, the high prices of hotel rooms in Paris, and several newly found incurable diseases so that I was ready to throw myself under the speeding subway (if Larlee Creek had a subway train) or eat some of Aunt Jellico’s pan-fried squirrel livers.
Always ready to suggest a solution, whether or not a problem exists, I would say that radio and TV news networks need to be told: ‘enough is enough’. Although The Good News Network didn’t last, the other ones could include at least one small good news story per newscast. Either that or I head for Aunt Jellico’s kitchen.
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A couple of weeks ago there was grumbling about a report on the Fox Soccer Channel that Fernando Torres, a striker for the Chelsea (London) soccer club, was drawing a paycheque of $280,000 U.S. dollars a week, somewhat more than most of us earn. The famous Charlie Sheen made $2,000,000 an episode before he got fired from ‘Two and a Half Men’, and Lisa Kudrow was making a million dollars a week for her dubious acting on the show ‘Friends’.
The funny thing about it all was that I rarely heard any howls of outrage about the actors’ outrageous salaries, but some people seemed a little nonplussed that Torres was making so much money for running up and down a soccer field.
Weird. Here is one of the best athletes in the world and who must make sure he stays that way by hours of physical activity a day, compared to someone like Charlie Sheen whose greatest accomplishment, so far as I can tell, has been to show some skill at reading lines someone else has written for him. As well, I suppose he showed a certain resilience by reading those lines although no doubt under the influence of various chemicals not found in the usual self-respecting glass of orange juice.
Like most things in life, I don’t understand it.
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A couple of other comments before I go out and split some wood, whether or not it wants to be split:
- On the subject of alcohol, it is said that one shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach, but if you drink, the stomach wouldn’t be empty any more, would it? On the same subject, there was a recent report by Statistics Canada that the increase in wine drinking by us New Brunswickers is double the increase by the Canadian public in general. In the same news report, it was noted that New Brunswick roads other than the TCH are the worst in Canada. Connection?
- It is said that a New Brunswick civil servant is just now completing a book about the importance of getting all the bureaucracy correct BEFORE worrying about minor details like people. Taking a cue from a famous literary work, it is called ‘Lord of the Files’.
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Various thoughts for the pre-spring season
by Robert LaFrance
Last week as I was driving on an icy road I thought about the woman who was driving along the Trans Canada Highway, hit an icy patch, smashed into the guardrail, and received a bill for over $6000 for damage to that guardrail. Let me see…mmmmm…what could I use for a comparison? Suppose I were walking in my orchard and a Cessna 172, having run out of fuel because someone screwed up, landed on the back of my neck. Then the owner took me to court in an attempt to get me to pay for the damage to the plane’s undercarriage. I guess that’s way the world is nowadays. I would have to pay. Reminds me of the burglar in Vienna; while climbing in through a hotel window to steal some jewels, he fell and then sued the hotel for his medical bills – AND WON!
Also last week I saw part of a movie that was ‘based on a true story’. It concerned two garage mechanics who had foiled a robbery at a local corner store. In the true story it was based upon, only one garage mechanic was involved and it was at a bowling alley. No guns were involved, as in the movie. Instead, in real life, the mechanic threw a banana at the miscreant who fell down just as the metal rod he was holding slipped out of his hand. He is, as we speak, serving 27 concurrent sentences for the crime and the banana wielder is in the next cell, having pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly fruit.
Along the same line – truth in advertising – I have always been impressed by the breakfast cereal commercials that started appearing when I was a teenager. The commercial would show a breakfast setting that included fruit juice, a glass of milk, toast, jam, and a bowl of that delicious cereal which contained the equivalent of three cups of sugar. A diabetic, just walking past this material, would go into a coma. Then came the kicker: the cereal was ‘part of this balanced breakfast’. Caveat emptor, said the Roman guy, let the buyer beware. Or is it ‘a rolling stone gathers a stitch in time’?
Still on the subject of advertising – not to say FALSE advertising – I must mention the cynical way that some so-called ‘green’ advertisers go about the business of selling us stuff. They will call anything ‘organic’ because there’s little enforcement of truth in this advertisement, and they know that if they use the word ‘probiotic’ or ‘antioxidant’ people will snap it up. ‘Omega 3’ is another one. I swear, if you said a piston from a 1993 Jeep engine contained Omega 3, some people would chomp down on it.
Things we never heard of twenty or thirty years ago govern so much of our lives. I know people who wouldn’t buy a wristwatch except from eBay or Kijiji, and people whose days are filled with YouTube experiences and blogging. Who would have thought of a remote car starter in 1981? Or a phone that has more features than a liquor store? Indeed, during the 1980s, the Internet itself was just a weird concept to most people. I first went online in February 1994 after the late Bob Inman persuaded me that I needed a computer for my writing. I will never forget the day when he (my advisor) and I brought my first computer home in several boxes. He said: “There you are. You can put it together yourself. Call me if you run into problems.” I told him that if he went out that doorway without putting it together and giving me a lesson in word processing (a lesson I recorded on a cassette tape and needed many times) he was toast.
Some people are now expressing regret that the Good Value Store in Perth has closed. Quite a coincidence, since the Canadian dollar is now at a par with the U.S. one. People, without doing a lot of thinking about why prices are lower over in Maine, will go over there and shop, and then clap their hands to their heads as they see stores close in NB border towns. Here’s a hint: That gasoline or milk you buy over there is cheaper than here because we pay many more taxes so we can go into a doctor’s office and come out with our shirt. Our tax money goes, in part, to pay for our medical system. Anyone over there who gets sick better have medical insurance or he is up that proverbial creek. My cousin’s husband had to go into hospital in Buffalo, NY, for one day and it cost him $5000. If Canadian businesses keep closing, that’s where we’ll be.
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