This week's lies

DIARY

How come only OTHER people are smart?

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          Every day I see, hear and read about how brilliant other people are. I’m sick of it, I tell you. I have apple trees and my shoes don’t squeak, and I can cook scrambled eggs that would make you say: “These aren’t bad”,
so why don't I get the recognition I deserve? 

          This feeling of inadequacy always comes by after I read a collection of quotes from famous people. “I could have said that,” I say. “I just needed to be in the right place at the right time.”

          Swedish-American actress Hedy Lamarr has a quote that has followed her around. Somebody asked her once how she became glamorous, one of Hollywood’s great beauties. She said: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” That remark was quoted in every newspaper and magazine in Christendom and beyond – maybe as far as Ernfold, Saskatchewan. I could say something like that. Would the papers quote me? No.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘He’s not very glamorous. I’ve seen him shopping at Wal-Mart. He looks like an apple farmer from Kincardine. Can he really have anything worthwhile to say?’

          I was fifteen when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I said: “Gee, that’s too bad.” Did any of the famous newspapers quote me on that? No. They quoted the mayor of Toronto who said: “The world will long remember this man who meant so much to all of us, the hopes and dreams of a generation.” Never mind that he went on to say to an aide: “So he ran around with bimbos, so what? I’d like to get a glance at his little black book.”

          “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” said the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. There are close to 500 patents on mousetraps, including a laser driven one that fries the poor rodent even before he gets to the cheese. I invented a mousetrap when I was living in Birch Ridge, but I didn’t see the world beating any path to my door. I called my mousetrap Cherree; she was a very hungry (because I didn’t feed her) mongrel cat who would kill anything that moved so she could get a meal. Aunt Myrtle’s leg took quite a while to heal.

          Back to quotes, I recall the day when I half-sawed off my leg with my Husqvarna chainsaw and I said to the ambulance attendant: “Lordie, lordie, this hurts worse than hearing poetry on an empty stomach.” Did that appear in any collection of famous Canadian quotes? No.

          If Winston Churchill had said: “Save my seat, willya? I gotta go to the bathroom,” it would have been reproduced in every newspaper from Malaysia to Halifax, but if I said the same thing (which I did last weekend when I was trying out a chair at a yard sale), nobody would care. I’m getting tired of this kind of treatment and I’m calling on all readers of this rant to give me a call. We’ll organize a ‘Quote Weekend’ and invite all the federal politicians who are trying to get elected or re-elected. They’ll be there. I understand an MP’s salary is now $4 million a week plus expenses, so a lot of people will be vying for that job.

          I have prepared a few quotes and will send them to the papers in advance of the Quote Weekend. “Sure you can ride a bicycle across Niagara Falls,” I wrote, “but you have to have lots of air in your tires.” What national paper or TV station could fail to pick that up? It’s brilliant.

          My old friend the late Hiram Kinney was a goldmine of quotable quotes. (I  rely on him a lot.) Back in the 1970s he owned a woodlot along the Currie Road and decided to cut a hundred cords of softwood logs and pulp. Trouble was, his neighbours seemed to feel he had strayed over the property lines in a few places. They hired surveyors to determine where the lines were and found that Hiram had accidentally wandered as much as five hundred feet off his own woodlot – a total of twenty-nine times – to get big logs.

          “Gadzooks!” he must have said when he realized his mistakes. As apologetic as he was, the landowners took him to court where he produced his deed and showed it to the judge. He pointed to a phrase that was in the legal wording: “…one hundred acres, more or less…”

Here’s what Hiram told the judge: “I figured it was more.” Now THAT’S a quote.

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