The best bra ever?

A message for the premier

by Robert LaFrance

          Taking a break from gardening, writing and other slaving tasks, I sat down in my easy chair and (figuratively) thumbed through the onscreen satellite TV guide where I found about to start a show called ‘The Perfect Bra’. In the interests of research, information and accuracy, I felt I had to look in on this show.

          It turned out to be more about engineering than prurient activity. While I am old—ancient—I am not too old to remember what is inside a bra, and what they showed was not it. Another of life’s disappointments.

          To quickly leave the subject of engineering and go to fishing, not to be confused with fission, I have to say the government of David Alward has not been successful in one major area of New Brunswick life—the weather.

          Although in 2011 we are now allowed to catch ten fish in these parts, the fish are not going to bite my hook if they can’t see it, so, Premier Alward, what’s with all this rain? I thought when you got yourself elected in September you promised a chicken in every pot, eternal prosperity, and perfect weather, much like Camelot. Although one friend of mine from the Sixties thought you had promised ‘pot in every chicken’ and was of course disappointed—especially after he bought an 18 cubic foot freezer—the rest of us aren’t too pleased either. Resign or give us some sunshine.

          My friend Dr. Rosscom from Bon Accord West is a retired meteorologist. He says that the reason for all the rain in late May and in June is that there has been ‘enhanced precipitation’. When I pointed out that the phrase meant ‘too much rain’ he merely went into Bureaucratic Mode #265 and bored us all for half an hour. I will not repeat the drivel that I had to endure while waiting for him to buy me a second lemonade.

          I don’t want you to think I am obsessed with female undergarments—at least to any abnormal degree—but I do have to relate this story that features my getting picked on and victimized by my wife—not for the first time in nearly three decades of marriage.

          We have a climbing plant called clematis (from the Hungarian word meaning 'crawling up the side of the garage if it has a decent trellis') and my wife was wondering how she was going to tie this up to the trellis since it appeared to need help. She went to the box of old (but clean) rags and found a pair of discarded pantyhose (formerly called unmentionables). She said she would use them, but the material was brown and clashed with the colours of the clematis and the garage. “Dye it,” I suggested.

          “Are you saying I’m getting fat?” she said, in that voice that is a combination of Husqvarna chainsaw and battery acid. It took some mighty backtracking for me to escape that one, and of course I never did. When she paused for a drink of water and some oxygen, I dashed out the doorway and into my Rolls Royce where the chauffer was waiting. All right, it’s a Toyota and I drove, but the point is, I escaped with several limbs intact.

          Down at the club, we pondered the subject of the name ‘June bug’. While there is a mini-war going on in Libya, planes crashing in the Malagasy Republic, a military coup in either Mozambique or Finland (I always get those two mixed up), fighting in Afghanistan, and trouble spots all over the world, there we were talking about June bugs, probably because we can crush them and can’t seem to do anything about the dictators of Libya and Yemen.

          “Why are they called ‘June bugs’?” asked Wenceslas the barkeep. “They show up at my trailer in the middle of May and those white grubs—they’re great in tequila by the way—appear around the first week of May. They’re June bugs too, or soon will be.”

          Like Red Green and Dougie Franklin who were asked ‘What do women want?’, we were all speechless. Then I suggested we start lobbying the government to get the name changed to ‘May-June bugs’ but that got nowhere. Flug’s idea was to call them ‘Torturing Disgusting Underfoot Crunchies’. It got a certain amount of airplay, but only until the pizza arrived and a few of us didn’t want to talk about it until the food was gone.

          After we polished that off, we all decided that we were wasting our valuable time; no government is going to get involved in such a controversial topic as…whatever we had been talking about. You have to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. We sat back, relaxed, and had another lemonade.

                                           -end- 

Canada's windiest city (Kincardine, NB)

Winnipeg no longer the Windy City

                    by Robert LaFrance

          You know those weather ‘events’ that blow down trees and flatten barns but aren’t called tornadoes? My friend Flug got caught in one on Thursday, June 9 – just to pin down the date in case you look at a weather map or were caught in the same one. If you were, that guy flying by in the red jacket with green trim around the collar – that was Flug.

          “I kinda got caught out in the rain, like that cake in the ‘McArthur Park’ song,” he recounted ruefully. We were sitting in the club on June 10. You could tell by the production line of 'lemonade' that Flug was still upset at the experience. “I went fishing in a little brook that runs into Larlee Creek, and I was up in the hills a LONG ways.” He stretched out his long arms to illustrate this and knocked over three glasses of lemonade that had been sitting two tables over, not to mention the three little old ladies who had been sipping and listening.

          “All of a sudden,” he continued, after he had replaced the lost lemonade and ordered three more for himself, “it started thundering, and the lightning was like being at an Alice Cooper rock concert (don’t ask). I just got out of the way before a big fir tree landed on the ground beside me. Then there was this big roar like Maggie’s Falls on steroids and I started flying through the air. It reminded me of the Sixties in Gastown (don’t ask).” He took a big drink of his lemonade.

          “Well, I fetched up solid on the roof of that big barn just below the hospital in Perth, which was weird, because the wind was coming from the other side of the river. I felt myself sliding off the roof and was sure I would break every bone in my body, but then an even bigger gust came up and kind of pinned me to the side of the barn. I slud down to the ground and just laid there full of wood slivers like that time I fell off the stage at the Stones’ concert in ’68 in Ottawa.” Don’t ask, and, by the way, he really said ‘slud’.

          That really was quite a storm. I’ve seen horizontal rain quite a few times, but that June 9 episode really took the cake, as it were, out in the rain. I was sitting in the cafeteria of Perth-Andover Middle School and waiting to be served some pasta, when the heaviest rain and pyrotechnics (as they say) began. Then I saw my wife out in the parking lot and in the midst of the tempest. She was carrying a couple of bags of something, trying to make her way into the school. At that point, had I been any kind of a husband, I would have gone out into the storm to try and help her, but just then my pasta arrived and I couldn’t let it get cold. While I have often said I would climb the highest river or swim the deepest mountain for her, I never said nothin’ about no thunderstorm.

          Someone asked me yesterday if I had later received the rolling pin treatment; was I forced to sleep in the garage for a week?  “Don’t ask,” I said, nervously rubbing my still tender cranium.

          Going from the subject of storms to people who should be left out in the rain, there seem to be more and more bad drivers on the road every day, to the point where government grants are now available to study them. A group of behavioural psychologists, neurologists, and a few other ‘ists’ have set up a clinic to test people who habitually tailgate, drive through the fog without headlights, and always drive too fast for conditions.

          The tail-gaters were tested first. The ‘ists’ used brain scanners, neuro-transmission detectors, and the like, all too technical for

this simple country boy to describe. None of the subjects had any measurable brain function. Indeed, the tail-gaters were on the minus side. None of the electronic devices could detect even so much as one gamma ray in the brains of these individuals, proving finally that bad drivers aren’t bad people; they’re just morons.

          And then there are the morons who try and enhance that condition by the addition of alcohol. I’ve done it myself, in my young and stupid days, but that was many decades ago and I drove a Falcon (named Hitler), top speed 43 mph downhill in a high tailwind. When I think of that car, I wonder just how far that June 9 uber-wind would have thrown it. Given that it was rarely out of the repair garage, probably not far.

                                         -end-

Nuclear fishin'

The ones that didn’t get away

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          Finally, FINALLY, I got fishing this spring, and did I ever haul them out of the brook!

          If you want to be picky, no, I didn’t catch any fish but I caught, among other things, 256 bushes (and lost 243 hooks), a fishing pole someone had lost or threw in the brook, an old and holey winter sock (remember winter?), a computer printer cartridge still in its plastic wrapping (Epson 338TX), a tin plate full of holes, what might have been a phone book, various ballpoint pens in a plastic bag, and a partridge in a pear tree.

          I was just kidding about that other stuff, but I did catch the partridge.

          It is nearly official summer, and now it’s time to do all those summer things we all looked forward to when it was February and the January winds Marched through on their way to April. For the past few weeks we’ve all seen more and more of the damage wrought by that December flood. Muniac Stream looks as if the Luftwaffe has been bombing it for weeks, and now all those roads washed out or partially washed out will have to be repaired.

          But here at home are the lawns. My friend Flug’s nephew Cruzer is supposed to be in charge of Flug’s front lawn, but he has developed a curious allergy disguised as a strategy. His ‘strategy’ is to mow every last blade of grass on every other lawn BEFORE he mows the front lawn, which is really the only lawn that can be seen from the road.

Lawns are supposed to be just for show, right? Cruzer agrees with this theory, but he says: “If I mow the front lawn first, I will say to myself that I have done the most visible lawn and am likely to not bother mowing the front of the orchard, behind the house, beside the house, around the raspberry patch, so I do those first.”

I did use the word ‘theory’. You can guess what happens, right? Cruzer will mow every flat green space in the Colony, and by that time he’s so tired he can’t mow the front lawn, the only one that really matters if one wants to impress people driving by – and really, isn’t that the whole idea of lawns? Guess who always gets to mow the front lawn.

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

Some further notes on spring, summer, and other things:

They say that one swallow doesn’t make spring, and my friend Flug, still sweating from his forced lawn mowing, agrees. We were sitting in the club and sipping on lemonades (“The finest drink of summer AND winter!” – Ed the Barkeep) when he started expounding on the subject. “See, I’ll show you!” He took several swallows of his drink, then several more. “See? That was about eight swallows, and spring is getting nicer all the time.” I’d like to say he had a designated driver, but he didn’t. On the other hand, his house is next door to the club and he doesn’t own a car. (I guess if you think about it, very few of us owns a car.)

It’s odd how one used a word all his life and still doesn’t know it exists. Shopping at a local grocery store last week, I found I was in somebody’s way because they used one of those words to which I just referred. “CHOUT!”

          Email addresses are weird birds at times. Someone might have as theirs: siddhartha@greenouthouse.net and if they were telling someone else that address, they would say for one part: “green outhouse – all one word – dot net”. I was thinking, one day when I obviously didn’t have much to do except read the Eaton’s catalog: what if a person’s email address was charley@alloneword.com? How would you tell that to someone and expect them to understand? I guess you’d just have to hope for the best. As they say in gardens and in church, lettuce spray.

          And now for a bit of nostalgia, to which I am getting more and more susceptible as I get ancienter. The only way to get to the Aroostook Valley Country Club, New Brunswick, Canada, is through Fort Fairfield, Maine, USA, and since I wanted to get to AVCC for an interview, I had to pass through the fort as it's called. It has been quite a few years since I’ve been there. Gone now are the Plymouth Hotel (and don’t try and say you don’t remember being there), Joe Ossie’s (as he was known) grocery store, Puddledock store, the Boundary Line Drive-In, Lenny’s Restaurant – you name it. The places I used to frequent are now part of the ether. When I was fourteen (and looking 12) I bought beer at Joe Ossie’s and Puddledock, and drank it at the drive-in. Later, when I was rich, I drank whisky sours at the Plymouth and had breakfast the next morning at Lenny’s. All gone now. It’s just as well. I was usually hitch-hiking and the driver was by no means designated.

Throw 'em in the clink!

Beware of computer prison

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          There has been a certain amount of consternation about last week’s column in which I suggested that anyone who has had a computer for two months and doesn’t yet know how to operate it should have it seized by the byte police. The readers’ reactions have been almost as outraged as the time I killed the mouse with a broom and people wrote in from every hamlet from Kenora, Ont. to Lunenburg, NS.

          (I suppose the question should be: where did the mouse get that broom?)

          I will stand by my recommendation. In fact, compared to one person I know, and I won’t mention his name, I am very lenient, even wimpy. “Execute them!” he roared one day. Another day when he calmed down, he said that the computer non-nerds should go to ‘computer prison’.

          That would be a rather crowded institution. It’s surprising how many people don’t have a clue how to operate the computer they sit down in front of every day. Oh, they can go on Facebook, and they can send email letters back and forth to their cousins, nephews and nieces, but they don’t have a clue how to attach a photo to an email, or how to file a photo they’ve received in an email.

          I blame oat bran.

          In April of 1994, Bill Gates, who was still running Microsoft then, became constipated. His doctor, an Elroy Rasputin of Mount St. Helen, Washington, suggested he take a week off work to recover his aplomb, as it were. The MD recommended to Gates that he eat miles and miles of oat bran every day, and little else except broccoli tea. Mister Gentleman (as my Dad used to say) that cleaned him out. At the end of that week he could run (no choice) from his bed to the outhouse (another Elroy suggestion) in 3.4 seconds.

However, while the cat was away, the computer mice were at play. Bill Gates’s assistant, who carried the unlikely name of Swann Lacche, had been busy. “Let’s make it easy for new computer owners,” he told the programmers. “Let’s make everything automatic so that Mr. And Mrs. Non-Tech don’t have to know about the DOS filing system, don’t have to know any of that technical stuff.”

And that’s just what they did; that was the origin of Windows 95, which has evolved into Windows Vista (a total piece of manure) and today’s Windows 7, which may be Windows 12 by the time this column is printed. Except for people who have to deal with people who have no clue how a computer works, everybody lived happily ever after, especially those who sold and fixed computers.

I bought my first computer in October of 1994 at the suggestion of the then Victoria County Record editor Willie Wark. Until then I had brought in my column typed on an actual piece of paper, and by the time Willie had edited it, someone else had typed it out, and someone else had pasted it in the paper, mistakes happened, which is like saying that a tornado is quite a breeze.

One example was that when I had interviewed a woman who said she had ‘post-partum depression’ it was printed in the paper that she suffered from ‘post-parent digression’. Those who have had the former know it’s no joke, and no one was amused. Guess whom they blamed? So I bought a $4300 computer.

Here’s the part that I am suggesting to today’s computer owners, if they want to avoid computer prison (located in the Regent Mall in Fredericton) or worse, execution. Take a course. From the day I bundled the various parts of my computer upstairs to my office until three months later, I taught myself how to manage computer software. I left hardware to braver souls.

On January 23, 1995, I emerged from my office. I had learned how to operate Windows 3.1 and I had connected to the Internet via telephone dial-up. My wife and children were a little nervous at first, at this now bearded stranger who suddenly emerged to have meals with them, but they got over it, I think.

The main thing was, I knew exactly how the DOS filing system – still used today, but away into the background – worked and I could type my column, then email it to the editor in Perth. However, there was another editor in Woodstock to go through, and he kept changing my correct grammar to incorrect grammar. I would write “between you and me” and he would change that to “between you and I” which, as the late Miss Sara Williams (my high school English teacher) could tell you, is wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Proud as punch at having mastered Windows 3.1, I was less than impressed when Microsoft announced a week later that it was soon coming out with Windows 95. “It will make computers easy to use for everybody!” trumpeted Swann Lacche. He was shot a week later when, coincidentally, I happened to be vacationing in Redmond, Washington.

                                       -end-

A modern Nostradamus

How’s that for a prediction?

                                        by Robert LaFrance

          In the early 1980s, a company called United Technologies hired consultants to look into the future of, well, technology, and they had some interesting predictions.     

         The main one was that by the 1990s four out of five North American homes would have a computer. Also, “by linking a computer to a TV set and then to the telephone network and outside data banks we will transform our homes into communications centres…” It was 1994 when I bought my first computer, and by February 1995 I had purchased the service called ‘dial-up’ to connect to the Internet and so this house was a communication centre.

My point is: some people are good at predicting stuff and others couldn’t predict that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. No need to rail on about the state of weather forecasting, but it’s there for all to see. Like ‘concurrent sentencing’ in our legal system, the concept of long-range weather forecasting is as futile as it is bizarre. Meteorologists, knowing full well no one will remember on Wednesday what they had predicted on Monday, smile their way through long-range forecasts that have as much to do with reality as my elbow has with dust from the planet Zenon.

          We all know people who can’t go to the bathroom without their Blackberries – and I should quickly explain to those technically challenged that a Blackberry is not a handheld body part, but a handheld electronic device that is everything from a cellphone to a movie screen. This zeal to always keep in touch with the world, in case the prime minister should call during a session with the Delsey, is catching on. I have heard (anecdotally, as they say) about kids in elementary school who object to the fact that they may not send text messages during art, music, or history class. Obvious teacher brutality.

          Television. What can I say about television? It had more potential than any invention since breathing, but has now sunk to the lowest possible common denominator – as Grampy would have said: “Lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut”. I continue to be amazed at the pure drivel and male cow manure on that rectangular screen. The newest TVs are wider to suit high definition technology, but the change hasn’t made the shows any wider. As long as “Power Boat TV”, televised poker games, and reruns of “I love Lucy” continue to be popular, I despair.

          “Television serves as a surrogate for many relationships within the family,” noted columnist Sydney J. Harris. “It is a way to avoid conversation…to shut out dissension and to lock oneself into an artificial environment. The television addict will watch any program in preference to none.”

          However, technology isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What about Facebook and email, which make it possible for my Aunt Flossie in Ernfold, Saskatchewan to know that I am planning to take the dog to the groomer next week for his monthly shampoo and set? (Not likely, believe me. Kezman would die rather than submit to a bath.)

          And what about my Internet connection that allows me to Google the earth and find out who lives at 245 Connaught Court Lane, London, England SW1? Without technology I couldn’t do that. Without my GPS I wouldn’t know where I was at any given time. Without my van’s ‘service engine’ light I would never have known that an $87 oxygen sensor, whatever that is, was malfunctioning.

          I tried to set my digital watch last week, and ended up driving to Toronto where the company keeps its records and its manual for this device. Quite a trip for a $19 watch. The heater fan by my living room chair quit working in February (not a good time) and it turned out to be because I had tilted it. The VCR refused to tape a show, and that was because I had somehow set the wrong day. My electronic or electric piano would only play in ‘reverb’ until I called the company and found out that the pushing of a mere 11 buttons would fix the problem. People email me text documents in Word Perfect format, or ODT, or whatever, and mail photos to me in file sizes so small they could only be printed the size of postage stamps.

There should be a law: anyone who doesn’t know how to operate a computer after having it two months should have to take it back and take a course, or go to computer prison. They shouldn’t be allowed to own one until they can find a file, attach it to an email letter and send it. Would four out of five homes have one then? Probably more like one in a hundred.

                                   -END-