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-