But don't smoke that cigarette!

Smoke is vital to our existence 

                    by Robert LaFrance

          Those who love smoked salmon know just how important that material—smoke I mean, not salmon—is to our very survival as a nation, indeed to the survival of the free world while the stock markets are crashing down around us.

          Don’t be alarmed by this, but the other day I got to thinking, and this time it wasn’t about philosophy, garden tools, or open-pit mining—deep subjects like that—but about smoke and how it’s something we don’t think about much, but something that is housed in the very vitals of our persona or personas.

          The main thing to make sure of is that it doesn’t occur in the wrong place, such as on one’s living room rug, but that it stays put where it’s supposed to be and helps instead of hinders.

          Now where was I going with this? I remember now; Saturday afternoon I happened to be napping to rest up for a full night’s sleep after supper (but my wife kept waking me up by taking the lawn mower past my window), when I got up to see a big smoke across the river. It looked as if half of that area were aflame. As a conscientious reporter, I phoned over to see what was going on and found that it was merely ‘an old barn’, which I took to mean it had been torched to get rid of it.

          Not half an hour later my wife came inside and said the lawn mower was smoking. Again she woke me up, though she knew I needed my rest for sleeping. I trundled downstairs and looked out onto the lawn to see that the lawn mower wasn’t smoking at all—it was smoked. Apparently a squirrel had shorted out a sparkplug wire and the whole thing exploded. Curious that would happen while SHE was using the lawn mower.

          If you have lived in the Sudbury, Ontario area—Copper Cliff and over that way—you may remember the pollution (smoke) that the nickel plant there used to lay down until INCO built a 1200-foot smokestack to take the offending material away. I was living in Ontario at the time and was quite amused and bemused that the company’s way to deal with all that pollution was to merely put it farther up into the air so that it spread over a wider area and made fewer Sudburyites cough, retch and be mad at them. Toronto trucks its garbage up to the Timmins area, does it not? Maybe the same genius took care of the Sudbury smoke problem.

          “Who hasn’t heard of the song “Smoke gets in Your Eyes”? Well, my great-nephew Clyde, but that doesn’t count. He’s a little vague on which continent Canada is located, although he’s quite certain it’s not Antarctica. The point is that the word ‘smoke’ is there again, as in the tune ‘Smoke on the Water’, and of course there are many more, less famous tunes.

          London, England, although it started dealing with its massive pollution problems in the 1950s, is still called ‘The Smoke’ by people who don’t live there. I was recently listening to a soccer game from Sunderland, which is near Newcastle, and heard the announcer say that Sunderland’s next game was ‘down in the smoke’ against Chelsea FC. Now, anybody who knows anything about Newcastle and area and the Industrial Revolution, knows that anybody from there shouldn’t be calling somewhere else ‘the smoke’. Newcastle, like Birmingham, Manchester and other cities, was an asthma sufferer’s nightmare until governments cleaned them up. (Translation: The factories all closed.)

          Wine conna-sewers refer to some wines as ‘smoky’ and apparently that’s a good thing; there a mountain range called The Smokies in the southeastern U.S.; although ‘having a smoke’ is less common today, it is still done.

          Which reminds me: Last February I motored to ‘the capital’ of our province (Note to Clyde: that’s Fredericton) on business and when I emerged from the main post office there I could see a whole whack of people standing out by the side entrance of the building. There was a huge cloud of smoke over their heads. At first I thought of grabbing the fire extinguisher from the van, but then, when a quick gust cleared out some smoke, I could see that the people were apparently workers from the building as they stood in the bracing air to grab a hit of nicotine.

          This was February, as I said, and it was c-c-cold, but those stalwart souls were out there for their smokes. One guy wasn’t smoking with his confreres and I asked him why. “Oh, I have a patch,” he said, pulling up a sleeve. “I’m trying to quit, but I’m out here supporting my friends who aren’t.”

          A final comment: as any election nears, we can see the politicians turning greener and greener, as in eco-sensitive. Their intent is to fool us into thinking they are going to clean up the atmosphere. Don’t listen folks; it’s all smoke and mirrors.
                                          -end-

Sept. 21/11...Still not too smart

Further proof of my lack of grey matter 

                    by Robert LaFrance

          Remember a few years ago when I asked a woman if she had rose hips and got a good slap up the side of the head? Well, I did it again. That’s what it is to get old; you forget stuff you really should remember. I was talking when I should have been listening—and remembering. From now on I’ll have no trouble remembering though, once I get this rolling pin removed.

          On to pleasanter subjects, or at least on to a subject that doesn’t describe my ending up in Intensive Care:

          I am wondering if anyone out there in the real world had heard about my winning the lottery. To be specific, the Atlantic Lottery and one million dollars. If you haven’t, there’s a good reason for that. However, I did win a free ticket and another week of hope. Which reminds me: many years ago I knew a girl named Hope and she left my heart broken and bleeding, and I have a feeling that all my future lottery efforts will meet the same fate.

          Why do we buy lottery tickets anyway? Yes, I know, to have a chance to win zillions and move to Easy Street from Hogface Avenue, but what are the odds? I have estimated that, in my case, the odds against my winning the lottery—any lottery over twenty dollars—are roughly 44 billion to one. And that would be on a good day when the stars are lined up in my favour. Yet I continue to spend two to four dollars every week on the off-chance that my number will be drawn.

          Old Man Fabianski said to me one day as we were discussing the subject: “If you were flying (in a plane that is) at five thousand feet over the Gobi Desert (in Mongolia) and threw a dime out the window of the plane, then flew to Lagos, Nigeria (in Africa) for lunch, then a month later came back on a camel looking for that dime, you would have a better chance of finding it than you do of winning the lottery.”

          What is it about me that insists I must never be rich? Every day in the paper I see photos of Charles and Letitia, or John and Myrtle, or Gerda and Erick, who have won four million dollars, or even $100,000. What do they have that I don’t?

Winning lottery tickets for one thing. Still, why can’t my ticket be the one yanked out of the lucky barrel?

          When my father was about seventy I suggested that he buy a lottery ticket. “Why would I want to do that?” he asked. “What would I spend it on? I got everything I need—a pension, a good dog, lots to eat, and a television.” Put like that, I suppose he had a point, but on his table at the time was a photo of me. I showed that to him. Then I tried a photo of my kids, then the dog and cat. Nothing. Finally I suggested that if he won the lottery he could drill a new well and hire a housekeeper. That did it. He gave me two dollars. Three days later he asked about the lottery. I said he hadn’t won. Quite a look of disappointment, even annoyance, there. He really expected to win.

          Among the other lotteries I have (not) won over the years are The Irish Sweepstakes, the Vancouver Yacht Club Lottery, The Inuvik Annual Municipal Draw (for a snowmobile and directions on how to build an igloo), and the Perth-Andover Fire Department 50/50 Weekly Draw.

          You want to talk about rubbing salt in a wound, try mentioning to me about that blasted sign in Andover, the one that gives the name of that week’s 50/50 winner. The prize is around $4500 now, which means I could pay off last month’s bar tab at the club and have enough left over for some Froot Loops, my favourite cereal, next to porridge. Trouble is, they keep drawing someone else’s name. Either that, or they keep spelling mine wrong.

          Flug’s cousin Esmerelda from Bairdsville is one of those people you love to hate, because she wins a lottery about every two years. No, ‘hate’ is much too weak a word. How about despise, loathe, abhor, revile, and detest? I’ve been buying lottery tickets since the late 1970s and the most I’ve ever won is fifty dollars—at best a down payment on my bar bill. I recall winning that and the cashier handing me the five ten dollar bills. I thought: “She’s my good luck charm,” and asked her to marry me, but since we were both married it was rather inconvenient to arrange.

          Am I going to continue buying lottery tickets? You bet your earlobe. Ya can’t win if ya don’t play. Whatever you may have heard, I really am not very bright.

                                       -end-        

Sept. 14/11...Famous Dutch painter

Call it Vincent Van Go 

                    by Robert LaFrance

          On the last day of August, the day the safety check ran out on it, I took my old van to the ‘automobile recycling centre’. (Junkyards are passé.)

          Whatever the place is called, I was sad to take the 1997 Plymouth Voyager in to its final resting place. We bought that vehicle in the year 2000 and, as they say, it didn’t owe us a dime. Walking away from it on August 31, I thought about all the wonderful times we’d had together as my kids grew up while the van, like myself, was growing older. But although I get better looking every day, the old van was rusting within and without. It needed a valve job, a new muffler, two rocker panels, a ball joint, a tire rod end, at least one strut, a lot of body work, and a dozen other things including a back door latch.

          I didn’t mean to suggest that we had never had any mechanical trouble with the Voyager. After I had driven the van about a year, it overheated, and I took it to Donnie Hathaway, my late friend who lived in Upper Kilburn. He said that the water pump was leaking but my warranty, which still had a few thousand kilometres on it, should cover it. I took Mister Van to the local garage that did the service work for that warranty company and the mechanic said: “Oh, I’m sure that the water pump is covered, but I’ll just call to make sure.”

          After a phone call he came back scratching his head. “That’s weird,” he said. “I called and (begin italics) the water pump (end italics) is under warranty, but not (begin italics) the case (end italics). You have a leak in your water pump case, but your water pump is fine, so they won’t pay for it. I guess it’s in the fine print.” I took the van back to Donnie Hathaway to see if he could find me a secondhand water pump with a case that didn’t leak. “You wait a minute,” he said. “I think I can braise that, but I can’t guarantee how long it will last.”

When I took the van to the junkyard on August 31, 2011, the braising job was still holding, but the warranty company had gone bankrupt in 2007. Now tell me there isn’t the occasional snippet of justice in this world, like when Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden got braised. (However, there’s still Henry Kissinger.)

          That van was one of the few ever featured in a Telegraph-Journal Saturday supplement article when, after my older daughter’s second year at Mount Allison University in Sackville, I wrote a story and took a few photos showing just how much stuff one minivan would hold. Every cubic inch of that van was filled with my daughter’s things, and the roof container was packed solid too. One photo I took showed all those things on our porch, and it was clear that a tractor-trailer couldn’t have held all that, but my van did. A bee can’t fly, right?

          Then there were the various trips to Gaelic College on Cape Breton Island, to Highland Games on PEI, in Fredericton, and to dozens of soccer games that occurred everywhere from Plaster Rock to Saint John to Moncton to Miramichi and all points south and east. The van showed up at county fairs, family reunions, potluck suppers, at fishing holes and what seemed like every event in the Maritimes.

          I remember one of those times when the whole family piled in and headed for the Gaelic College just outside Baddeck, NS, where my daughters were going to spend a week learning bagpipe and drumming stuff. (I hope that not too technical.) It was a Sunday, no garages open, and as soon as we had the van packed I saw that a tire was slack. I pumped it up and off we went. If I could make it to Fredericton, I could get the tire fixed or get a new tire if need be. Hell, we were made of money back then.

          At Coldstream the van was weaving back and forth so I had to pump the tire again. Finally we got to Fredericton where I checked the tire. It still held 35 psi; I couldn’t believe it. Should I trust it? Yup. We drove all the way to Cape Breton without a further problem from that tire, and it was months before another tire (not that one) went flat. Go figure.

        So it wasn’t just a vehicle I took to the junkyard last month; it was a whack of memories. I hope it has a happy retirement and its parts help other vans take kids all over the place.
                                               -end-

Quaking with fear - NOT

Working on a VERY slow news day

                    by Robert LaFrance

          I am glad I don’t call myself a journalist, television or otherwise. Too much pressure. I am just an apple grower who types.

          That earthquake in Virginia a couple of weeks ago—give me a break. It was pathetic the way CNN and other TV networks tried to make that into a major story. True, a few (okay, a lot of) buildings shook a little—so do I when I get up in the morning after an enthusiastic evening of darts and lemonade at the club, but it doesn’t get on the national news.

          Almost seven minutes of one CNN report dwelt on the fact that two buildings in some city near New York had leaned into each other and were touching each other, no doubt as a result of that horrific earthquake that measured 5.8 or 5.9 on the Richter Scale. A good belch would measure 5.5. Come on!

          So here are hundreds of people dashing out of these buildings before they caved into the sea. The news reporter interviewed half a dozen people who were under great stress from what they had escaped. Meanwhile, they were standing about two car lengths from the building. One older lady said her son had been working in one of the buildings and she didn’t know if he had been rescued. By this time the nearby sidewalks and streets were filling up with panic stricken people.

          Since the broadcast was live, the hard-hitting, up to the minute news team didn’t have time to prepare for what happened next. One of the people emerged from the crowd. He was holding up a photo. When he got near enough, and the camera could pick up the details of the photo, it was clear that it showed the two buildings in question. “Just thought you’d like to see this,” he said to the reporter. “I took this about ten years ago. I just went over to my apartment and got it.”

Holy poop Batman! The photo showed the two buildings clearly touching each other even back then. “Yeah, the earthquake didn’t do it,” he explained. “They been like that since the 1950s.”

          The camera then switched to the reporter. It’s not often I get to use the word ‘dumbfounded’ when describing one of these television personalities. His expression reminded me of last Christmas morning when my friend Flug and I watched Flug’s nephew Raymond III open his present. He was sure he was going to get the keys to a new Malibu, but all he got was a pair of socks and a Swiss Army Knife. Another word that would have fit was ‘crestfallen’. That’s also how the reporter looked. His fabulous story was, as they said in the movie Napoleon Dynamite: “A decroded piece of crap”.

          As the ‘earthquake’ story continued on CNN, they grew more and more desperate to find someone, anyone, who had been hurt, got a hangnail, suffered post-traumatic stress, fell down, cut themselves shaving. Because it was the most entertaining show on TV at the time, I stuck with it. Finally I was rewarded. A ‘news’ team in Norfolk, Virginia found a cracked basement wall. The news networks descended on the area like relatives to a free and open bar.

          They were interviewing people like mad. “How did you escape the devastation?” Then, the same thing happened as before. The homeowner, who had just returned from Wal-Mart, where there was a sale on toothpicks and Barry Manilow CDs, wanted to know why 200 people were trampling his lawn. Oh, that,” he said, after someone had explained. “That crack has been there since my brother-in-law Gerald backed into it with his pickup. He was drunk of course. This was 1999, or was it the year before? I tell you, those Hendersons spend all their time suckin’ up beer. The whole family should be taken off welfare and…”

          At that point the camera broke, or something, because the scene quickly shifted to an interview of a guy in Richmond, a few hundred miles away from the quake’s epicentre. It seems that he had been out ‘with the boys’ and only got to bed at 9:00 am. The quake woke him up. “Oh no!” he told his wife. “That quake shook the money right out of my wallet. I don’t know where it went!”

          In all seriousness, the earthquake did cause some damage to historic buildings in Washington, and some people were injured, usually in panic evacuations of office buildings. According to a press release from the Delsey company, there must have been other types of evacuations too, because their sales went up 11% that week. My point is, you can do better, CNN and others. We had a 5.9 earthquake here in Victoria County in 1982 and the only casualty was the radio that fell off a shelf in the bedroom of my Birch Ridge estate.

          My dog Belvedere didn’t even wake up.

                                  -end-