by
Robert LaFrance
I sometimes see television
commercials – not that I watch TV – featuring those exercise machines called
Bowflex or Elbow-Stretch, Butt-Zonker, whatever, and am always intrigued by the
question of where they find the people who appear on the screen. They do NOT
need exercise. In fact, in many cases I would suggest that those tightly strung
exercise fanatics go have a beer and lighten up – in more ways than one.
But then this morning, between my
bowl of oatmeal and my blueberry muffin, I revised that original thought. Let
those people keep walking and running on treadmills, lifting weights, and
eating delicious tofu burgers in between. Just think, I thought to myself
(which is my favourite way of thinking), all that energy being wasted while we
whine and cry about the price of hydro. As I wrote in a previous column but
didn’t pursue it very far, we could store that energy in giant batteries and
supply all our houses’ electrical needs while keeping that waistline slim and
trim.
(There is a woman in one of the
Bowflex commercials who could probably supply enough electrical power to light
up Winnipeg.)
I mentioned in that column that we
who live on hills could also set up a windmill or two and get our power ‘FREE’
from the wind. I also mentioned that if we bought a free $30,000 windmill and
it supplied all our house’s electricity, it would easily be paid off by the
year 2036 and it would be the old gravy train after that. At least for a week
or two, until the windmill finally wore out.
Although NB Power says that
Beechwood Dam was in no way responsible for the Perth-Andover Flood of 2012, I
am thinking that they may be just a bit, a tad, disingenuous, if you are
familiar with that word. I am, because it’s my job. Some people avoid using all
those syllables and simply use the word ‘lying’ but let’s have a little charity
in our hearts. They could have been merely drunk, or recently had heartburn for
which they took a tablespoon of Milk of Amnesia.
Back to the point, Beechwood Dam
could be bulldozed if each of us Victoria County and Carleton County residents
bought a Bowflex and duct-taped wires from it to the electrical grid. I would
say that within six months we would make up all the power from Beechwood Dam,
and then some, and we would be the fittest bi-county area in Canada. I should
mention though, just in the interest of disclosure, that I just bought a block
of Bowflex stock. A guy’s gotta put food on the table, even if it’s tofu.
Back to the world of reality – we
know Beechwood Dam ain’t goin’ anywhere – I guess it’s about time we all
figured out that Perth-Andover and area is expendable in the eyes of those who
make the decisions. NB Power let massive amounts of ice come down the river and
then held it all at Beechwood so Fredericton wouldn’t get flooded.
Perth-Andover is the meat in a moist sandwich and simply has to move to higher
ground.
********************************
On to other subjects (while
Perth-Andover residents struggle to get fair settlements for their homes and
businesses), I continue to read the books of Henry David Thoreau, who, during
the 1960s, was thought to be the wisest man ever. He lived – on a small hill I
should add - at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century and
seemed to think a lot. I tried that in 1982 and oh how I’ve suffered since, but
that’s another story.
Back in 1845, Thoreau – poor chap –
didn’t have an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or indeed a phone that might have
awakened him at 3:00 am when someone’s cell phone ‘pocket-dialled’ him. He
didn’t even have what the late Melvin Barclay used to call ‘tricity’, so what
kind of a life could he possibly have had?
True, he had a brain the size of
several buildings in Riley Brook, and he had strong arms and legs to walk all
over the place and paddle a canoe to far-flung areas, but really, what fun
could he have had? “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the
universe will appear less complex and solitude will not be solitude...” he
wrote in ‘Walden’. There was a time when I didn’t know what that meant, but
last evening, as I looked in on my favourite soap opera (the Stanley Cup
finals) I finally knew. It was June 11. When I was a kid and interested in
hockey, the season was over in April. Let us get a life before the season is
year around and floods are every year.
-end-
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