by
Robert LaFrance
You can’t say you haven’t been
warned; I have said in two different columns this fall that I would soon write
a column composed entirely of puns, the lowest form of humour.
I always like to see entrepreneurs come up with new
ideas and then go ahead and produce an actual product for sale. Such was the
case with Frank Naismith, a local guy who designed a big beer mug (not that
anyone around here drinks alcoholic beverages) and put it on the market about
two weeks before Hallowe’en, which is supposed to be kind of a scary time. What
did he call his invention, you ask? It’s the Frank N. Stein.
Castor DeMercé, who lives down the
road and tries to be a carpenter, stopped by yesterday morning and we each had
a lemonade. The sun WAS over the
yardarm because I had put the yardarm into the ditch for the day. Castor was
saying that he had built in his garage two shelves for his power tools and they
had both collapsed from the weight. Just before he arrived at my estate, he had
put up yet another shelf and put the same heavy power tools on it. It was still
there half an hour later. I asked him why he didn’t simply put less weight on
it. “You gotta believe in your shelf,” he simply.
My second cousin twice removed (to
prison both times) Ernie said – not very originally – that it’s not what you
know, it’s who you know and proceeded to prove it. He said when he had been in
the slammer, the top dog in his cell block was named Bob Vail. He said that,
like Conrad Black, Bob had gourmet meals sent in from the kitchen while the
rest of the prison population, and indeed the people of Renous itself, had to
be satisfied with sirloin or quiche. “The rest tried to get the good meals
too,” Ernie said, “but it was to no avail. I was a good friend of Bob and got
good meals too, which proves that the secret is to know a Vail.” If he had
continued and mentioned our other cousin Noah Vale, I would have cheerfully
killed him. And probably ended up in Renous myself.
About a month ago my friend Flug
decided that he would no longer eat store-bought eggs. He asked me where I got
my eggs and I explained that, when one finds a source of ‘free-range’ hens’
eggs – the same as for fiddleheads – he does not divulge that source even if
someone gently placed red-hot steel spikes under his fingernails and insulted
his grandmother. So Flug, being Flug, decided he would buy a dozen laying hens
and keep them in his garage. “One hen never does what the others do,” he
complained, and I remembered a similar trouble when I had hens. There’s always
one, I told him. I called them ‘henigades’.
So Flug eventually got rid of the
hens, which had laid six eggs in four weeks, and moved on to his next adventure
in craziness. The day after he gave the hens away, I looked out my kitchen
window and saw Flug going by on his old Schwinn bicycle and then fifteen minutes
later I once more saw him going by – backwards this time. I hollered out and
asked him why he was doing that and he said that he was ‘recycling’. I think
Flug needs a hobby.
The country music group The Rebels
was in town last weekend and one part of their act was a song about Christmas
when five men dressed as Santa Claus – one for each of the boys - were to have
come out on stage and to do a little dance number. Trouble was, the Santa who
was supposed to come out and dance beside Sidney J. had a flat tire on the way
to the theatre and didn’t make it. Sidney J. was – one might say – a Rebel
without a Claus.
Everyone in the small community of
Pandora is laughing because a fellow named Scott Ginger tried to murder Jayden
Hislip’s grandmother for her cash. Everyone but Scott knew better than to annoy
Mrs. Grindon. If Scott had asked anyone, he would have learned that she was the
wrong one to attack. The reason he wasn’t successful was that she was a trained
MI6 operative and knows 46 ways to kill a human and that includes Scott. Why
did he do that, you ask? Apparently what happened was that Scott was
‘over-served’ as people say when they have drunk too much, and when someone
used the word ‘kilogram’ he decided to try it. He will be out of the hospital
by Christmas – of 2013.
-end-
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