The 3 Vomiteers of the Senate (Dec 11/13)

I cannot make up things like this 

                                  by Robert LaFrance 

            Because I used to live in Hamilton and later Burlington, Ontario, I occasionally tune in to CHCH-TV that covers the area just to see some of my old haunts. I have to say that something I saw on last evening’s news broadcast knocked me to the ground and stomped me.

            You know how I keep asking who’s in charge of the weather? I found out. The TV reporter was interviewing a Hamilton city employee whose name and title were: “Bob Paul, Hamilton’s Acting Manager of Winter Control.”

            Go ahead, look it up on Google. I swear I am not making this up.

            In other breaking news stories, the ongoing Senate scandal (The Three Vomiteers) is…well…ongoing. It reminds us that some people have no shame and no respect for others, especially for us little people. Of course there are government flacks, PR people, and downright liars (all of the above) telling us that all is well and they’re taking care of it. It has been ‘fine language’ at its worst.

            Coincidentally, shortly after I listened to The CBC National News, I picked up an Agatha Christie story called ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. Someone was complaining about the ‘mess’ things were in even though government spokesmen tried to smooth it all over. Here’s the passage: “Mess?” said Mr. Bonnington. “That’s what’s the matter with the world nowadays – too much mess and too much fine language. The fine language helps to conceal the mess, like a highly flavoured sauce concealing the fact that the fish underneath it is none of the best.”

            Turning to sports, I have to mention the most expensive Christmas present of all time – the NHL’s deal with Rogers which will now broadcast all NHL hockey games for the next twelve years for a mere $5.2 billion.

I can’t imagine a world without Don Cherry (I joke). What does this all mean, I ask myself? Will I have to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on my cellphone? Back to the future indeed; when the first TVs came out the screens were about that size.

Here I have to tell you the truth; I don’t watch hockey on television – or cellphone, or tablet, etc. – and haven’t since the 1970s. What I am about to tell you will probably get me kicked out of Canada, but the truth will out, as they say. I much prefer watching soccer on television to watching hockey. I do like hockey, but it’s the local live games that I prefer, especially high school games and minor hockey when the kids are out there doing their best.

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Recently I was reading a book about Canada in the 1890s and came across a passage about Sir Henry Pelatte, an eccentric Toronto millionaire. I probably needn’t have used the adjective ‘eccentric’ once you know what I’m going to say. This guy once had a set of false teeth made for his horse. As I said, I can’t make this stuff up.

Every year at this time there’s the Politically Correct argument that we shouldn’t say “Merry Christmas” but instead we should go around uttering “Happy Holidays!” People really get into this minor quarrel as if it were something that mattered. My friend Flug phoned me last evening and greeted me thusly: “Merry Christmas slash Happy Hanakah slash Happy Holidays slash blah blah blah!” I wasn’t sure which ethnic group the blah blah blahs were aimed at, but I got the point.

            Speaking of Christmas, last evening I attended a choir performance in a county long ago and far away and particularly enjoyed one feature of the program – Carol singing. A young choir had just finished their performance and the MC, a nice lady with blue hair, announced that they would now have Carol singing. “Come on up on stage, Carol,” she said. And Carol proceeded to sing some Celine Dion numbers, except she wasn’t so skinny.

            As we speak, it should be a storm day for the schools, but it isn’t, probably because there was one last week. Are they rationed or what? Looking out my living room window, I saw the cars of two acquaintances going by. When I was talking to both of them (the people, not the cars) at that concert last evening, they both said they would be staying home if the weather was bad today.

I think there’s something about bad weather that forces some people to go out on the roads. No doubt it’s a syndrome of some kind. Or how about plain stupidity?

                                              -end-

Flummoxed, flabbergasted, and gobsmacked (Dec. 4/13)

It wasn’t possible to defeat Aunt Jessie 

                                       by Robert LaFrance 

            Just this morning I was telling Flug about some occurrence when I was growing up in Tilley in the 1950s and he said: “Bob, you should write your life story. Or even your autobiography.”

            I was flummoxed, flabbergasted, and gobsmacked.

            I suppose it could be argued that this weekly column is, in a way, an autobiography, but it doesn’t really delve into all the exciting events of my childhood in Tilley where every day was an adventure. I resolved to think about my years growing up in that hamlet named for a temperance leader and Father of Confederation (Sir Leonard Tilley), and compare notes of that turbulent time when we expected to be vapourized any minute by a Russian ICBM; we lived fast and expected to die young and have a beautiful corpse, as the saying went.

 I did exaggerate slightly. It was hardly wall-to-wall excitement, growing up in Tilley. In later years it was a hotbed of exhilaration, but I had moved to Ontario by that time. I remember coming home from Ontario for a 10-day vacation from my job at Canadian Canners in Burlington only to find that Tilley now had a public dump.

No kidding. A public dump for Tilley! Even though it was located in Lake Edward, or on the way there, it was OUR dump because it was my Aunt Jessie LaFrance who had fought the government to a whimpering bowl of jelly on the issue. Every day of the week she was either phoning the MLA or going to his office or house. “We want a dump so that people don’t keep putting their garbage in the woods. In OUR woods,” she emphasized.

One day Premier Richard Hatfield was in Perth-Andover at the same time Aunt Jessie was. Talk about two worlds colliding. By the time she got through with him, he would have moved the legislature to Tilley just so he could have some peace.

I mentioned years ago in this column something that my grandfather Muff LaFrance had said to me during this very same vacation. We had been talking about all the goings-on in Tilley – Roland Baker just getting back from selling a load of potatoes on the north shore, Aunt Jessie’s new dump, a horse pull scheduled for that weekend, Murray Paris’s accident, Norman Kinney getting a new pup, and things like that. A person could hardly catch his breath.

As I said, I was home on vacation from Burlington, and was talking to Grandpa about fighting the traffic in Toronto. (Naturally I had chosen to leave for NB about 3:00 pm on a Friday, putting me in Toronto just exactly at the time of the Daily Smash known as rush hour.) Grandpa looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked how many people lived in Toronto. I said about two and a half million or more. “Boy,” he said, scratching his chin. “That’s funny why so many people want to live so far away from everything.” Meaning Tilley.

            Flug is right; there was a lot going on in Tilley and its suburbs in those days. There probably still is, but I live down here in the Colony now, and many folks here seem to spend more time avoiding all the many activities than otherwise. There was a supper in Burns Hall in October and only about 500 people came to it over the period of two hours or so. In Tilley in the 1950s and 1960s there would have been at least ten thousand.

            Back to Tilley, and our fear of Russian ICBMs. The only television station we could watch was WAGM from Presque Isle, and all they seemed to dwell on was the certainty of Russian missiles coming in to take out Loring Air Force base, near Caribou. It was a Strategic Air Command base. There were about ten TV shows a week explaining how we should all have a fallout shelter behind our houses. That would have been like putting a toothpick on the track to stop the Tobique Train. A plutonium bomb would have flattened everything as far south as Johnville dance hall, so we didn’t figure digging a cave in our backyard would be the best use of our time.

At night I could stand out in our yard and see the lights of Loring AFB, and every half hour throughout the night a giant B-52 bomber would fly right over our trembling house and head for the Atlantic. Good for the flight crew, but not for us. They’d be gone when the missiles arrived. It didn’t make me feel any better that they carried nuclear missiles that would flatten Moscow in return.

            I have now started on my autobiography, as per Flug’s suggestion. I told my wife I needed a secretary. She reached for her winter rolling pin. I have decided to do my own typing with my remaining unbroken fingers.     

                                           -end-

Weird weird (wired) November weather (Nov. 27)

Just how crazy is this month anyway? 

                                                  by Robert LaFrance 

            Here it is the last week of November when in fact summer just started (in my mind) about three weeks ago. How crazy is that?

            I’ve often asked in these pages, as a rhetorical question of course, who is in charge of the weather? Not me, I’ll tell you that, but I will make some comments about it, strictly on a voluntary basis.

            A week ago we were in the middle of winter. It was minus ten Celsius and the January wind was howling on this mountain, but here we are today under rainy skies and the temperature is +8C outside. What is this, communism? (I have no idea what Communism is, but I know some Americans. They tend to blame that political theory for everything from poverty to haemorrhoids.)

            My wife had even put away all her summer rolling pins. It’s funny, I had no idea until last year that RPs are graded as to size, season and weight. The heavier ones are used in the summer when the wielder has all kinds of energy to hit an erring husband (which may be redundant). She has such an array of rolling pins that she can put half a dozen away for the whole winter.

            (The columnist shakes his head.) I wasn’t even intending to talk about the weather when I began this column – there’s been enough written on that subject – but was going to discuss Flug’s nephew Francis who is visiting from Medicine Hat, Alberta. He and Flug – who hasn’t been married since his 15^th wife Flora fled in August – have been ‘batching it’ and trying to decide which is the worse cook. Whoever wins that contest doesn’t have to do it any more, with the downside being he has to eat the other fellow’s grub.

            Francis decided he was going to cook “one a them soofuls’ for supper last evening. I was there helping Flug get rid of some ‘past-best-before-date’ lemonade when Francis made this announcement. It took quite a while before we discerned that a ‘sooful’ was what other persons might call a soufflé, a dish that is challenging to most of us who fancy ourselves cooks.

            I was still there when supper (‘dinner’ if you prefer) was ready for us to clamp on the old feedbag, so I stayed. I figured to have plenty of lemonade handy in case I needed to wash down a disaster, but I was pleasantly surprised. It tasted quite, well, tasty.

            However, it wasn’t a soufflé. I diplomatically asked Francis how he had cooked this gourmand’s delight and he was very eager to tell me. I had praised it effusively, so he was in a good frame of mind while I was in a lemonade frame of mind.

            “You know them soofuls have a lot of eggs in them,” he began. “Well, I didn’t have no eggs, so I substituted cream of mushroom soup. It called for parmesan and cheddar, but I only had cheddar, so I used feta for the other cheese, for that Greek flavour…”

            “A Greek flavoured soufflé?” I querried. “It sounds a little…recherchment if I may use the Romanian expression.”

            “No, I didn’t put any romaine lettuce in it,” he insisted. “Anyway, back to the recipe. It called for cream of tartar and milk, but I couldn’t find the first one in Uncle Flug’s kitchen, so I used nutmeg and canned milk with a dash of honey.”

            He described the rest of the ‘sooful’ and its preparation and I had to admit that this young man had a certain something when it came to the kitchen. He has what might be called a flair, while Flug’s cooking would more likely be called a flare.

Anyway, by that time I had imbibed six large bottles of lemonade and was ready to appreciate anything that didn’t outright kill me. Francis had lost the cooking contest – meaning he was a far better cook than Flug – so it looked as if Flug would be well-fed for a while, until Francis had to go back to Florida and take Chris Hadfield’s place in the NASA space program.

            It just goes to show you; never judge a book by its cover. Or is it that a gathering stone should save a mossy stitch in time?

 

            A final note on that evening’s activities: When I arrived home, there was an email waiting for me. It was Stephen Harper inviting me to take a Senate seat if I can prove I am from New Brunswick. I phoned him the next morning (he was playing canasta with Rob Ford) and said I couldn’t accept because I have ethics. I could hear Rob Ford yelling: “It never stopped me!”
                                                            -end-

Rob Chevrolet wouldn't be a scandal (Nov. 20)

Toronto, stick strictly to Chevrolets 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            One subject we do not need to talk about is the predicament of Torontonians and their mayor (Rob Ford). Even saying that little bit was too much on that subject.

            I know I rail on about the weather, but who was in charge on the weekend of November 9th and 10^th? On the 10^th my bride and I had a supper invitation in Bath, normally a 20-minute drive away, and it took us twice that long as we battled the snow and slush. I backed the Toyota out of the garage and started spinning, then started down off this mountain and those things called brakes were only a vague concept.

            The road had gone from bare to deadly in about forty-five minutes. I did manage to get the car stopped down at the church, then turned around to come home and get the 14-year-old Intrepid that had studded winter tires. The Toyota’s summer tires were, I suppose, better suited to summer.

            We did manage to spin our way back up the hill and into the garage, where we changed to the Intrepid. As we drove by the garage, did I only imagine it, but did that big ancient car give a sort of sneer and Quebec raspberry to the Toyota? Thumbez le nez as it were?

            Spoiled. That’s the word that occurs to me when I want to describe us humans and how we are doing. I can’t imagine watching TV if I had to actually stand up and walk over to the television to change the channel every hour or two. Brutal. I would probably not even bother to watch it at all.

            It was probably five years ago when I heard a gent define the term ‘roughing it’ as “watching black-and-white TV”. He was serious. That’s why I think we should do away with winter tires and TV remote controls altogether. Once we walk to where we’re going a few dozen times, it might serve to tell us that we aren’t spoiled at all. We are UBER-spoiled.

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

            People are always telling me stuff. Someone else was telling me recently that he and his wife often leave the house while the automatic washing machine is running, or the dryer, or some other kind of device whose entire function in life is to disappoint its owners. That’s just plain crazy.

            Every time I hear a word whose first two syllables are ‘auto’ I cringe, because it gives me a flashback to the day I was certain was my last.

            You know about aircrafts’ autopilots of course. I would rather not think about it any more, but this was in 1976 when I was working in a Lockheed L188 turboprop aircraft. Doing an ice survey for shipping, we had flown over Hudson Bay for six hours at an altitude of about one hundred feet, and then as dusk arrived we headed home for Montreal.

            A fellow ice observer, Ben Baker of Amherst, NS, and I were sitting across a table and playing some cards – whist no doubt – when all of a sudden the plane started dropping like a stone. It dropped and dropped and dropped some more until it looked as if we would soon be part of the landscape, seascape, or bayscape, whatever fits. Ben looked as green as Robin Hood’s tunic and I was probably even more terrified if possible, but we said not a word as we waited for our particular Godot.

            I know we didn’t have any more than five thousand feet of air beneath our wings when at last I could hear the engines roar and slow down our descent. We soon levelled out and started climbing again. “Ahem,” said the pilot. “We had a little problem (a little problem?) there with the autopilot which decided we should be flying at 2800 feet instead of 28,000,” the pilot – or some other madman – said over the intercom. “Don’t worry. All is under control.” All except our bodily functions that is.

            An hour later, coming into Montreal, we entered a thick, thick fog. That same pilot said: “We’ll be landing on instruments. They’ve been working great for over twenty years, so don’t worry.” At that moment I was reading my Mad Magazine whose main character, Alfred E. Neuman, always said: “What, me worry?” as a tree fell on him.

            When we had landed and were walking down to that blessed tarmac, I couldn’t see either wingtip. The pilot was pointing somewhere. “The bar is right over there.” Talk about the walking wounded. However, before we landed, the pilot had showed his real worth. He radio-ed ahead for the bar to get extra rations of lemonade.

            Next morning we were off to Hudson’s Bay again. I can’t say we were bright AND early, but this time we insisted that the pilot fly his own damn plane.       

                                            -END-

Blasting Sundays to smithereens (Nov. 13)

      Even Sunday can be a blast these days 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            On the morning after the time changed, I was out in my orchard when I heard a shot. That’s not unusual because certain spouses try to keep me on my toes, but this was a Sunday and this shot, followed by several others whose sounds came from different directions, was a little unnerving.

            “You look unnerved, Bob,” said my wife, as I chuga-lugged a 45-ounce glass of lemonade with a few things added. “Did you see the famous Kincardine Slasher?”

            She has tortured me for months, ever since I saw this community’s equivalent of the Abominable Snowman - in July - and couldn’t resist another dig. I told her about the shots coming from the woods – and on a Sunday. “I think I heard that they allow Sunday hunting now,” she said. “I didn’t pay much attention since I don’t hunt – except you.”

            So I went to the sometimes faithful Internet and Google to find out. Apparently Sunday hunting is indeed allowed now in New Brunswick, from October 28 to November 23. It was a miracle!

            I mean it was a miracle that I had actually found this information on a government website. I would say that all government websites were put together by committees of civil servants. They in turn choose more committees and sub-sub committees from their members. There’s no other explanation, including drugs. At any given time 78% of our government employees are engaged in writing booklets and websites.

            The information I read included regulations on who is allowed to hunt. Apparently any NB resident 16 or over may hunt, and then it goes on to say (if I understood it right) that non-residents 14 and older may hunt. There is no reason given as to why, at the age of 14, a citizen of Iraq (for example) is more responsible than a citizen of New Brunswick. In Iraq’s case possibly – familiarity with firearms from the womb – but other countries where the citizens wouldn’t know a Colt 45 from a can of beer?

            On another subject, I’m not sure if they read my column, but I want to say thank you to all the black bears who have been eating the fallen apples in my orchard. They – and I don’t know how many there are – go into my orchard and clean up all the windfalls, and then they leave me 3D calling cards (land mines) all over the orchard and yard. Some of those calling cards are so big that two big men couldn’t shake hands over them.

            The bears are doing me a favour because when apples fall, they often contain the young of the apple maggot or railroad worm, and since the bears are prompt at eating those apples, the insects are taken care of before they get a chance to come out of the apple and crawl into the ground, ready for next year. So thanks, Bruno!

         Now, to segue neatly from the subject of bears to the subject of hunting itself, I do not hunt because I tend to shoot things that I shouldn’t. The last time I hunted, it was a tall birch tree that wasn’t doing any harm to anyone, and the time before that it was a short birch tree. This was in the fall of 1980. After these rather embarrassing acts, I unloaded my 7.5 mm Swiss Army rifle,  took it into my house in Birch Ridge (ironic name there) and put it in a closet. I called my friend Larry M. and asked: “Are you interested in purchasing a tree-killer?" He thought I meant my Husqvarna chainsaw, but he did finally buy the rifle.

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

A few other observations, none of them associated with hunting:

Some U. S. Border Patrol officers in Niagara Falls were being a little overzealous recently when they arrested The Great Herman, a tightrope walker who was plying his trade from the Canadian side of the river to the American side. When he arrived on the New York State bank of the river they 'detained' him because he wasn't carrying a passport.

Canada Geese are becoming more educated these days. As long as I can remember they flew south in 'V' formation. This, they say, is for an 'aerodynamic reason' – the same reason I was tailgated for two miles today by a hockey mom. Saving gas but causing heartburn. The reason I mention Canada Geese and their enlightenment is that this afternoon I looked up and saw about 120 of them forming the 'square root' symbol. What next? The symbol for Pi?

 

            As we all know, the New Brunswick Legislature recently began another session. What would you expect their first order of business to be? Fracking? Calling an election? Closing every hospital except the one up the street from the legislature? Crown Land use legislation? None of the above.

            They are going to pass some strict laws governing those little metal teapots we get in restaurants. The way they are now, one only spills three-quarter of one’s tea. The government wants 100% spillage.
                                                    -end-

Only serious stuff from now on (Lying) (Nov. 6)

A new leaf - only important stuff now 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            I have resolved that, from now on, I shall only write about important stuff in this column. No more frivolous paragraphs and attempted humour. From now on I will only deal with serious topics.

            Inflation for example. This is a subject we are all interested in and should be dealt with in a serious manner, and part of that topic is the Bank of Canada and its interest rate.

            As far as inflation goes, it’s all rather silly anyway, isn’t it? We go to the grocery store one week and a big bag of dog food is $8.99 and the next week it’s $13.99. Bacon is $5.49 a pound, up from $3.00 or so a year ago. And so it goes. Turn on the financial news and someone in a suit is telling me that the annual inflation rate is only 1.1%. Really?

            The price of everything I see or touch – bacon, gasoline, tuition, vehicles - rises a lot faster than that, so where do they get their figures? I can picture some men with ties and women with severe suits all in a small room in Ottawa and saying: “What shall we say the inflation rate is this month? George? Alice?” George says 1.4% and Alice says 1.1%. They flip a coin. Alice wins. Meanwhile, from the back corner, is a little voice that says: “But my rent went up twenty percent since Tuesday!” He is ignored.

            The Bank of Canada’s ‘benchmark’ (whatever that might mean in the real world) interest rate continues at the same place it has been – low – to avoid that inflation. Just last week the Bank’s Governor, Stephen S. Poloz, said they might lower it even more. I have almost a hundred dollars in a savings account, so I’m going to lose big. What if they placed the central interest rate (that the Bank of Canada charges chartered banks) at minus 2 percent? Then the banks could just take our money until we don’t have any more.

            Wait a minute. They already do that.

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

            Continuing to be serious about things, I refer you to some television commercials you recently saw. On that commercial was a brand new medicine to cure an illness you never knew existed. If you tend to get nervous when skydiving, there’s a pill for that. The disease, by the way, isn’t common fear of death, but it could be called Vertical Apprehension Syndrome. You just take their little pill called Agamemnon-FX and you don’t feel a bit nervous, or conscious

            What I am saying of course – in a very serious way because, remember my resolution – is that drug companies manufacture illnesses where none existed before and then come up with a drug to cure it. Hitchhiker’s thumb? Could that be a disease? Okay, drug companies, I have come up with the name of the disease; now all you have to do is come up with a drug that cures HT whose symptoms are fatigue, a tendency to swear, and a general cynicism about people who drive on highways.

            New subject: Are we finding that we are continually having to settle for second best in the products we buy? Just yesterday a guy in a suit told me (he was in Toronto so it must be true) that the Blackberry device, which from all accounts is a wonderful social tool, may soon be gone, buried under the many other companies’ products that don’t work anywhere near as well.

            It all comes down to advertising. If Company A has a better product than company B, but Company B’s advertising is far better (more money spent), then people will choose Company B. Back in the 1980s companies had to make a choice whether they wanted to sell the videocassette recorders called Beta or the ones called VHS. Someone in Japan decided that, for marketing reasons, the standard would be VHS. So Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. all switched to VHS and soon Beta didn’t exist. Ask somebody who has used both which one was better and they will almost always say Beta.

            The very machine I am typing this serious column on is using a Microsoft Windows operating system. Also back in the 1980s and the 1990s, Macintosh operating systems were left in the dust by Microsoft because of the latter’s fantastic salesmanship. However, Microsoft systems were far more prone to viruses and still are, and Macintosh machines were much easier to use in some areas. The reason we (almost) all have PCs and not Mac computers? Advertising, but there may be justice in this case; Apple products have finally pushed aside Microsoft ones and they’re making billions.

 

            Okay, I have tried being serious, but I’m going to have to return to being silly, as in next week. Sorry about that.
                                                              -end-

Keep your electronic stick on the ice (Oct. 30 column)

We are all in the same (electronic) boat 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            Whew! I don’t think I have received as many letters about a column as I did this week. They were almost all sent through the actual mail; you know, where you put a stamp on an envelope and send it to someone at a certain address. (Mine is 129 Manse Hill Road, Kincardine, NB, E7H 3A3).

            In my column I was talking about all the automatic stuff we have to deal with every day – and every hour it seems. The car door automatically locks when I start driving, the clock falls back an hour without my telling it to, Microsoft Word corrects my spelling although I can spell.

            “My VCR keeps flashing 12:00-12:00-12:00,” wrote a young lady (64) from Johnville. “What the hell can I do? My husband Harry is about as useless as wings on an elephant and he won’t read the manual because he’s a man. Imagine!”

            I advised her to take a piece of duct tape and put over those flashing numbers and send Harry away. Jeez Louise, is that rocket science?

            George Noxman, a bachelor originally from Knoxville, Tennessee, and now living in Knoxford, NB where he rents a house from Edmund Knox, wrote about his cookstove. “I put on the timer to turn on the oven while I’m away so my roast beast will be ready when I get home from the office – I’m a civil servant – but it never works. I have done this nine times now and the roast is just sitting there cold when I get home. In fact, even the burners won’t work on this new stove, so I cook all my meals in the microwave oven.” He probably also says pizza PIE.

            I sent him back some suggestions: “Dear Mr. Noxman: I think your clue is contained in your letter. You implied – and I inferred – that you have been having this problem since buying a new stove. Might I suggest that you check to see if the stove is  plugged in. However, if it’s a gas stove, use a flashlight rather than a lit match to look behind it.”

            I received a return email that same afternoon. Mr. Noxman, not mechanically inclined, had asked his neighbour, a widow named Adelah Knokwurst, to look at the stove. It turned out to be a dishwasher. She was so delighted with this helpless male that she proposed to him immediately. “I wasn’t sure what she was proposing at first, and got my face slapped,” he said, “but the date is set for January 7^th.”

            A former police officer also emailed with a confidential question: “They give me this here gun, but whenever I shoot at a suspect – somebody robbing a bank or cheating on his income tax for example – he or she just stares at me and runs away. I got a little tired of that, and so did the bank managers, so the next time I answered a call I used my taser. For some reason it made a hole right in the middle of his chest. What’s going on?”

            As gently as I could, I suggested that this officer should perhaps find another line of work, once he returned from unpaid vacation in Renous. It was clear to me that he had gotten his taser gun and his Uzi machine pistol mixed up, which was a lucky thing for the previous bank robbers, but rather unfortunate for the guy with the hole(s) in his chest. However, if you rob banks, you have to expect a bad day now and then.

            A final note on that letter: Since X-rays, radar, etc. may make people temporarily sterile, I might suggest that anybody who has been stopped by this guy for speeding along the highway – or perhaps those first bank robbers I mentioned – shouldn’t despair at their not fathering children for a while. I suspect that what he thought was a taser was actually a radar gun.

            This final comment for the day did not come to me in a letter, but on the television news. As you know, I try and dream up things that are ridiculous, but in this case real life was away beyond anything I could dream up.

            In the country called Azerbiajan, a former enclave of the Soviet Union, elections are held once in a while. There are electronic voting machines and all is automatic as you would expect of a modern country like Azerbiajan, whose farmers are just finding out about milking machines.

            They had an election on October 9, but three days before the election, the results were accidentally published online. The government said they were just testing their equipment and these were really the results of the 2008 election. This was a dubious claim, because the names of the candidates were those in the 2013 election about to take place.

You just can’t make up this stuff.

                                     -end-

Bob actually read a manual (Oct. 23 column)

I find bare things shocking - especially wires 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            This morning I received a real shock shortly after I got up. I must fix that bare wire on the toaster.

But I don’t want to talk about toasters, or procrastination; I want to talk about my blasted alarm clock and how things are all so automatic nowadays that no one can fix anything. I know, I rant about this kind of stuff all the time, but this time it’s personal.

            It was Sunday morning, October 13, almost dawn when I woke up, but the clock radio alongside my bed was reading 5:45. “How could this be?” I asked myself, since there was no one else awake to ask. I looked at the clock radio on the other side of the bed and it read 6:45.

            I have mentioned before in this column that I have a drug and liquor problem, but it couldn’t have been that, because I don’t use either one. (My problem is that I probably should start.) A quick scan of my face in the bathroom mirror didn’t show any more weirdness than ever, so I was forced to sit down and think.

            Finally, like the waters of the Mackenzie River arriving at the Beaufort Sea, it came to me once I had spent a considerable amount of time thinking of every possible reason that my clock, on time when I went to bed Saturday evening, should flip back an hour.

            Of course! It was doing the automatic fall change from Daylight Saving to Standard Time, but the only trouble was that the clock wasn’t listening when the powers that be moved that time change forward a few weeks from mid- or late October to November 3^rd.

            So it was just a matter of changing the clock ahead an hour, right? Very simple, right?

            Wrong. Guys, I am sorry but I let you down on this one, but after fifteen minutes I started reading the manual. Although it seemed to be in Swahili, I got through it and tried it suggested to set the clock. Of course nothing worked. It remained an hour slow. Finally I decided on a foolproof solution: leave it alone and accept things as they were until November 3^rd.

            When I did finally get up, just before 8:00 am, I went downstairs to check if my VCR had recorded ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ but of course it had not. It too had switched back to Standard Time. Therefore, I had recorded a program about aardvark mutations in Ernfold, Saskatchewan. Exciting, but I would never know if Det. William Murdoch had captured the miscreants.

            In the kitchen, the microwave’s clock numbers were blinking. I decided to have breakfast uptown with some relatives. As I started my borrowed Toyota, I heard a sharp ‘click’ and soon realized the car had automatically locked all the doors. I would have said that I was perfectly capable of locking my own car doors, but apparently Toyota doesn’t agree.

            Everywhere I went and whatever I did, some electronic instrument was telling me what I could and couldn’t do, and when to do it – or not. Security cameras followed me in every store, I couldn’t take the car out of ‘park’ unless I put my foot on the brake, and I found everything I touched had dead batteries.

Let’s accept it: we humans no longer have any say in anything. While this is a common feeling for husbands, now even wives are feeling the pinch, as it were.

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

            A friend from Ernfold, Saskatchewan stopped by for the visit on Tuesday. He and his brother were on their way to Charlottetown for a horse breeders’ conference. They co-own a ranch where they raise quarter horses. (I never could understand the term ‘quarter-horse’. What happens to the other 75%?)

            Anyway, Boyd and his brother Bill stopped by for a short visit and Boyd had one of his stories all ready for me. When we had shared a house in Hamilton, Ontario back in the early 1970s, he had always been ready with a good story.

            This story dated from the late 1960s when he was working on a Panamanian freighter, sailing between The Netherlands and Brazil. New on the job and only 19 years old, he had studied his book on nautical terms and the jargon sailors used. One night he was doing a shift on the bridge, watching for other ships, etc. in the area. Four bells (2 hours) into his shift, he saw some lights off to the right and informed the captain.

            “Well, where is it?” growled the captain, a Luxembourgian who was in a foul mood. You know what they’re like.

            “Three points abaft the starboard beam!” shouted Boyd.

            “What?”

            “Three points abaft---“

            “I heard what you said, you moron. What does it mean?”

            “Over there to the right…see?” Thus ended Boyd’s career as a master of nautical terms. He threw his book overboard and talked Saskatchewan trash talk from then until he jumped ship at Halifax three months later.

                                                             -end-

McDonald's drive-thru a total disaster (Oct. 16)

Ten seconds in a line - an eternity? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

 

            This morning as I was sipping a double latte (whatever that is) on the porch, my dog Kezman asked me what is the main difference between now and when I was a kid. “Well, old faithful dog,” I said, “the main difference between 2013 and 1980 – we’ll say – is in the area of communication.”

“You’re talking about email, text messaging, and stuff like that, aren’t you?” he said, between bites of Gaines Gravy Train. (Really No-Name dogfood I had bought at the discount store, but I told him it was Gravy Train.)

“No, I’m talking about people actually talking to each other,” I explained, “and please don’t drool on your blanket. Today people communicate in 5-second sound bites, or if they’re really eager for a chat, in 15-second sound bites.” To prove my point, I walked away.

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

This is 2013 all right. Listen to this radio news item. I did use the word ‘news’?

“A study done at fast food restaurants in Canada and the U.S. has reported that drive-thru window times have increased over the past year,” the announcer droned. “The average time that McDonalds’ drive-thru customers spend, well, driving through, has increased by ten seconds from last year.”

I tried to get my head around the fact that someone had actually used up money to hire people who would spend their days timing people at drive-thrus. This is important I suppose. Anyway, the final finish – as my wife’s Aunt Ruby Phillips used to say – is that these hirelings ascertained that the average time a car spends in a McDonalds drive-thru is three minutes and nine seconds, whereas last year it was two minutes 59 seconds. Is there anyone in North America to whom this makes a difference?

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

            Amazingly, I am still on the same subject – food – and I can’t take long writing about this because I’m going with Flug to bail his nephew Gerund out of jail. Gerund passed a 10-dollar counterfeit bill at a restaurant over in Caribou, Maine, and the owner was not impressed. Neither were the Caribou police, the State police, or the Secret Service, that branch of the Treasury Department that not only protects the president but deals with those who deal with counterfeit money. From the phone conversation I overheard between Flug and Gerund, it seems that the latter has already hired a lawyer who will fight the case on the legal basis of ‘quid pro quo’. “Whatever you do to me I can do back to you.”

Gerund said on the phone: “I asked for a coffee and he gave me a mixture of chicory and instant decaffeinated coffee; they put a non-dairy creamer in front of me, and when I wanted to sweeten the mess, the waiter gave me some sort of aspartame-filled artificial sweetener. If they can serve counterfeit coffee, cream and sugar, why can’t I give them a counterfeit bill?”

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

            Canadian teenage boys have received a lot of criticism over the years for wearing their baseball caps backward. Just about every comedian has some kind of a routine where he or she makes a joke about that. “What are they trying to do, keep their neck from getting sunburned? Ha-ha-ha!!!”

            Today, the laughter stopped, because I found out there’s a valid scientific reason for wearing one’s baseball cap with the visor down one’s neck. Wind. I’m not referring to the aftermath of a large bean and salad supper, but to the air currents blowing across the parking lot where I was walking and wearing my cap with the letters ‘Victoria Star’. My cap is probably in the St. Lawrence River by this time. It occurred to me as I watched it fly away like a paycheque that, had I been wearing it backward, that never would have happened. I hereby apologize to all male teenagers for any time I ever thought you were crazy for wearing your cap backward.

            Early in this column I mentioned how people now talk in sound bites. This is not to be confused with the bytes on a computer, although that instrument – a blessing and a curse – has contributed to the changes in communication. I started on that trail exactly 19 years ago this month when I was talking to the late Bob Inman and asking him to advise me on buying a new computer. We went to the nerd store and he picked out everything I would need. When we had finished bringing all those boxes in my house here, he started to go and said: “Okay, it’s just a matter of putting it all together and you’re on your way.”

            I pulled a gun. “Bob,” I said, “sit down and get ready to stay a while.” It took the two of us (and the Luger) an hour and a half to set up my new computer that cost $4300 and had an operating system called Windows 3.1. Each time he made a move, I recorded it, and even then it was weeks before I had things under control. It actually worked, no viruses, no spam. I don’t want to talk about how things have gone skittering away since then. I’ve already exceeded my sound bite quota.

                                                     -end-

Dark for 146 days - but who's counting? (Oct.9)

That’s the last of the sun until March 4th

                                                           by Robert LaFrance

 

            Every year at this time I send a big hello on to the people who are living and working in Alert, Nunavut, which was Alert, Northwest Territories, when I lived there for 54 weeks in the 1970s. Today the sun goes away for the winter and doesn’t return until March 4^th. Right around Christmas time it is the darkest place on earth, or so it seemed to me, but we got through it.

I arrived there in early May of 1974 and left in mid-May the next year. When I arrived the ‘met techs’ (meteorological technicians) and the army guys from the 110-person military base there were out on the runway and playing softball. They were in their shorts and some of them, I noticed when I emerged from the belly of the C-130 Hercules, were sweating.

            It was 42ºF, about 4ºC.

            “What kind of a looney bin have I arrived at?” I asked myself, but since I had been on the road (as it were) from Trenton, Ontario for 30+ hours, including overnight in Thule, Greenland, my brain wasn’t able to process enough information to answer that question. It – my brain – at that point was temporarily in the same shape it is as we speak.

You know how people complain today when they take a plane trip? The seats are too narrow, there’s not enough leg room, the food is terrible? During the 8-hour flight from Trenton to Thule I sat along the side of that huge cargo plane; my easy chair was four metal rods with a little canvass over them. My food was two sandwiches I had scrounged from the mess hall at Trenton’s armed forces base, and my drink was two cans of lukewarm Pepsi.

Thule was another story though. It was a US Air Force base and you know how those guys are taken care of. I had a room all to myself in the officers’ quarters. Not long after we landed in Greenland the C-130 crew, several scientists who were also travelling in luxury on the plane, and I were called to a dinner at the USAF Officers’ mess. The choice of thick steaks, roast chicken, or pork roast. I remember it well. I think I had all three and some mighty fine wine just like Jeramiah the Bullfrog.

One of the guests at the dinner was the American Ambassador to Denmark, which owned Greenland at the time, and I got to meet him. I shook hands and went back to my plate. First things first. I didn’t know what kind of food they would be serving at the Alert weather station.

It was just before noon local time (Atlantic, same as us) when the plane touched down on Alert’s long runway. A Hercules needs LOTS of runway. As we circled to land we could see the wreckage of a Lancaster bomber that crashed there in 1953. I mentioned the softball players; they were back at the game before the turboprops stopped turning. One of the army guys pointed to a red vehicle: “There’s your crowd with a bomb.”

He didn’t seem too nervous about the whole thing, and I was too tired (late night with some Pabst Blue Ribbon and some guys from Arizona) to worry. It turned out that the ‘bomb’ was a Bombardier snowmobile, a large one with a cab big enough to hold six people. We made it the 800 yards to the weather station with no problem. So there I was, 26 years old with a fabulous salary and a view of Greenland out my bedroom window. And the meals! I had arrived just as the cook, Ray Cameron from Calgary, was starting to serve Chicken a la King etc. followed by a wonderful apple pie.

Alert took a while getting used to, especially the 24-hour days. When the boss showed me my room, there was aluminum foil over the window. He said I’d need that if I ever wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Knowing better and tired out, I took off the foil.

At 3:00 am, with the sun blazing in my window, I put back the foil. First of many lessons. The boss, Jim Patterson from Saskatchewan, knocked on my door next morning, noticed the foil back up, but didn’t say anything. Jim was what we called ‘An Arctic Zero’, as opposed to hero. He’d been up there eight years and was scraping the edge of the rational world. While I was in Alert, Jim received several big packages from Toronto. It was a kit to built an airplane. We all laughed, but two years later, he flew out of Alert and eventually landed at  Saskatoon airport.

One thing I must mention. I was scheduled to leave on the weekly Hercules on May 11, 1975, but due to a mixup, my name wasn’t on the flight manifest when I, all packed, went to the runway. Because I’d been taken off the work schedule, I spent most of the next week in the Junior Ranks bar at the base. I would need that expertise when I got back to Tilley.
                                                     -end-

It's all academic (Oct. 2/13 column)

'Currency' and 'current' are not the same thing

                                                             by Robert LaFrance

           

            Sometimes two words are much too much alike for comfort.

            Take the word ‘breadpan’ – I do make bread occasionally – and the word ‘bedpan’. I was seriously thinking of relating the story of what happened to Flug’s nephew Allie, but I think we’ll just leave that story until another day. It’s almost dinner time.

            And that’s another thing (as I segue as smooth as silk to another subject): What do we call the meals that we have at noon and in the early evening? I usually call the noon meal dinner and the evening meal supper, but some people, much classier than I, say the evening meal is dinner. Then what do they call my dinner? Lunch?

            In any case, it’s all academic (as academics say) because my noon meal is not dinner in the first place; the proper name for it is ‘late’ because certain retired persons have not cooked it. Furthermore, she will not show me where the electric stove is kept or I would be glad to cook it myself.

            Speaking of electricity, I just thought of another example of a pair of words that are uncomfortably close together in sound if not in meaning. A convicted murderer in Texas was told by the prison warden that he would be receiving ‘currency’ the next day. The murderer, for some reason, thought the warden meant money, but the warden, not an educated man, meant to say ‘current’. Texas still has the electric chair. At dawn the next day the convicted murderer was shocked to find out that ‘currency’ had been a bit of a stretch, a malapropism as they say.

            Perhaps the Texas chap was expecting paper money, a load of $100 bills. We have all heard the fairy tale about ‘the paperless society’ and by now we all know that it really is a fairy tale. In the late 1980s, when computers had begun taking over everything, we kept hearing that within a few years, perhaps even a decade, we would no longer use or need paper to store correspondence and records.

            Well, guess what? We use just as much paper as we ever did, but now we keep 10,000 times more records, all digitized – if that’s even a word. It is true I now email Aunt Martha instead of using a stamp and envelope and sending it over time and space to her cottage in Lake Huron country, but here’s the rub: I never did write her anyway, and now we correspond every month. So I don’t use any less paper, but I now have an electronic file of letters to and from her. Every few months, when I do a total backup of my computer, I put all the information including her letters onto a CD or DvD and store it in a safe place. So now I buy CDs or DvDs when before I didn’t know either one existed. This is society’s new paper – those media including travel drives, mobile hard drives, and all that stuff.

            I don’t watch a whole lot of TV news or listen to a lot of radio news, but one story I did hear recently was about the world smallest pony, a 2-foot tall one, being stolen in Umbria, Italy. A news reporter asked the pony’s owner who he thought had stolen the pony and demanded a ransom for it. Now listen carefully to his answer: “Criminals.” Well, Giovanni, thanks for clearing that up.

            The Parti Quebecois minority government in our neighbouring province appears to have shot themselves in the foot when they proposed a new Charter of Values. Of course it was aimed at Muslims, who don’t tend to be separatists, but it also hit another minority whose feelings have been hurt. What about the atheists? Their feelings were not considered at all when the PQ came up with their charter to fix a problem that didn’t exist in the first place.

            This news just in: About two months ago Flug’s nephew Jerry G. joined the police force of a small town in PEI and soon afterward got himself into trouble, as usual. Already famous for his lack of judgment, Jerry forgot to do his homework and also forgot to think. On August 7 a fire started in an apartment building just on the outskirts of that small town of Murchieville and Flug, whose radio had not been turned on because he was sleeping outside Tim Horton’s, saw a red truck zooming by and quickly moved to arrest the driver. That driver was not only the mayor, but also the fire chief on his way to the fire. Jerry’s job security took quite a hit that day. He’s now settled into his new career as a ‘greeter’, if you know what I mean.
                                                 -end-