The weird world of the Middle East

Just like that old dog I used to have

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Exasperating though the New Brunswick weather has been (blow hot, blow cold) we’ll leave that off the list of subjects for this week. The one comment I want to make is to say hi to the folks stationed at Alert, Nunavut, and give them my deepest sympathy because they are in the in the coldest part of winter. 

 

           I spent 381 days there in 1974-5 working at the weather station that’s 450 nautical miles from the north pole. By the way, it was in the Northwest Territories then; I hope Nunavut is warmer.

            My second comment will be directed at people who live in a slightly warmer area of the world – the folks of Hamas, the political party that runs the Gaza Strip, just across the road from Israel. Late last year they started send explosive rockets over into Israel and – this is going to astonish you – Israel answered them with bombs from their air force jets. After a few dozen buildings went from being Hamas offices to rubble, the two sides signed a ‘peace accord’ which is like calling a cat a catamaran. (There is no peace in that area, just no bombing on a particular day.)

            Hamas said they won this mini-war and that reminds me of a U.S. general’s suggestion during the Vietnam War: “Let’s just declare victory and go home”. Hamas also reminds me of a dog I used to own, if one can own a dog. He would chase cars and get knocked down and run over regularly, but he was still too stupid to quit chasing cars. So it is with Hamas; they send rockets into Israel and then get flattened, then quit for a while so they can recover. Hamas dealing with Israel is like Rover dealing with the 1959 Impala that finally got him for good.

            I awoke early yesterday morning to a weird sound, one that sounded like a combination of a dog howling (such as when he gets knocked down by a grey 1950 Meteor), a cat screeching, and a Jean Chretien speech. It was quite windy outside and every time there was a gust of wind, there was that sound again. After a while (not to be vague or anything) I narrowed it down to an area where the carpenter (Sid Goostep) had caulked around a window two days earlier. Apparently the wind was making that sound that now sounded like a crowing rooster, but there was no hole I could see. It was now a few minutes after eight in the morning and the sun was coming over the hill to the east, so I called Sid who insisted I hadn’t awakened him because he had to get up and answer the phone anyway. “I told you about that type of material,” he protested with a sleep-filled voice. “Don’t you remember? I said that for a week or more, when the wind is blowing, the caulk crows at dawn.”

            I would say that was the worst pun I have ever delivered.

            We had quite the time at the club last evening – and night. Jordan Demays was the toast of the club and the town and we all toasted him – not with a toaster, but with lemonade. He was our latest hero because of what he had accomplished three days earlier. The reason it took three days to celebrate him was because Grimy Gus the barkeep needed to stock up on lemonade; he knew it was going to be a blowout that Australians would envy.

            The reason for Jordan’s celebrity? He had succeeded, in less than half an hour, in getting through a maze of government voicemail and actually reaching a real live person – or civil servant at least – on the telephone.

            Those citizens under the age of twenty or so didn’t quite understand what the fuss was all about, because they only know the world as it is today, one in which it was (until last week) routine to go through 17 levels of voicemail and come back to the same place. Governments have invested ‘multi dinero’ as they say in Croatia to making sure that no one – NO ONE – is able to actually speak to a human being. That is the whole reason for voicemail. Let them say it is for our convenience, but we know better, don’t we? It’s for theirs.

            The bottom line of all this, unfortunately, is that the civil servant that Jordan actually spoke to against all odds has been fired. His boss, contacted by cellphone while he was on a fact-finding mission in Jamaica, made an awful fuss when he learned that one of his employees had been guilty of speaking to a member of the public. The criminal’s job was toast, which is exactly what we at the club had prepared for Jordan. All were welcome except whoever invented voicemail. We had a firing squad all ready for him, her, it, or them but they didn’t show.

                                                              -END-   

The bizarre world of EI 'reform' (Jan. 23 column)

There was no one left to speak for me

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            There has been a certain amount of controversy about the EI changes that recently passed into law by the now-famous behemoth known as an Omnibus Bill. That particular method, which the government calls C-45 and I call a D-11 Caterpillar bulldozer, passed, with very little debate, about 450 pages of new laws and revisions.

            I can say with confidence that this is the closest I have seen Canada come to being a dictatorship in my nearly six and a half decades on this orb.

            Back to the subject of the EI changes, one Tory MP said: ‘a year from now we will wonder what all the fuss was about’, but if you ask Janine Dubrovsky, she can tell you now. Up until the changes, she was “living the life” on her nearly $300 bi-weekly cheque – getting some groceries every week, putting up to ten dollars worth of gas into her 1991 Hyundai every week, and paying her rent with as many as $34 to spare each month. She was also able to buy several Christmas presents for her two nieces. Splurging indeed.

            The day after the changes came into effect, Janine received a polite letter from the EI people. She had been laid off her regular job since October 29 because sales were down etc. and EI wanted her to take another job – in Minto. “But I can’t take a job in Minto,” she said to the nice man when she called him in his newly renovated ($12,481 worth of Ikea) office in Moncton. “That’s a 2-hour drive in the summer. It’s winter and my car is over two decades old.”

            “According to our data, it should take you fifty-nine minutes to drive from your home to Minto,” the man said. “That falls under our new criteria. Can you start Monday?”

            Janine said that she drove an Hyundai and not a Cessna and he must have his geography mixed up. She lives north of Perth-Andover, just south of Portage. She said that not even her brother Bill, who drives a stock car in the summer, could make Minto in fifty-nine minutes from her home.

            There was a pregnant pause, for two reasons. The EI man said: “We somehow had the impression that you lived in Stanley, NB. I do beg your pardon…(a rustling of papers)…would you be able to report for work in Woodstock Monday morning? Oh, wait! That’s Woodstock, Ontario…”

            The conversation went on for a while longer, but then Janine said she had to go. I mean she REALLY had to go, like to the obstetrics department in Perth-Andover. She had THOUGHT she was only eight and a half months pregnant. Then she remembered that Hotel Dieu no longer has obstetrics. She would have remembered sooner, but the notice from the hospital came in the mail and her group box was four miles away.

            “My governments in action,” she muttered, and called her cousin Vinnie whom she would get to drive her to Waterville, that is downtown metropolitan Waterville where, as everyone knows, there is ‘a critical mass’ of patients and that’s why they built the hospital there in the first place.

            The EI guy called her cellphone just as she and Vinnie were leaving. “Good news,” he said, “there aren’t any jobs within an hour from your home so your EI cheque is okay for a while. Too bad you don’t live three minutes nearer Waterville; there’s a custodian job there you could take.”

            She refrained from telling him that she was going to that very place, because he would have debited the amount her gasoline cost from her next cheque.

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

            Those familiar with my column recognize the preceding as an example of allegory and perhaps not the literal truth, but it’s close enough for government work.

            We all have examples in which the government – of whatever level – does things that defy not only logic, but imagination and thought itself.

            The federal government’s two omnibus bills do not, however, fall into those categories. They are first-class examples of a majority government bulldozing through its agenda – and I do mean bulldozing.

 

            Bill C-45, the latest of the two and the one that spawned the Idle No More protests, is a 453-page piece of in-your-face legislation which, if we all read it carefully (and who has a weekend to spare?) would astonish us with its changes to the Canadian way of life.

            Do you think the First Nations people – and many non-natives - who stand with protest signs in bitter winter weather are there for entertainment?

 

            Of course not. Bill C-45 affects us all. It is a piece of legislation that is only the second step in a larger plan. It's time to start reading.

 

            Remember the old saying: “First they came for the communists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist…Next they came for the socialists and and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist...Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist…Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.”

 

         If we don’t pay attention to - and read - these omnibus bills, we are going to be in big trouble.
                                                   -END-

The Mayans were wronged (Jan. 16 column)

A bit of a blip in the Mayan calendar   

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            It’s easy to see how a mistake could creep into a calendar. We heard for months – years – about the world's ending on Dec. 21, 2012 and here we are in mid-January, colder than a witch’s chest and sort of wishing it had been true. We could have all gone together in a blaze, or at least a haze, of glory.

            I have come to the conclusion that there is also something wrong with our own calendar, the Gregorian one introduced to (the future) Canada and the rest of the world in 1582 to replace the Julian calendar. When I say there’s something wrong with it, I mean there’s something VERY wrong with it.

            No more than two weeks ago I was sitting on the front porch and sipping on a lemonade while the dog Kezman was beside me and chewing on a mastodon bone, or possibly a hambone from the pea soup we had just had for supper. The temperature was twenty-one degrees Celsius, and there was no minus sign involved. According to the calendar it was July 25.

            As the boxer, looking up at the referee, said: “Wha’ happened?”

            I will take an oath that it really was no more than two weeks ago, but here we are in mid-January. Wha’ happened? Time is fleeting they say, but that is ridiculous. And to think of the time I wasted watching television or women or women on television or sports or just plain old killing time when I should have been doing something useful. Now I am forced to do something useful, because it snowed last night and I have to scoop out the driveway. H. D. Thoreau asked how one can ‘kill time with injuring eternity’ and I fear he was on the right track. Instead of watching ‘Canadian Pickers’ on TV I should have been out there picking.

            I have strayed off the subject a bit – nothing unusual there – so I will veer back to it. The subject I was going to introduce was the fact that a second version of the Mayan calendar has turned up, in Minto of all places. Some of the boys at the club there phoned me at 3:46 am and woke me up to impart this news. I suppose that they didn’t realize they would be waking me up at that hour, no doubt miscalculating the time difference between here and Minto, NB.

            It appears that on this newly found Mayan calendar which continues from Dec. 22, 2012, the world is not going to end for quite a few months yet. I believe my friend Flug (who was visiting his sister there) said the new calendar goes to the year 2219, but there was a lot of noise on the line for some reason – no doubt people shouting their joy at their reprieve. In the morning I must send an email explaining that even though the CALENDAR goes to the year 2219, that doesn’t mean that Minto will be there to see it. And I must remember to thank Flug for the early morning heads-up.

            I mentioned Henry David Thoreau, whose book ‘On Walden Pond’ was the favourite of the 1960s generation. I may decide to go and build a cabin near a lake myself and then I might be able to get a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately Flug has begun 2013 with the same amount of judgment he had in 2012 – and 1995 for that matter – and needs to be sent to ‘a re-education camp’ as the late Chairman Mao Xedong was fond of doing to those who didn’t agree with him.

            Of course I would have to modify a few of the things that Thoreau did alongside Walden Pond in the 1840s. Rather than build a cabin out of timbers I cut and carried myself, I would buy a little camper and place it somewhere close to hydro lines. I would not cultivate acres of beans, but would buy them at the grocery store, and all that canoeing he did – well, he was younger. If I can get some sort of satellite TV connection, that would be good, and I would have books just as Thoreau did. Probably e-books and books on DvD, but still books.

            Yes, I can see all that happening because being awakened at 3:46 am by a phone call about the Mayan calendar is something to be avoided if possible. Especially from Minto, a place from where I have some bad memories. I don’t recall what those bad memories are or were, but they are definitely bad ones. Hey, I’m 64.6 years old. How can I be expected to remember bad memories when I have a bad memory?

            I will leave you with one more quote about time, from Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
                                                  -END-

Let's say Maritime 'cooperation'

Bob’s column January 9, 2013 

 

You gotta start small to win at MU     

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            There has been an ongoing discussion in my daily newspaper (the one I occasionally receive in my mailbox) about ‘Maritime Union’ and it reminds me of the RCMP and federal budgets.

            “I don’t see the connection, Bob,” said everybody I’ve seen, spoken with or took photos of. “What can the RCMP and federal budgets have to do with Maritime Union?”

            Why? Because the instant that politicians hear the phrase ‘Maritime Union’, they immediately gird their loins for battle against the whole idea. And you know why? Well, yes, of course you do and I do. It’s because if the three Maritime provinces united, chances are good that half or more of the present ‘members’ would no longer have a job.

Try using the phrase ‘gun control’ in the U.S.A. and you will find the same reaction.

 

As to the RCMP, whenever the federal government decides to cut their budget, they immediately threaten to disband the hugely populat Musical Ride and that's the end of that.

We all know that Maritime Union would mean we would have a bigger voice in Ottawa and some real power for a change, but it’s never going to happen while we let the politicians decide. Would you shoot yourself in the foot?

We have to start small, even it just means we three provinces getting together and deciding on a set of common rules for ping-pong. Three senators, no doubt bored with eating and sleeping in the Red Chamber, suggested Maritime Union and then immediately one of them – Mike Duffy I think it was – said that PEI and Nova Scotia would have to become officially bilingual, which of course put the whole thing in jeopardy. Why couldn’t NB alone could remain bilingual?

I say we start tomorrow and see what things we three provinces CAN agree on, and start from there, and before too many years, the politicians will blink and miss the fact that Maritime Union is here. Bill Handy down at the Club says they could start with beer. “Does it make sense that people can’t bring beer over provincial borders?” he asked. Of course that was a rhetorical question, because no matter how big a truck we club members drove, it would be empty of beer by the time we approached Amherst.

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

Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about lately. Sorry to start off the new year like this.

A week before Christmas, Flug’s 17^th wife Gerda made chocolate covered peanut butter cups. So they wouldn’t have to be refrigerated all the time, she put some shaved cooking wax in the recipe. It’s the kind of melted wax we used to (and maybe still do) melt and put on the top of preserved jellies and jams. Trouble is, the recipe said to include one teaspoon and she put in a half cup of the shaved wax. Would that be a Parowax error?

One of these days I, as a registered old person, am going to write a column about all the things one can’t do as he or she gets old. It will include things that we can’t have in the house – like an aquarium. Allow me to explain. Flug and Gerda bought a 10-gallon aquarium in mid-November and stocked it with a few small goldfish and other exotic varieties not usually found in the Scotch Colony in winter – like piranhas. Of course the goldfish ate the piranhas immediately as you would expect because the goldfish were from the middle east and the piranhas were from Vatican City. But that’s getting away from the point; Flug and Gerda had to jettison the aquarium because of the bubbling of the aerator. Picture two people, age 64 and 67, listening to running, bubbling water while trying to watch a whole TV show at one sitting. I suppose they could move the flush into the TV room, but it is easier to get rid of the aquarium.

As the year 2012 drew to a close, I find there were some things I regretted. For example, I thought I was doing a great thing, a favour, when I bought my wife a hardwood rolling pin in Winnipeg. However, after three concussions, 19 contusions, and countless trips to ER. I begin now to see my error.

Another thing I wish I had done – buy shares a few years ago in those companies whose hand-washing devices are on just about any wall you want to name. And finally, I wish that ten years ago I had bought shares in bottled water companies and pet food companies. There sure are a lot of suckers on this earth.

                                        -end-

Pugilistic December 26

Missed the Boxing Day sales!

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Although an edition of this very paper hit the streets on Dec. 26, Boxing Day, it never crossed my alleged mind to refer to that fact in my column for that day. The ancient brain cells let me down once more.

            Perhaps I should begin with the history of Boxing Day. Although it is said that the tradition and the name began in England where the better-off people packed up extra gifts (the stuff that didn’t fit, turkey bones, etc.) on the day after Christmas and distributed the BOXES of them to poor people, that’s nonsense of course. Pure baloney, twaddle and drivel.

            The tradition really began in the late 1800s in Tilley, New Brunswick, where my ancestor Olivier Pinel dit LaFrance (1846-1932) first started (as they say, redundantly) the tradition we know today as Boxing Day.

            On Dec. 26, 1882, four years after the Pinel dit LaFrance (later LaFrance) family took up land grants in North Tilley, Olivier was driving a team of horses down what is now Churchland Road (then called Block X Trail) when his way was barred by a huge black bear that scared the horses.

            “Allez! Allez!” he said to the bear, which to his misfortune, understood only English with a smattering of German. “Allez!” and the horses bolted down the road with the bear close behind.

            On the wagon Olivier drove were a dozen hardwood boxes he had been taking down to the store in Tilley with the idea that he would bring back some canned goods in some of them and flour and sugar in the rest. Well, Mister Bear had to decide  whether to attack the horses or the man and he chose the latter. Wrong option. When the bear leaped onto the wagon, Olivier (my great-grandfather) grabbed one of the boxes and took that bear right between the eyes with the corner of it. Whether or not he understood French, from that moment Monsieur l’ours was ‘hors de combat’, which means knocked out like a light, even though incandescent ones hadn’t found their way to Tilley yet.

            So, those of you who are gathered round the fireplace hearing this narrative, that is the true story of why December 26 was called Boxing Day from then on.

            I suppose you want to know what happened to the bear; somewhere between the point of Olivier’s battle and the farm of Herman Goodine, the bear regained consciousness – sort of – and leaped off the wagon, right into the path of the Medford-Lerwick Stagecoach Line’s 3:32 coach on its way to South Tilley. The four horses of that particular Apocalypse trampled the bear real good.

            I thought I would start out the new year with a true story, so people don’t keep accusing me of lying on my column. I get a lot more criticism for that than I do for lying in bed while my wife shovels the driveway.

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

            Rudolph Seere (known in the club as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rain-Beer) asked me if I intended to make any New Year’s resolutions. Indeed? “Why should a perfect human being, good-looking and admired, need to make such spurious promises to himself?” I asked.

            “No,” he said, “I am asking about you, not this other person to whom you refer.” Rudy’s first language is one of the Chinese dialects known as Mandarin #16 and so he’s very careful with English. “Did you or did you not made any New Year’s Resolutions?”

            I had to admit that I have made a few. The first was to make a better effort to remember people’s names. There is no one in Victoria County who has a worse memory for names than I do. This is NOT a good characteristic for a newspaper reporter. I was interviewing Premier Allerdyce only last week about the price of something-or-other and I could not remember his first name. Prime Minister Harvey is not a problem, because I don’t get to interview her.

            There was a second resolution. Wait, wait, don’t tell me. It was about being more tolerant of politicians – such as those two I just mentioned – and making an effort to understand that several Canadian politicians are hard-working and honest. Defence Minister Peter McKay, for example, must have his good points. Perhaps he’s kind to dogs.

            The third resolution had to do with speed bumps. I should do a 1500-word story on the history of speed bumps, or maybe not. Some people on Birchwood Street in Perth-Andover were happy to have them there, others hated them, and now the latest I heard was that quite a few people on Hillcrest Drive on the Andover side would be happy to have them if Birchwood Street residents don’t want them. “It has become a racetrack,” one woman told me.

            I don’t think there was a fourth resolution unless it had something to do with winning the lottery. I have had many people tell me that the odds against or the chances of winning a lottery – and I mean one in which the word ‘million’ is used – are astronomical and tiny. However, what are the odds of anyone paying at least two dollars a week since the 1970s and winning a total of less than $100? If I can beat those odds, I should be able to beat the odds against winning a lottery. I’ll just check the Mayan calendar. Maybe it will provide me with a clue.
                                                                -end-                                                   

Back to Beechwood Dam

The things we search for and rarely find 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

Christopher Columbus - or whatever his real name was - spent a lot of time looking for what was then called The New World. I don’t know what Amelia Earhart was searching for, but after she lost her way flying over the Pacific Ocean in the 1930s, people spent a lot of time searching for her. I have been watching the fiasco known as 'The F-35 Affair" in which federal Defence Minister Peter McKay has been searching for some integrity, telling every story but the truth.

A Spaniard named Juan Ponce de Leon spent a lot of time around Florida in the late fifteenth century looking for the legendary Fountain of Youth. The newspaperman who became Lord Stanley looked in every bar in Africa until he found Dr. Livingstone.

What's the point of my mentioning these things? I’m thinking about Rowena, the place, where (going by the evidence) the government has somehow misplaced the yellow line on Highway 390 that goes through there.

Most secondary roads have yellow (white when I was a kid) centre lines, but somehow the centre line on the road through Rowena got misplaced; I pretty nearly swamped my old 2000 Intrepid as I was driving through Rowena and on my way to Picadilly where I had read there was a circus going on.

It was foggy and trying to snow and I couldn't quite make out where the ditch was in relation to where Bob was. I slowed down to a near crawl and rolled down the window to try and see the centre line, but like Peter McKay's integrity, it didn't exist.

What did exist was the ditch about five feet from the LEFT side of the car which meant that if I continued on my present course I would end up in disaster. This was remarkably similar to what Miss Sara Williams, my high school English teacher, used to tell me. My Latin teacher, Mrs. Maybelle Titus, gave me similar warnings, as did my Chemistry Teacher Ellsworth DeMerchant who told me that he faithfully reads this column. All those warning, while accurate, didn't deter me from ending up in the circumstances I just described - driving through Rowena in a fog and on the wrong side of the road.

Here is my request for whoever is in charge of roads and is holding many truckloads of rolled-up lines in his warehouse: slap some down on the road through Rowena, just for me.

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

I continue to be bemused (not to be confused with ‘amused’) by our provincial Health Minister, Ted Flemming. As I mentioned before, he reached in his Tickle Trunk and came up with the promise of a new hospital for Perth-Andover without, it appears, really looking deeply into what can be done at the present location. While this kind of ‘thinking’ is common among those who breathe only the rarefied air of Fredericton, it seems to me that logic has been brushed aside – also a common thing in Fredericton.

The first number I heard for the proposed new hospital – if I’m not guilty of exaggeration by using that word – was eight or nine million dollars, but then the number $17 million has crept in. If that is meant to keep the people quiet, it’s not working. We have heard government promises before. And the fact that possibly some cement will be poured just before the next election – well, I know that is just coincidence, not that I’m either cynical or sarcastic.

Mr. Flemming refuses to promise surgery, obstetrics, a full ER, and parking spaces at the new ‘facility’ which tells us far more than any puffed-up dollar figure does. It’s clear that there will be none of these things – except perhaps the parking spaces – so let’s not get carried away. Oops! Another bad analogy. Carried away from a hospital, get it?

Not one to complain without suggesting a solution, here is mine to the government: Use the unflooded second floor of the old part of the present hospital because there’s no reason not to. Raise and widen the walking trail that goes by the hospital so that vehicles can use it to transport staff and patients during an actual flood to Beech Glen Road and over what we call Jawbone Mountain (hardly a mountain). From there people can go through Lower Kintore and Muniac, onto Highway 105 and downriver to the Trans Canada and Waterville hospital if necessary, or to Plaster Rock.

Muniac Road, impassable during the March flood, needs to be raised about ten feet near Highway 105 and perhaps a few other minor places. Presto! Chango! For about two million dollars rather than $17 million. What government is forgetting is that, if a new hospital is built across the river, then people on the Perth side can’t get to it. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And finally, two major suggestions: Tear down Waterville hospital or make it into 47 handball courts, and rebuild in Woodstock, and lastly, have a major study done on the operation of Beechwood Dam – NOT by anyone associated with NB Power or their tame consultants.

                                         -END-