What catches the eye better - Hitler? (April 10)

A variety of spring observations 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

             It is said that the late Irish playwright Brendan Behan was not a writer with a drinking problem, but a drinker with a writing problem. I am not sure if it were he or Oscar Wilde who said: ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’. I am also not sure why I started this column with a paragraph on alcoholism, but other than JFK, Hitler and bestiality, what catches the eye better?

            A headline in my daily newspaper referred to an attack outside a bar in Saint John as a ‘vicious stabbing’. I thought about that for a while, as I tend to do, but I was unable to come up with a scenario in which a stabbing wasn’t vicious. Think of this headline: ‘Bar fight results in gentle, kindly stabbing’.

            Note the symbolism that after a group of young Cree folks snow-shoed and walked 1600 km from James Bay to Ottawa in support of the Idle No More movement, and the Prime Minister wasn’t there to greet them. He was in Toronto welcoming two giant pandas from China where Canada hopes to sell a lot of trade goods. To be fair, this was part of a diplomatic exchange with China, but perhaps a diplomatic exchange should also be set up between Canada and the aboriginal people. After all, they were the FIRST nation here.

            I was recently in Fredericton and walking up Prospect Street when a police car turned on its siren – actually the officer did – and pulled over a lady who had been talking on her cellphone while driving her Austin Mini. I slowed my pace as I neared this scene and could hear him sassing her about ‘hands-free’ devices and how she was endangering people’s lives by her thoughtless action. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice two tractor-trailers going by, their drivers holding CB radio mikes in their hands and having a lively conversation, possibly with each other. When you’re big, you pretty much run things. A good lesson for our youth who probably are taught a lot of guff about ‘fairness’.

            My neighbours Flora and Ben have two teenage kids – and yes, I know they have your deepest sympathy. What I was going to mention was something that sounds like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. “The phenomenon of the toilet paper and the juice container”. Flora said that the kids will not put on a new roll of toilet paper, even if they have to go three days without using the flush. “They’d be constipated before they’d change that blasted roll,” she complained. “Same with the orange juice container.

 

           "They would leave a quarter inch of juice in it for a week rather than fill it.” Being very wise, I told her something I had read a few years ago: “Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.” She said that sounded like her neighbour Glenna, who finished high school. I said no, it was the philosopher and teacher Socrates, about 2500 years ago. “He’s not around now,” she pointed out quite correctly, “or I would say: ‘Right on dude!’”

            On the subject of national spy organizations, I have been impressed by the motto of various ones like CSIS, the CIA, MI5, the KGB, et al, but I think my favourite is the one used by MI6, Britain’s external spy agency. Through the wonders of the Internet I saw recently in the Manchester Guardian newspaper this recruiting ad: “Join MI6 and put some spies in your life!”

            My friend Flug, who considers himself an expert on architecture ever since he built a shed for the Johnsons, had a few comments to make about the houses in this community. “Why are so many houses white here?” he asked, as if I would know or care. As everyone knows, I have no style or class, except fourth.

 

            Flug said: “I counted 16 white houses out of 18 on our road. Do people never think about other colours?” I told him I never did, except if I saw an orange house I might retch.

 

            So I asked him: “What if I went right wild and painted my house beige? Would that stop your complaining?” It took two Molson lemonades and a pickled egg to stop his laughing.        

                                              -end-

Various observations (April 3, 2013)

A notebook oozing with pithy observations

                                                             by Robert LaFrance

             My notebook having been jammed full of pithy (did I spell that right?) comments, questions, and brilliant insights, I will make this column a collection of aphorisms – whatever that might mean to you or me – and some of those insights etc.

            It is said that such a collection should be made in ‘point form’ as they say nowadays, but, like Thoreau, I march to a different drummer. Let me ‘march to the music I hear, however measured or far away’.

            If you haven’t seen it yet, go to the CBC-TV website and look up the show ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ for the sketch called ‘PEI EI PI’ which stands for Prince Edward Island Employment Insurance Private Investigator. Sean Majumder plays the part of a detective going door to door and asking EI recipients if they are really looking for work. In the end, he gets whacked in the forehead with a metal shovel. I’m sure that was an accident. Enjoy. Not that I condone violence.

            A certain member of this household has hinted that my office needs a bit of neatening up. The word ‘excavator’ was used. I have ignored these hints because I’m busy, but yesterday she went too far. She was showing some people around our historic  house (built in 1887) and showed them all the rooms except my office. “What’s in there?” asked one visiting myopic twerp. She answered with a sneer: “Forget that room; that’s the scene of the grime.”

            My friend Jillian Montero emailed me the other day from Seattle where she is a member of the city’s Library Board. It’s a paid position and she wrote to brag that she had just been elected the chair of the Library Board, and that meant a raise in salary of over five thousand dollars. Although Jill is of the female persuasion, she despises all the politically correct terms used these days and is quite happy to be called Chairman. She is also happy in sarcasm; she wrote: “Yes, I’m the new chair, Bill Peterson is the new table and Samantha Glinns was elected to be a bookcase. Or was it filing cabinet?”

            Last week I finished a book called ‘The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam’  by Barbara W. Tuchman. It was about how governments keep making the same mistakes, over and over. (Are you listening, finance ministers?) Here is the first sentence in the first chapter of the book: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policy contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity.” An hour and a half after I finished the book I heard on the news that the Iraq War put on by George W. Bush and confreres cost a total of two millions lives, and cost the U.S. alone a total of almost THREE TRILLION DOLLARS. That’s $3,000,000,000,000 for absolutely nothing.

            I was interested to hear on the radio news that employees and former employees of two of the big Canadian chartered banks (CIBC and ScotiaBank) had launched a class action suit in an effort to receive money for overtime they had worked. Quite a coincidence, because in 1969, when I was working for the CIBC in Paris, Ontario, I put in my overtime claim of 48 hours for one month and the manager called me into his office to tell me I would only get paid for twelve. “You must be mistaken,” I pointed to the overtime sheet, “because I worked 48 hours. If you had wanted me to work fewer hours, you should have told me at the BEGINNING of the month.” He said he couldn’t send in that 48-hour sheet because ‘it wouldn’t look good’ in Toronto. I commented that I didn’t give a rat’s posterior what they thought in Toronto. He insisted, I insisted, back and forth. Meanwhile I was writing out my resignation from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Cheapskate. I gave them THREE MONTHS notice, so that they couldn’t hire anyone else for my position the whole time. Go ahead, call me vindictive.

            There is a sign on our porch where our dog lives in an insulated house of his own. It says: “This residence is protected by a 4-legged security assistant. Go ahead, make his day.” Meanwhile, in Nova Scotia, a group of well-meaning people want to make it illegal to have a dog kept outside. How could you have a watchdog that stays in the house? I recently heard that people, brought to tears by soppy TV news items, donated over $30,000 so that a dog in Moncton could have several operations. Meanwhile people are living on the streets or being visited by the PEI EI PI types. This is a DOG, people! See if you can regain your perspective before the Great Scorer comes and calls you silly.

                                                 -end-

"I have just inconvenienced 5000 people, too bad!"

Tobique Narrows bridge closing will create varicose veins

 

                             by Robert LaFrance

 

            When our provincial Department of Transportation and Infrastructure decided to close Tobique Narrows dam bridge for eight to ten weeks this summer – and not have an alternate means of getting across that river there - they were obviously under the influence of some substance that renders its user unable to access (1) vision, (2) compassion, and (3) what it would be like to make a 90 km round trip when you can actually look out your living room window to see your destination. Parts of Tobique First Nation are 3 or 4 km away from parts of Perth-Andover.

            Has anyone who had a part in that decision ever spoken to someone in Tobique First Nation, Tilley, Rowena, Perth-Andover or the area around there to see just what it would be like to live on that side of the Tobique River and be cut off from travelling either way? People from Tobique work in Perth-Andover and vice versa. It must be interesting to sit in an office in Fredericton and snap your fingers: “I have just inconvenienced five thousand people, too bad.”

            Let’s go back a ways and look at the new bridge put in a few years ago about halfway between Perth and Tobique Narrows. A ‘stream’ that pretty well dries up in the summer runs down through Hanson’s Gulch whose bridge was replaced although a large culvert would have done the job. Some obscure environmental rule dictated that it couldn’t be a culvert because, apparently, sockeye salmon and beluga whales migrate there to spawn.

            I have spoken to several engineers about that job and they said it could have been done perfectly well for half a million dollars. The official cost, including the building of a temporary bridge around the site, was around a million, but I have it from a ‘reliable source’ that the total cost of the project was close to $3 million. Keep in mind, the transportation minister has said that NB can’t put a temporary bridge at or near Tobique Narrows because it would cost a million dollars and, added to the project itself, this would be $3.5 million.

            Over the past few years and decades, I have often wondered if someone in Fredericton has a grudge against the whole Perth-Andover area including Tobique First Nation, Tilley, etc. Every possible government office has been ripped out of the area and we wouldn’t have to think long to name some of them: the Carlingford jail, Department of Agriculture, the Provincial Court, the ranger station, and so on. You can even go back to the installation of the lovely Beechwood Dam which forced merchants on the Perth riverbank to move to the other side of the street. And when Bernard Lord’s band of merry minions built a hospital out in a field in Waterville that was about it for Hotel Dieu hospital in Perth, or so the minions thought.

            A show of hands, please - who really thinks that Perth-Andover will get a $17 million hospital on the Andover side of the river? Although I have heard from another reliable source that $4 million would reinstate the present hospital to a flood-proofed facility including the building up of access roads to Waterville, the government decided to mollify people with the $17 million fantasy figure. Another thing that no one has mentioned is that if a hospital did happen to be built on the Andover side, it would isolate people in Perth from access to it. Remember, you heard it here.

            While I ain’t no good at ‘rithmetic, I can tell you that the difference between $4 million and $17 million is $13 million. How much was that temporary bridge around Tobique Narrows again?

            While I was doing research for this column, I tried to think of analogies for what the provincial government has planned for us this summer. I thought of Stompin’ Tom and his plywood – with Tobique First Nation and Perth-Andover being the plywood – but that didn’t say it well enough. Then I looked up the definition of ‘varicose veins’.

            With varicose veins the blood is allowed to flow backwards; this causes the veins to swell. The flowing backwards is traffic going to Tobique Narrows and finding they have to turn around and go somewhere else, and the swelling represents a lot of people who are as mad as a cat dropped in a mud puddle. Varicose roads – what a concept.

            Here’s my idea: how about if Tobique First Nations residents invite the transportation minister and several high mucky-mucks from his department to the parking lot of St. Ann’s Church. Look down the river and you can see part of Perth-Andover. Then what if the minister got a call that he was needed urgently in Perth-Andover? But the Tobique Narrows dam is blocked by vehicles, so they would they have to drive all the way to Arthurette and down Highway 109.

Would it then sink in, just a little bit, why people are so upset at the idea of doing the same thing every day or every week?

                                           -end-