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-
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