The
club is a place of exotic topics and cold lemonade
by
Robert LaFrance
I think we have all noticed that just about
everything we do is now so complicated that it’s hardly worth doing. I went
into a place last week to buy a fishing licence and was told I should wait
until my 65th birthday on May 11th because it would be
half price then. I didn’t buy the licence; I do live in the SCOTCH colony and
we all have to live up to the name. Or to use one of the words of my friend the
late Mike MacAfee: parsimonious.
Although I did not buy the licence, I took the 2013
Fishing Guide handbook. When I got home I settled myself into my favourite easy
chair and sipped on a lemonade while perusing this booklet. Booklet? ‘War and
Peace’ was barely longer. After 17 lemonades, a can of smoked oysters, and some
french-fries, I decided I needed help in finding out whether I could actually
go fishing in New Brunswick this year. I hired three lawyers from the
Kincardine firm of Anderlect, Breeton, and Shyster and, after a week, we are
starting to see some light at the end of the funnel. Yes, I said FUNNEL. I’m up
to funnelling in the lemonade now.
The bottom line is, I think I will soon be fishing
on a lake, as long as it’s part of the headwaters of the confluence of the
lakehead of a brook that forms part of the watershed of the Upper St. John
River, but not west of a line that runs from…never mind. Hand me that big red
funnel, boys.
********************************
Funny how one word can alter the
meaning of a sentence; someone said last week that my friend Flug was ‘tough as nails’
and Emir Podolski, a Swede with not a great command of the English expressions
and idioms, asked if it was a good thing to be ‘tough as snails’. “I happen to
know that the terrestrial pulmonate
gastropod molluscs are not very tough,” he said as he sipped a
lemonade. Emir is some kind of scientist who deals with that stuff. I said that
snails might be puny but they will outlast all of us. That led us to the topic
of gardening, then to hockey, then to Armenian playwrights, at least those who
wrote after 1918. The club is a place of wide-ranging discussion.
Big Red just came back from South
Korea (if it’s still there) and said he had had quite a time in the capital
city, Seoul, where he had lost track of his wife and son while they were
visiting a zoo, or perhaps the legislature. “I looked everywhere in that zoo
(or legislature)” he said. “I’ll tell you, I did some Seoul-searching that
day.” For that bad pun the bartender, Teddy, sent him out with a flea in his
ear as the saying goes. At least, I thought it was a saying until I noticed
that the brand name of Teddy’s boots were ‘Flea’.
As one who has enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes cartoons
for years (although the cartoonist has been retired since the 1990s), I must
relate a recent case in which Calvin’s wisdom could have been useful. The
Perfessor lost again in the provincial dart finals in Moncton. This is the
fourth year in a row this has happened, and each time he lost to Gary Naholet
of Lutes Mountain. Not one to ever admit he has any shortcoming, the Perfessor
continues to deny that Naholet is actually better at darts, something that
seems a little obvious. Calvin, if he had been there talking to the big loser,
would have said: “I know, you’re not in denial. You’re just very selective
about the reality you accept.”
A few decades ago, one of the huge
names in the oil business – or “all bidness” as they say in Texas – was Getty.
John Paul Getty seemed to own every oil rig in North America. Then in 1973
JPG’s grandson was kidnapped in Italy and finally got returned – minus an ear
which the kidnappers chopped off to point out they were serious – and the Getty
family disappeared from the news, other than financing a library here and
there.
Not any more. That grandson had a
son and he has started a resort in the Cayman Islands, a spa as it were. You
can guess the name if you try. Yup, you’re right - Spa-Getty.
-end-
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