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-