Life lesson: Bullies get rich (Nov. 26)

The Bully Pulpit has returned

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

There is a television show called ‘The Dragon’s Den’, in which resides some of the rudest and most obnoxious people in Canada. These individuals look down on people who are trying to sell their inventions and products and bully them. That is apparently the job of these highly paid jerks.

            It must be a decade ago when I saw for the first – and last – time a show called ‘American Idol’. A bully named Simon Cowell was browbeating a performer who was competing in the contest. He made the young man cry right there in front of millions of people and then smirked.

            The reason I mention these two shows is that I recently heard that the jerk named Simon is ‘worth’ something like $500 million, largely because of the popularity of ‘American Idol’ and the one he’s in now, ‘The X Factor’. Guess whether I watch it or not.

            Cowell and the bullies on ‘The Dragon’s Den’ are all rich celebrities because they are bullies. It says a lot about the society we live in, doesn’t it?

            Moving on to a more pleasant subject – the refrigerator – I was looking at ours yesterday afternoon and was really quite amazed at the amount of information on it. Grocery list, a couple dozen photos, an envelope of postage stamps, newspaper advice columns, various pins and magnetic things, a page of cellphone numbers, a $2 bill, a few cartoon strips – it goes on and on. A computer hard drive would be envious of all the information stored there.

            My question is this: where did people stick all this stuff before there were fridges and ice boxes? The obvious answer is “in the fireplace”, but I think we should delve a little deeper. We’ll say that the year is 1901. There are iceboxes of course, but not everyone can afford one. Many people store their food in brooks or springs, or in the shed behind the axe.

            I can only guess where a lot of the information was stored back in 1901.

            The grocery list, consisting of a maximum of three items, list was in the head of the ‘housewife’. “Flour, sugar, and salt.” The photos would be in an album in ‘the front room’ or ‘the parlour’. The list of cellphone numbers would be non-existent of course, unless one had a couple of friends in jail, and the magnetic pins would be waiting to be invented.

            Just to go back a bit to the word ‘icebox’, few people would think that I am old enough to remember the days when iceboxes were used, but I certainly do. (I’m 66, but my wife says I don’t look a day over 65.)

            It looked just like a fridge; housewives (that word again) stored food in them just as they do today, but the icebox had an insulated compartment that held a big block of ice that we had to replace about every week. Father would drive our 1949 Monarch to downtown metropolitan Tilley and pick up a block from a guy named Bernard. That little barn is still there today. We would go up and get a sawdust covered block and take it home – which makes sense I guess.

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

            I am, and have always been, completely at a loss to understand how to pronounce most of the Bosnian and Herzegovinan names and others from the Balkans - Serbia for example. However, Serbia, Montenegro, and other countries that made up the former Yugoslavia do occasionally use vowels in their languages.

            Bosnia and Herzegovina, whom I mentioned first for a reason, is the toughest of them all for its names. It would not be unusual for a 10-letter name to have only one vowel, or perhaps only the letter ‘Y’, which is only half a vowel.

            The town of Brcko is an example of a shorter name, and it went a bit overboard (into the Adriatic Sea perhaps?) because 20% of its letters are (is) vowel. There are lots of other examples, but I’ll just move to the reason I brought up the subject.

            On the MPBN Radio Show ‘Car Talk’ the hosts reported on an important news event in the late 1990s. U.S. President Bill Clinton, noting the plight of Bosnians, filled two C5 cargo planes with vowels and sent them to Bosnia on an airlift of mercy. He had the planes drop thousands of vowels over a dozen major cities. Was he successful? Look today at Gracanica, which used to be called Grznnztrtwx, and make up your own mind.

                                       -END-

Flug joined a new group, DWM (Nov. 19)

Like a 98-year-old guy in a harem

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, not related) was railing on last evening at the club about the uselessness of meetings.

            He’s a member of the Quadra-County Council for Esoteric Doldrums or some such organization, and the twelve members, every month or so, decide the need to meet is overwhelming. They always meet at the club and always when the bar is open, which may tell you something right there.

            “I have the minutes of every meeting we’ve had since March of 2012,” he told me, “and I would say that during that time we have accomplished exactly zero. Just reading the minutes tells me that every motion that anybody ever made was voted down by the rest, including those whose round it was next. The only contribution we have made to the economy of this area is the tax money we have paid on all that lemonade.”

            As he went on, expanding on this theme, I listened attentively, meanwhile thinking about what colour I should paint my office walls, whether to wear my grey shirt with my kilt, and whether buying oil stocks would be a good move right now. (I decided to wait.)

            “And in conclusion,” he said, after what seemed like a month, “I have decided  that I am now going to waste my time doing something other than going to these meetings. I have decided to resign the Quadra-County Council for Esoteric Doldrums and form a group called DWM Ltd.”

            “And the meaning of the acronym DWM?” I asked.

            “Down With Meetings,” he answered. “We will meet every Saturday afternoon down at the club.”

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

            Even though I was just a kid in the 1950s, I remember the Communist Scares of the time, particularly those coming from the U.S.A., the land of the free etc. (Free if you agree with everybody else.)

            One phrase I particularly remember is “A card carrying member of the Communist Party”. Apparently being a member of the party wasn’t anywhere near as much a sin as carrying a card to proclaim it. I often pictured a chap trying to persuade the police or some other authority figure that he was indeed a Communist and their ignoring him because he wasn’t carrying a card. “Oh, come on guys! I’m a lousy Commie; I just don’t happen to have my card today!”

            This is all leading up to this: ask yourself how many cards you are carry around in your wallet or purse. My wallet is approximately the same thickness as a politician’s skin although the only thing in it is a lonely five-dollar bill and 87 cards, none of them a Communist Party membership one.

            I go into the drug store to buy a toothbrush and before I get out of there I have to produce an Air Miles card, a credit card, a store card, and seven pieces of ID plus a card to show that I have more cards at home including a card that allows me to own a dog. A few minutes later I am at the grocery store where I must produce approximately 41 cards before I can buy a can of soup or a bar of soap.

            The upside of this all is that, although I’ve gotten a hernia from lugging around all these cards, one of them is my Medicare card so I can have it looked after, someday.

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

            Don’t you really, REALLY, enjoy it when you go into a store and they lie to you? The worst thing is, quite often those people don’t even know they’re lying. Here’s what I’m talking about:

            “We don’t have it today, but it will be in on the truck Tuesday morning.”

            They never say Monday; that’s too early in the week. They never say Wednesday because that’s too far into the future; same with Thursday and Friday and of course the next weekend is out of the question.

            I was thinking (watch out!) this morning that if those clerks did happen to be telling the truth, the strain on Canada’s transportation infrastructure would be brutal. Picture this: On Tuesday morning – perhaps next Tuesday morning – all across the country, if every one of those Tuesday trucks started out at the same time. It would be bumper-to-bumper from Halifax to Chilliwack.

            My point? Clerks, please quit lying. If you don’t have the item, say so and quit promising something you can’t deliver, like the 98-year-old guy in a harem.

                                     -end-

Prime Minister Stephen Harper - weatherman (Nov. 12)

Whatever happened to Pamela Wallin?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Many people have congratulated my daughter Kate who did very well on Episode 6 of the CBC-TV show “Canada’s Smartest Person” and when I say ‘many’ I mean  MANY people.

            Facebook, emails, tweets, etc. – she is still receiving accolades for her great performance, but I think I should get a medal or two as well, plus some sort of medical attention for biting my fingernails down to the third knuckle.

            It’s a nerve-racking thing to watch your kid, even if she is 29, stand up there on national TV and not only hold her own, but very nearly win the final over a guy who got his medical degree when he was 23.

            Anyone who wants to watch that episode #6 can go to this URL on the Internet: http://www.cbc.ca/smartestperson/episodes. I feel that on there somewhere should be a big thank you to ME from CBC-TV. I guarantee I was much more nervous than Kate.

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

            I try not to talk about the weather too much, but I must say that first winter snowstorm was a doozie. I’ve written to the Prime Minister who has often implied he can control the weather, but so far I have only received a letter from one of his flunkies – a George P. Donleavy.

            Mr. Donleavy asserted that, although PM Harper can indeed control the weather, he was busy at the moment welcoming a delegation from Chernobyl. I understand that they have glowing praise for the job the prime minister has done so far.

            I just want to say, Mr. Prime Minister, that I am totally unimpressed with your first huge snowstorm of the year and I sincerely hope that will be it until Dec. 24 when you will drop just enough to make it a white Christmas. Then perhaps Global Warming will take over and we will be out in our pools by the first of February.

            (NOTE FROM MY FRIEND FLUG: The only pools Bob has ever participated in has been the hockey pools or pool halls.)

            Back to the subject after that unauthorized interruption, I was not greatly inconvenienced by the huge snowstorm, but I must soon do a story on garage owners. They are now part of the ‘nouveau riche’ culture because their garages have been going night and day putting on winter tires. I have called three garages this morning already and the earliest they could ‘fit me in’ has been January 27^th.

            Here are a few more observations from someone who doesn’t always have enough useful things to do: The first one involves birdseed. I am about to sue (for false advertising) the companies who sell birdseed; this past spring, for the second year in a row, I planted birdseed in the garden and not one chickadee or robin grew. All that came up were sunflowers.

            I’m also thinking of suing a certain communications company. In July I saw an ad for a ‘bundle’ consisting of satellite TV, high-speed Internet, and land-line telephone, all three for $115 a month plus tax. A month later I added $15 worth of programming so that my total monthly bill should have been $130 plus tax. My smallest monthly bill so far has been $238 and every time I get my bill I have to phone the company and complain that they’ve charged me for things that must have been added by my dog Kezman, like extra mileage for the guy hooking up the TV since he lives in Saskatoon. I think I’m about to go back to my previous companies.

            The other evening, over a jar of lemonade – actually two jars, he’s not THAT much of a friend – Flug and I were talking about pre-existence. It was late. He said that Louie, a friend of his, had positive proof that he had had a previous life as an assistant to Julius Caesar. Indeed, Louie and Caesar’s wife had married after the emperor had been murdered by Brutus and others. Flug looked a little sad at that point and I asked him what was wrong. “My previous life was as Gene Autrey’s horse, Trigger. I told him that I had long suspected he was a certain part of a horse and this was proof positive. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Gene’s horse had been Champion, not Trigger.

               As I’ve mentioned before, some words find their way into everyday use even though not a one of us has an idea what they mean. A show of hands, please: what does the word ‘algorithm’ mean? I don’t know either, although I hear it about every day. How about ‘matrix’? ‘Parameter’? Remember those forgotten Senate scandals during which Senator Pamela Wallin kept saying the word ‘recuse’ which means drop out or delete oneself? Within the next month every reporter in Canada started using that word in his or her stories.

            By the way, is Pamela going to be recused from the Senate? There’s no recuse for her behaviour.

                                             -end- 

Canada's worst slob (Nov. 5)

I made a slight error in judgement

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            The faithful and long-suffering readers of this column have often heard me say that I am the messiest dude in Canada – a real slob – and I am here to tell you that I have put an end to all that, perhaps not in the way I intended, but “anyway, however”, as Aunt Ruby used to say.

            If I sit down to have a meal and am covered with a tarpaulin, I will find a way to get stains on my clothes. Perhaps the filling of my fried egg sandwich will fly out, bounce off the dog, and end up, somehow, in my shorts, but Whoever Is In Charge will find a way to mess up my clothes.

            About 1:00 pm on Monday, as I was gazing down at my pants and the large stain left there from my spilling an entire can of V-8 juice on them, a lightbulb went on over my head. I thought it was what’s-her-name turning on my reading light for me, but it was in fact an idea.

            Up in my closet, I said to myself, are 15 pairs of pants, each of them stained with some food item. They are like an epicurean biography of my recent meals. “Since I can’t get those stains out by washing the pants in anything (vinegar, nuclear Tide, etc.),” I reasoned, “why not dye the pants? Ipso, chango, no more stains!”

You might say I had had  a brain-wave, or maybe not. Readers, if you go to your mirrors, you will see a person who would not have done what I did next. I came up with a decision that turned out to be as wrong as possible.

            At this point the normal, rational human being would have taken one pair of pants and tried the dye out on them, just to see if it were a good idea. While your columnist is (probably) a human being, the other two adjectives didn’t and don’t apply. I decided to dye all my pants at the same time.

            I had to go to town to buy all that dye, but I found it – enough dye to change the colour of my entire wardrobe of pants – and went to work. I happened to have a galvanized tub from my moonshining days and put “the whole complete unit” (as the late Paul St. Peter used to say) in there. Slosh, slosh, slosh and it was done. The pants were now all a uniform grey. I hung them on the clothesline with confidence and aplomb.

            Late that afternoon they were all dry, but the colours (plural, as you see) were not all grey any more. They were kind of a pastel rainbow but, to look on the bright side, all the stripes were vertical. That would make me look taller.

                                                “Slings and arrows”

            That was probably the first time I ever made a mistake on this scale, except that time in Orillia, Ontario…but that’s another story. In one fell swoop, or as the late Marvin Toner used to say, one smell foop, I had taken fifteen pairs of pants whose biggest crimes had been the fact that I had worn them, and pretty much ruined them.

            “Be careful what you wish for, it may come true,” goes the old saying, and the fate of my wardrobe was an excellent example of that. I had all those pants that were stained, it is true, but they were wearable, and nobody other than friends and relatives made snide comments about them. My ‘new’ clothes were somewhat (shall we say?) gaudy, even if the colours were muted, but what could I do but wear them?

            The first time I wore them in public was at a ceremony in Fredericton where I was covering the story of Prince Charles’s dedicating a new grocery store or something. He took one look at me and, right in the middle of a sentence, burst out laughing. Beside him Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was in stitches, and that must have hurt. I decided then and there to buy an entirely new pants wardrobe.

            “I say, did you have an explosion in your house?” asked Prince Charles after the ceremony. “I have just the thing to help you out, old chap. Since I never wear a pair of pantaloons (he said that) twice, I will donate my entire week’s discards to you.”

            So if you see me at Save-Easy and wearing what looks like some rather foppy trousers, or pantaloons, that is the whole story. I am now a clothes-horse, or some part of a horse. I no longer have to endure, as Shakespeare wrote in ‘Hamlet’,  “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Thanks, Chuck.

                                                 -end- 

Just a little smartie she is (Oct. 29)

Is my daughter “Canada’s Smartest Person”?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Our daughter Kate is scheduled to be a contestant on the CBC-TV show “Canada’s Smartest Person” on Sunday evening, November 2, and I suppose I should watch it, just to keep peace n the family.

            (Translation: If I don’t, she will beat me even worse the next time we play golf. The last time we played she beat me by 27 strokes, but we had to go or I would have done better on the second hole.)

            The funny thing is, when she first saw the ad welcoming contestants, she phoned me and suggested that I enter. When I stopped laughing I said: “Remember when I taught you how to play chess when you were four and you beat me two months later and forever after? Remember those Jeopardy shows when you would get 25 or 30 answers and I would get two by guessing? Remember…?”

            “I got it, Papa,” she said. “Okay, just for fun I will apply for it.” So after dozens of emails and phone interviews between her and the folks of CBC-TV Toronto, they chose her as one of the top 32 Smartest Persons in Canada and she flew to Toronto for the taping of the show. She stayed in a luxurious hotel, “was treated like a queen”, and came home with her mouth closed.

            In other words, she had signed a confidentiality agreement that she wouldn’t tell ANYONE how she had done. I looked at the agreement, and it didn’t include the words “anyone but your Papa”, so I will be in the dark as much as you when I watch “Canada’s Smartest Person” which will be on at 8:00 pm that Sunday, November 2.

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

            Going from someone I love to some things I hate, let me start with anchovies, although they don’t weigh heavily on my life.

            The first (and last) time I ever ate anchovies was in 1967 when I moved from Tilley to Hamilton, Ontario, and had some on a pizza. I was staying for a few days with some Aroostook chaps who had ordered a pizza “with everything”. It was either Dennis Campbell or Gaylen Dee who asked me if I liked anchovies and I sure, I like everything.

            Apparently I lied. When I bit into that pizza the gag reflex kicked in, but, being of tough French-German stock, I ate it anyway. Although being of no Scottish stock at all, I still worried about the five dollars I had contributed to the purchase of three large pizzas, but being otherwise greedy, I ate three pieces, anchovies and all.

            I also hate false advertising, or any advertising at all. This morning I bought a box of crackers whose label read “61% less salt”. Less than what? I asked myself, but didn’t pursue the matter; I was hungry. When one is hungry, he doesn’t feel like arguing, only gorging.

            How about terrorists? Don’t you hate the way they don’t respect private property and the various urban bylaws? Don’t you hate it when your spouse cooks some delicious looking treats and then says you can’t have any because they’re for the church supper?

            Don’t you hate it when you are coming from fishing and you only have four small fish on your stringer and you tell somebody that a big one – at least a foot long – got away and they don’t believe you? How about insomnia? Physical work like dealing with firewood? Winter? The piercing sound of mourning doves at about 5:00 am? Mould? Mold? Slum landlords? Columnists who ask dumb questions?

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

            We had some house guests in October and they were a trial, believe me. Earl and Joanne arrived here about the 3^rd of the month and brought their suitcases right in the house first thing, as if they were planning to stay a while.

            I sighed, then sighed some more. I felt like cursing, but one must put up with in-laws, outlaws, and other assorted laws. My side of the family probably is thought of the same way.

            So for the next week we fed Earl and Joanne and washed their bedding, engaged them in conversation, took them out for drives and even took them to my club where they filled up on fish and chips. It was with a certain sense of relief that we said goodbye to them on Friday evening.

            “I think we need to have a talk about your relatives using our place as a motel,” I said to my wife as we watched the dust from their car tires drift down past the church.

            Pause. “MY relatives?” she said. “I thought they were your relatives.”
                                               -end-

Never throwing out ANYTHING (Oct. 22)

A staggering change in the weather

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            It’s been quite a week. My grandfather, Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) would have called it “a staggering change in the weather”.

            He wouldn’t have been referring to the weather. What happened was that last Thursday Mrs. Jean McAlloy finally gave her consent to her husband Oscar McAlloy. Nothing to do with matrimony, since they’d been married 37 years, but the consent was that she had finally agreed that the two of them would clean out ‘the junk cupboard’ and ‘throw a lot of stuff away’.

            Anyone who knows Jean McAlloy would have been extremely dubious about that second part. The last time she threw anything away was 1981 when a mouse knocked a china cup onto the floor and smashed it to smithereens. Smashed the cup I mean, not the floor. Jean reluctantly consented to put the broken pieces into the refuse tip as the say in her native England. It took some persuading. At one point she suggested trying to glue it back together.

            Back to the junk cupboard. We see on television that we shouldn’t have hazardous waste in the house; the McAlloys (Jean) only had it stored in a low kitchen cupboard for 30 years or so. Whenever something needed to be discarded, like DDT, she would just shove it to the back of the lower shelf. Over the years Oscar tried dozens of times to get rid of some of that detritus before it exploded, but she watched carefully. The closest he came to triumph was the spring day in 2002 when Jean was abed with a bad cold. She took Dramamine or Columbine or something sleep-inducing and was out like a light, but, somewhat like one of Pavlov’s famous  dogs, she sprang to her feet when she heard the creak of the cupboard door.

            How did she get to the point where she was considering throwing out a few things? A flyer came in her and Oscar’s group mailbox and it was from her local solid waste commission. “Safely get rid of computer monitors, toxic chemicals, blah blah blah…” was the message on the flyer. Oscar strategically placed the flyer near her knitting and later saw her pick it, put it down, then pick it up again. “We should look into this,” she said. “There’s some spray cans we should throw away since we don’t use them any more. DDT for example…why is your jaw dropping like that?”

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

            “I would say we took out three 45-gallon drums of toxic and nuclear waste,” Oscar told me over a lemonade at the club. “Jean was crying at the end, just at the thought of throwing something away.”

            I asked him how he managed to get her to agree to throwing out what to her must have been items “that might come in handy” or things “that we’ll need as soon as we throw it away” and he pointed to his lemonade.

            “Let’s just say that by the time we were ready to put the last of the stuff on our Ford Explorer, she would have given away her cat. It was evil and underhanded, but it had to be done. Even so, once the people in the white protective suits had gently put the toxic waste into their truck, Jean had to be held back. I had three carloads of police officers there to help out.”

            A lot of people might think I’m making this up, but I swear on my dog Belvedere’s (1975-1988) grave that it’s all true. Three years ago she picked potatoes at Bon Accord Seed Farm and earned enough to buy a $900 chesterfield that she had to have. Then, when the truck arrived from the furniture store and the men offered to take the old couch out on the porch out of the way, she said no, they would keep both of them in the living room. So now, when they want to watch ‘Canada’s Smartest Person’ (which my daughter Kate will be on November 2) they have to sit at an angle and peer around a corner.

            It used to be that the excuse for holding on to everything, forever, was that the person “had lived through the Depression”, but nowadays that often is not the case. Jean is 61. Her family in England (now living in Alberta) was always well off and not overly parsimonious (which my friend Alby says means ‘cheap’), so nobody knows why Jean has to keep EVERYTHING. It hurts her to take 20-year-old newspapers to recycling, but after Oscar’s and her bedroom got so full it wouldn’t hold an idea, she finally conceded.

            NOTE: Early in this column I mentioned their group mailbox. When Canada Post cut off home delivery to those without a fortified parking lot, Jean refused to remove her home mailbox. It’s still there, just in case.

                                                             -end-

Wanting to talk to a real person (Oct. 15)

Can a mouth be both hot and cold?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            The world is full of contradictions and I’m not even talking about politicians.

Take the sun. We enjoy lying out in it or walking outside on a nice sunny day, but the sun can cause diseases – everything from cataracts to cancer. On the other hand, we need the sun to help put Vitamin D into our bodies. The same sun that we like to be out in makes solanine in potatoes and causes them to turn green and poisonous. During humid summer days, the sun heats up the ground and causes updrafts that cause thunderclouds that give us lightning. If you leave your sunglasses on the dash of your car, the hot sun shining through will scratch them and almost melt them.

How about the wind? There’s story from ancient times in either Rome or Greece – I can never keep them straight. One of the gods of those days looked down on a cold day  and sees Yerkes blowing on his hands to try and warm them up. A little while later Yerkes is seen blowing on his soup to cool it off so he can eat it. I may have gotten this quote a bit wrong, but the god said something like: “Whoa, I ain’t gonna trust nobody who can blow both hot and cold out of the same mouth!”

If you are looking for a point to the previous comments, you look in vain.

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

I am right on the verge of giving up trying to get hold of a real person on the telephone when I try to call (1) a government office or, (2) a business.

My latest attempt was a bank. I spent exactly 24 minutes trying every last trick in the book to get a human voice to talk to me. It would direct me to an employee’s voicemail so I could leave a message (that never would have gotten answered) or perhaps to the employee’s email address that also never would have succeeded in connecting me with him, her or it.

It’s clear, and has been clear for years, that the reason government office phones are all hooked up to these various voicemail and other answering machines; it is so the government employee never has to actually speak to anyone, unless they choose. Can you imagine the cost of wiring every government office in Canada to these Infinity Machines?

That’s what they are – Infinity Machines that put us into One Great Loop. The classic story occurred about a dozen years ago to a young woman in Hillandale. She was having a problem understanding something about her income tax, or just wanted some information, so she dialled the toll-free number provided by Revenue Canada as it was called at the time.

The first person (yes, a real person – it WAS a dozen years ago) directed her to another employee who directed her to #3 who directed her to #4, etc. etc. After a while, employee #8 directed her on to another person who turned out to be the first person she had talked to. The One Great Loop, the Infinity Machine.

Back to my attempt to reach a live banker person by phone: I finally succeeded. I drove to town, walked in the bank and talked to one.

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

Still (indirectly) on the subject of  banking, last year the U.S. of A. decided they had the right to demand income taxes from every Canadian who had been born in the U.S. That took in a lot of people in this area because they had been born in Fort Fairfield, Maine before we had a hospital in Perth, and all over the country people were finding they owed money to the American Internal Revenue Service.

“That’s all well and good,” as Aunt Maud would say to Uncle Henry, “but what if the tables were turned?”

There are millions of people in the U.S. who were born in Canada. Movie stars and other celebrities who make zillions over there. Jim Carrey, Alex Trebek and others should now have to pay Canadian income tax on money earned in the U.S.A. As Aunt Lara would say to Uncle Freddy: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

            What the eating habits of large nesting birds has to do with anything I don’t know, but I thought I’d throw that in there anyway. Although the Americans have forced Canadian banks to release financial information, can you picture the outrage if Canada demanded to have the same information from American banks whose clients include many millionaires born in Canada?

                                                      -end-

Why can't I remember names? (Oct. 8)

Thanks for the (lack of) memories

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

           

            It is traditional that the husband forgets the date of the anniversary so that the wife can be properly outraged, but here in this house it’s the husband who always remembers. He may be the first to remember, or perhaps the only one.

            “What! Is it September this week?” she may say after she looks at the calendar. “Our anniversary is in September ain’t it?”

            I can remember practically anything that has a number associated with it, but when it comes to names, you might as well not bother telling me. Years ago I bought a book entitled “How to Remember Names” and only recently found it under one of the Chesterfield cushions where I must have lost it the same day I brought it home. During that time I have not remembered one name.

            No, that’s not quite correct; I remembered the name of the book.

            As a journalist, my having an ability to remember names is vital; I just hope no one reading this tells Brunswick News that I can only remember numbers…it just occurred to me that what I should have been doing all this time was remembering people as numbers. For example, when Brian Mulroney came through here in 1979 I could have called him Minus Four and then a month later I could have called Joe Clark Plus 6.5. Stephen Harper would be 0.654 (because he’s so precise with all his non-answers).

            I even know the reason for my lack of ability to remember names. Thumbing through an encyclopedia last week, I came across some definitions of parts of the brain. The part that controls the memory of names is located near the left frontal lobe and guess who got struck by a hardwood stick there when he was about eight years old?

            I still have the bump there. What happened was that my cousin (who doesn’t need to be named, but it was Harold) and I were throwing sticks around and one he threw caromed off a nearby apple tree and whacked me on the forehead. He was all worried, thinking he had killed me because of all the blood, but Uncle Jim was there to smooth things over: “It’s all right, Harold. It’s just his head, nothing vital.”

            Uncle Jim had a lot of class; unfortunately it was all fourth class.

            I wrote the foregoing because I want people to know why I forget their names almost immediately. I try very hard, but when I am introduced to someone, no matter how much effort I make, his or her name disappears into space dust within ten minutes. I was telling this to the editor, Joanne, just last week and she said not to worry. No one believes anything I write anyway.

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

            A few observations are in order so I can tear some pages out of my notebook.

            In the 1970s my (future) wife what’s-her-name was attending the New Brunswick School of Craft and Design in Fredericton when one of her fellow students asked her where she was from. My wife admitted that she lived in Victoria County.

            “Oh, the Lost County,” said her friend. “We hear about Madawaska County, Carleton County, York County – even Albert County which has a population of seven – and all the other ones, but nobody ever mentions Victoria County.”

            The recent provincial election reinforced this for the 8,739^th time. As if a seat in Fredericton were worth more than ours, we would hear about the former ten times while our riding was mentioned once. At least it WAS mentioned. I understand that some ridings still haven’t seen their election results.

            Last evening I watched the first episode of the CBC-TV show ‘Canada’s Smartest Person’ and saw my daughter Kate’s face on there for a few seconds when they were showing the top 32 contestants in Canada. I’m glad it was she and not I who made the top 32 and will therefore be on TV. I would have fallen into a panic – if not a stupor – the first time someone asked me what time it was. Her episode will be airing on November 2^nd and I might watch it. Just in the past week she’s been interviewed by four newspapers, two radio stations, and what seems like every media outlet in New Brunswick, including Radio-Canada which is the French CBC station.

            And now I have to go and study. This week it’s the Middle East. I have to try and figure out how the U.S. is going to demolish the terrorist threat from ISIS which is an enemy of the Syrian government which is also an enemy of the U.S. which has been screaming at Russia over Ukraine, but Russia is a friend of Syria which the U.S. hates…STRONG DRINK PLEASE!

                                             -end- 

Over-reacting about NB vote return delay (Oct 1)

Well, you never miss the dry water

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            During the Hurricane (tropical storm, etc.) Arthur power outage, we were reminded once again how important electricity, and especially the availability of a good water supply, are to our everyday lives. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say: “You never miss the water ‘til the well runs dry”.)

            Too late; I’ve said it.

            That thought occurred to me on September 9 as I was suffering through a sinus cold and was sitting in my easy chair in the living room while a vapourizer was wafting medicated water droplets into the air around my aching head.

            Meanwhile, in the basement under my feet, a dehumidifier was humming and taking water out of the air while I was adding water to the air above. Did that make sense? Of course not, but what does?

            Our heat pump fans were both humming and taking heat from the moisture of the air; in the bathroom the clothes washer was cleaning some of our clothes and alongside it the clothes dryer was tumbling and steaming the water out of a previously washed load. I could hear somebody washing dishes in the kitchen.

            While all this exchanging of waterly fluids was taking place inside the house, it started to rain. A few seconds later I received a text from my daughter in Calgary; she informed me that Calgary had received 35 cm of snow in two days. She sent me photos from her 16^th floor apartment. The snow wasn’t quite up to her balcony, but close.

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

            As one who has closely followed election night events for decades, I can say I’ve never seen so many upset people as those wanting the results one minute after the polls closed on Sept. 22.

            While it is true that ‘tabulating’ the votes took a lot longer than the computers gurus predicted, it wasn’t exactly a Tabukistan election. There it could be a week, a month or never before the people find out who won. Indeed, they might then find out there was no such candidate as the one who won or the winner has since switched parties.

            Here in Canada, people, especially those at ‘Election Desks’, were outraged that they couldn’t dramatically broadcast a winner before 9:00 pm, but whoa, are they and we losing perspective, just a tiddly?

            We’ve all gotten spoiled over the years so that we expect the winners declared with an hour or – if it’s really close – an hour and a half after the polls have closed. Jeez, that’s hardly time to sit down and have a jar of lemonade at the Elks Club.

            It seems the problem with the ‘tabulators’ in the NB election was merely that the people at Election Central (if there were such a place) had to wait for the data cards to be brought in before everything was official, but they already had the unofficial numbers and those are rarely wrong. For security reasons some people went home with their data cards in their pockets while the folks at Elections NB were waiting for that ‘official’ data.

            It was all a pig in a poke, a crock of beans, a murder of crows etc. because we did find out eventually, although those who sold tranquillizers of various sorts made a killing, so to speak. I think we should all calm down and remember that the most powerful country in the world, just to the south of us, went about five weeks in 2000 before the Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush would be their next president. And we’re complaining over a few hours? Look what THEY ended up with.

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

            Sometime in the past year, a huge news item went almost totally unnoticed by the Canadian and American media. I have checked CBC, CTV, TV Ontario, Knowledge Network, all the big U.S. networks as well as Google and even the Perfessor who lives in Lower Kintore. Not a word about this.

            During the year to which I referred, there have been massive news stories on oil spills, wars and skirmishes between Russia and Ukraine, ISIS terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, global warming, elections (see above), traffic accidents, plane crashes, the Alberta oil boom, factories closing – you name it – and I have never seen one sentence about one of the most important stories since a Canadian corvette sank two German U-boats within an hour of each other in 1944.

            I refer of course to the Oreo Cookie makers changing the bag so that now the gourmet cookie eater only has to open a recloseable paper or plastic tab on the side to get at those delicious offerings. Before, it was like rocket science – open the top of the bag if you were able, then pull out the inside holder, then reclose the bag as best you could. It’s so easy now that I just eat four or five cookies rather than the 10 or 12 that I used to.
                                                   -end- 

Feeling guilty about growing tansy (Sept 24)

My client regrets his (her) actions, your honour

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            What we need is some kind of media translator (MT) to take statements made by politicians, business leaders, janitors – in other words, people in power – and change them into what the speakers REALLY mean.

            Reading a story in today’s daily paper, I was struck by the words uttered by the defendant’s lawyer. “The defendant is full of regrets for what has taken place and the pain he (she) has caused.”

            If we had a good working MT, it would translate that into: “The defendant is full of regrets for getting caught and the pain and expense that he (she) has gone through in serving the minimum amount of time in jail.”

            On a similar subject, I sat dozing in my living room easy chair when all of a sudden I was either dreaming or looking at a TV show about some guys from the era of the Three Musketeers. They were what used to be called ‘swashbucklers’. It reminded of the guy (gal) in court who had been buckling swashes all over the place before he (she) got caught. A lot of people think we should go back to the days of the Three Musketeers when serious crimes resulted in the tipping of the cap with the head still in it.

            I can’t say I subscribe to that sort of thing, but it’s tempting to think of now and then. Trouble is, when you have permanent solutions like that you can’t go back and say “Oops!”

            On a side note, I don’t remember ever seeing the Three Musketeers with muskets, but almost always swords, so it was false advertising in the first place.

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

            A couple of Mondays ago, as I was out picking apples so the bears wouldn’t have quite so many, a red and white helicopter appeared over the horizon. For the next half hour that vehicle went back and forth over the area; I couldn’t help but think that it must have been the RCMP looking for The Deadly Grass (TDG).

            In spite of the fact that I don’t grow anything stronger than tansy, I couldn’t help feeling guilty. A couple of times I held out my wrists for handcuffs, but they didn’t land, at least not around here. Maybe it wasn’t the police at all, but a political execution squad looking for escaping Bloc Quebecois members, but whoever it was, I don’t think I like helicopters hovering over my             gardens. After all, Save-Easy sells tomatoes, and even basil so they can hover there.

            A few days after this incident, if it could be called an incident, I read in my daily newspaper that there had been major marijuana and cocaine ‘busts’. A big co-ordinated police operation in Quebec and the Maritimes.

            As usual, I am confused as to why we might have a police helicopter (if that’s what it was) perusing my garden and orchard and spending $1000 an hour to do it, while in some areas of Canada and the U.S. cannabis is legal. Of course, as I often hear from certain wives of mine, it doesn’t take much to confuse me.

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

            I try to see the funny side of things and then come and report it to you, but sometimes I don’t need any help finding a funny side.

            Ten days ago I was perusing the Sportsnet channel when I came across two gents arguing about a certain rule that Major League Baseball wants to bring in. One of these two gents was all for the new rule and the other one wasn’t “because it might slow down the game”.

            There is not a whole lot I can add to that. The idea of something that could possibly make the game of baseball any slower is away beyond anything I could imagine.

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

            A lot of people are going to say I’m lying about the following news item: On August 12, a man named Louis Riel won a ‘Best Big Toe’ contest in Brandon, Manitoba. From what I can guess, this is an annual contest in that city, part of their Prairie Days celebration.

            Louis Riel – and that is the winner’s Riel name – I mean real name – is a barber from the nearby town of Forrest Station. He told reporters he spent days cutting his toenails and just generally buffing his feet. They shone like the sun. As a mechanical engineer might say: “Truth is stranger than friction.”

            Louis Riel – the barber, that is – won $500 cash and an autographed picture of the original Louis Riel. I hope he doesn’t meet the same fate – being elected to Parliament I mean.

                                                           -end-

"A hot toddy is what you need" (Sept. 17)

A truly staggering coincidence

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I know that life is full of coincidences, but sometimes they are a little beyond coincidence.

            Take, for example, the remarkable coincidence of the charge against Liberal candidate Andrew Harvey being made public, not only during his election campaign in our riding, but one day too late for the party to put in another candidate if they wanted to. Remarkable.

            In case it hasn’t been clear from media reports – and it hasn’t - Andrew Harvey will still be running for the Liberals.

            While I am temporarily on this subject, I should point out that both “major” parties (as they call themselves) have and will encourage such ‘coincidences’. There ain’t no angels in politics.

            From the wildly entertaining subject of politics, I move on to the extremely annoying subject of the common cold. Some people capitalize the words Common Cold, but I am not here to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

            As of Tuesday, Sept. 2, I had not had a cold for six or eight months. I was beginning to think that I had found the answer to avoiding that particular malady. Whatever that answer was, I didn’t know, but I assumed I was just one of the lucky ones – invincible.

            Then came Tuesday, Sept. 2. You will have seen some of the old photos of men driving spikes as they built the railroads – keep that in mind, because that’s what happened to me. I was that spike and the cold was the hammer.

            “A hot toddy is what you need,” said my friend Flug, so we looked on the Internet for a good recipe. The one that sounded best to me was the one that combined 3.5 tablespoons of brandy, the same amount of water, a half teaspoon of honey, all heated and stirred together.

            I mixed them all up and left the cup on the counter. Meanwhile, the phone rang and a few seconds later Flug came in. Seeing the cup, decided there wasn’t nearly enough brandy. He added a dollop (4.36 ounces) more.

            My phone call over, I strode to the hot toddy cup. “I wonder if 3.5 ounces is enough?” I asked myself, and you know the answer to that question.

            Long story shorter, within ten minutes I was snoring in my favourite chair while the TV quietly played some old-time country music, my favourite. My wife came in and tried to awaken me, but as she shook me I slud (yes, I said ‘slud’ just like Dizzy Dean) onto the floor. She told me this afterward, when I awoke with an even worse cold and headache.

            “While you were on the phone, I saw your hot toddy on the counter,” she said to my aching head, “and added a dollop of brandy because it looked a little weak.” Apparently I drank a gallon of brandy from that one 12-ounce glass. That ain’t no dollop.

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

            Have you ever known anyone who didn’t get colds and who never was sick? Ever? I have such a relative. He is, by popular demand, about to emigrate to New Zealand, and if there were anywhere farther away I would pay his train fare.

            Cousin Eldred LaFrance, a former resident of Victoria County, is one of those chaps who visit people a lot, and in his wake people get sick – not of him, because he’s likeable and entertaining – but he is a Carrier.

            After extensive medical lab tests, the professionals have ascertained that Eldred carries on and around him the germs and viruses for everything from sickle cell anemia to ulcers to syphilis to The Common Cold. The government wanted to execute him and carefully put the remains in a vat of hydrochloric acid, but instead bought him an isolated kiwi farm in New Zealand. You can’t say Stephen Harper isn’t decisive.

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

            On Monday afternoon, after I had finished working and slaving for the day, I took a lawn chair out to my apple orchard and sat there in the shade while I read an Agatha Christie novel. I heard – and even felt – a thump and looked down to see that an apple had fallen almost at my feet.

            It just goes to show you how important timing is. Comedians Don Rickles and Bob Hope used to say that timing wasn’t just important, it was everything, and that was proven once again.

            A few centuries earlier, if that apple had fallen onto my head, I might have been the one who discovered gravity and Sir Isaac Newton would have been just a bum, a university lecturer who bored all his acquaintances with his foolishness about inertia and stuff like that.

            On the other hand, I should point out that the apple that fell at my feet was an Alexander and it was huge. If that had whacked me on the noggin I would have still been staggering around that orchard.

                                                 -end-

"Results may vary" = sleazy (Sept. 10)

Were the old TVs doing something illegal?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I was thinking today (my head still hurts) about those big old televisions that used to adorn our houses - the ones that weighed about a metric tonne each. Remember them and the computer monitors that needed a mule and a crane to lift them from one room to another? Today I can easily carry a 32” flat-screen television in one hand, whereas back in 1975 I would have been hard pressed to carry a 17-inch TV with the help of lemonade and a Merle Haggard 8-track.

            My question is: what happened to all that stuff that was jammed into the backside (so to speak) of the old TVs?

            SOMETHING must have been in there. Today televisions are as flat as the top of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head and, curiously enough, that space that disappeared from the back of the old TVs is just about the size of his head. Can that be a coincidence?

            Looking at photos of the old televisions and computer monitors that mostly came to North American from Japan and other Far East countries, I am now prepared to put forth a theory on the matter.

            Drugs. All that time the North American and European drug problems have gotten worse and worse, so the only conclusion I can come to is that those big backs on the TVs and monitors held all kinds of deadly drugs. Looking at the actions of all our political leaders during that period, and realizing that each of them owned a large TV, can we doubt that drugs were heavily involved?

            I think I have proven my case (Q.E.D. as they say in math), but now we have to figure out how the drugs are getting in today, because it only takes a glance at the headlines to know that world leaders are still ‘on the line’.

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

            Turning from the subject of television to the subject of television commercials, are we finding fewer cases of positive statements these days?

            Last evening, while I was watching a show called ‘Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery’ in which she solved eight murders, three embezzlements, and a spitting on the sidewalk while the police stood by baffled, there came on my (flat-screen) TV a commercial about a miracle product that would clean one’s bathtub, flush, kitchen sink and little Johnny’s dirty sneakers.

            At end of the commercial the proviso came on the screen – in small letters – “results may vary”. Of course the idea of that little warning was that if I spend the $19.99 for this minor miracle, it might be as useless as my neighbour Flug’s nephew, who is at the moment on a sight-seeing tour of Renous, NB.

            As I’ve mentioned dozens of times in these pages, I was once employed by Environment Canada as a weatherman. In reporting the weather to the public, we were all warned to NEVER use percentages, as in “there’s a 40% chance of snow in Resolute Bay”. I recall our instructor in Ottawa warning us about using that wishy-washy way of forecasting.

            “Guys and gals,” he said, as he brandished a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver, “if I EVER hear of you doing this, no matter where you’re stationed – Inuvik or Saskatoon – I will hunt you down and shoot you. Say it’s going to snow or not.” We never used percentages in our forecasts. Looking at the weather girls and boys on TV now, one can’t help but notice that it’s a 40% chance here and there. It’s called CYA, or ‘Covering Your Bum’.

            Then there is the matter of political and other polling. Even though pollsters are almost always wrong because people lie to them, they continue to rake in the money and continue to have their findings broadcast to the nations. Who is paying for these things?

            Like the ‘results may vary’ sleaze, pollsters always have their little proviso at the end of their published poll results. “We certify that this poll is correct to within four percentage points 19 times out of 20”. What does that mean?

            This is called wiggle room, or wriggle room if you’re a language purist. Like the previous two examples, the pollsters’ statement at the end is merely saying: “Hey, we don’t have any idea what’s going to happen and we’re leaving ourselves some space in case we’re left standing there with an omelette clinging to our beards”. Such as in the latest Alberta and BC elections.

            My favourite poll result of all time was during the 1974 federal election campaign when the NDP and their leader Ed Broadbent were found to have 45% of the popular vote sewn up, while Pierre Trudeau and the Liberals were mired in third place with 28%. The Liberals won a majority and the NDP got 16 seats.

                                                     -end-