Starting
2014 without an idea
by
Robert LaFrance
Flug really takes this ‘New year’s
Resolution’ business seriously, and I mean seriously.
(I just slipped in to my office for
a minute to write that first sentence and remind myself to write on the matter
once he leaves. He’s in the living room at the moment, still foaming at the
mouth about telemarketers – or it could be the lemonade he’s imbibing.)
Later…He finally went home and I’m
somewhat the poorer, now being bereft of lemonade until Monday morning. I know
it’s Canada and not the country to the south, but he was in a state anyway and
it was all about the three – THREE – telemarketing calls he had received before
11:00 that morning.
“I think Megan of Cardholder
Services and I are going steady now,” he moaned. “And Achmed of Credit Cards
America is getting to be a case of diarrhoea. Why don’t these people leave me
alone? I swear at them and insult their ancestors, but they just keep calling,
and they won’t answer any questions I ask them.”
“The clue is,” I said, “when there’s
a pause after you answer the phone, that’s a computer talking to you. I
immediately hang up. Have you tried putting your name on a ‘no-call’ list?”
He said he had done that three times. “And guess
what?” he said, not really wanting me to guess. “I read in the newspaper that
one of those big no-call lists had just sold all their phone numbers to a
telemarketer for a million dollars.”
It’s a mystery wrapped up in an
enigma, that’s for sure. You probably started reading this with the idea that I
would suggest some way to deal with these ‘people’, meaning computers, but not
only am if bereft of lemonade, I am bereft of ideas. But then, you knew that
already.
*****************************
Although I try – but not very hard –
to avoid talking about the weather, I have to say this is the worst winter
weather we’ve had for years. Since 2007 according to John McSheffery. I just
needed to say that and remind our politicians that 2014 is an election year, so
let’s get out there and smarten up.
I was sitting at the club last
evening and talking to the three Felkoy twins about those two subjects –
weather and politics – when who should come in for a hot chocolate and olive
sandwich but my old friend Oscar Hammond, the inventor of the Hammond Organ.
“Come on in and sit down, you old
horse thief,” Flug bellowed. “We were just saying that we wished you would come
in, because we have a question we’d like to ask you.” It must have been late in
the evening, because I didn’t remember mentioning Oscar’s name at all.
“We know you invented the electric
organ,” said Flug, “but the question we’ve been pondering is, did you ever lend
your name to a type of breakfast?” None of us knew what Flug was spouting off about,
but we let him ramble. It turned out he was wanting to start 2014 by pun-ishing
us all.
“Is it true that the breakfast dish
‘Hammond eggs’ was named after you?”
*******************************
My nephew Dishdrie was getting quite
exasperating on Christmas Day. He kept repeating the song from a beer
commercial he had heard on Sportsnet. After he had sung this refrain about 231
times, I asked him to refrain from the refrain. “Quite right,” said Flug, “I
would prefer the ‘I am Canadian’ song or poem about another kind of beer.”
“I don’t want to hear any beer
commercial,” I said. “I don’t want to hear ANY commercial, even if it involves
shapely Swedish models…Well, maybe shapely Swedish models, but certainly not
beer.”
“You sound like a broken record,”
said Dishdrie’s mother who is also my sister. “It’s over and over…”
I noticed he had a mulish, baffled look on his
alleged face. “What do you mean, ‘like a broken record’?” he asked, and I
realized he was only nineteen, barely old enough to remember Windows 3.1 that
Bill Gates introduced in the early 1990s.
I explained what a record was, and
how when a scratch appeared on one of the old 45 rpm records it tended to skip
past that point and repeat itself. “For example,” I said, “on the Hank Williams
song ‘Mansion on the Hill’ old Hank – the real Hank, not Hank Jr. – would sing:
“Tonight, down here…tonight, down here…tonight down here…tonight down here…”
and it might go on forever unless someone stopped the thing.”
“Who’s Hank Williams?” asked
Dishdrie. It was then I threw him out into a snowbank. Anyone who doesn’t know
who Hank Williams is must be a terrorist, or at least a Communist. Send him
away.
Before I close this column, I should
explain about ‘the three Felkoy twins’. Those of us good in math realize that a
set of twins usually includes only two, but you see, there are two sets of
Felkoy twins, and Allan’s twin brother Albert is in Whitecourt, Alberta at the
moment.
-end-
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