Double bored or double board? (March 19, 2014)

The saga of a Yamaha 292 – double bored

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Just as I sat down at this word processor, a trio of snowmobilers zoomed by. They were going at Mach I down the trail that is about twenty metres off Manse Hill Road and parallel to it as it goes by our estate. Were they ever having fun!

            It is about time they had some snow to play on.

            Many people would be surprised to learn that I was once a snowmobile owner. Yup, back in the late 1970s I owned a Yamaha 292 that I had bought from a chap in Four Falls. Apparently its pistons were larger than when it came from the factory. They said it had been 'double bored'. Although I didn't have any idea what double-bored is or was, I guessed it had something to do with the feeling a person gets on a long, long winter's day, the feeling that makes him go out and buy a secondhand snowmobile even though he's about as mechanically inclined as a gerbil.

            My nephews, however, were - and are - mechanically inclined. The instant I brought home the Yamaha on my halfton, these teenagers were on it like a Persian rug - no insult to any Iranians who might be reading this. "We'll fix it up, Uncle Bob!"

            And so they did. When I brought it home and they started it, the Yamaha was running, but without much pizzazz. They took it apart right out in the yard behind my cabin. Parts were spread all over the place. "Are you SURE you know how to put that thing back together?" I asked.

While they were doing this, I was sipping on a Moosehead and the more I drank, the more confident I felt that my dear nephews - what were their names? Shawn and Harry? - could make it the finest snow machine in Tilley and suburbs including west Rowena. "Youse is good boys," I kept saying, until John threw a three-quarter inch open-end wrench past my ear and followed it with a half-inch socket.

NOTE: I quit drinking alcohol soon after this, mainly because buying parts for the Yamaha soon made me a pauper. Nothing stronger than Pop these days. (Pop is a vodka man.)

Back to the story, I finally shut up and let them work and, sure enough, in an hour or so they had it all back together and purring like a kitten when it wasn't roaring like a lion. John tried it first in the field behind my cabin. He was only gone twenty minutes. I could hear the Yamaha singing out in the woods and when it emerged it and John zoomed past the cabin, turned around and came back, at which point Terry decided he should try it out - after filling it with gas from my can. He was only gone fifteen minutes. "Working great!" he said to John.

"Let me take it for a spin!" I said, sort of begging, like. It was my snowmobile after all.

"Well, I don't know, Uncle Bob," said John. "I don't know if the inverter valve is working just right. We should test it some more, don't you think so, Terry?" Terry agreed. So for the next two hours they tested the inverter valve, the collation arm, the needle valve, the big belt hinges, the generator housing, and who knows what all. Finally I went into my cabin and lay down. I could hear the Yamaha now and then, blasting its way through the fields and woods.

            I awoke the next morning to the sound of voices outside. It was my dear nephews. I went out where they were discussing my snowmobile. “We’ll have to take it out for a good run this morning, Uncle Bob,” said Terry. “Up to Riley Brook. It’s only forty miles or so and then we'll know how those carburetor points are working." So off they went with one dear nephew driving my snowmobile and the other driving my brother Lawrence's. They were back in time for supper.

            Let's go to the bottom line, as they say. I had that Yamaha a total of three months and got to drive it about half an hour while my nephews, always fixing something, drove it a total of about ninety-six hours, always on my gasoline.

Its final journey ended about March 15, the Ides of March, which is when Caesar got knifed. I was actually driving it. The Yamaha, not the knife. As I went past the Lerwick Baptist Church, the Yamaha  quit with what my grandfather would have called 'an atomic kablooah'. Pieces flew everywhere, even into the graveyard, which shows that there is poetry in the world.

The reason I’m writing this column is to tell my nephews that I knew all the time what they were doing. They didn’t fool their old Uncle Bob. I might not be mechanically inclined, but I recognize a con job from a distance. Carburetor points indeed.

                             -end- 

Our eternal winter of 2013-14 (March 12)

Why did I buy this barbecue anyway? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            It’s 3:55 on a Tuesday afternoon. I’ve spoken to fourteen persons today, and all but one said, word-for-word: “Will spring ever get here?” The fourteenth said: “Will winter never end?”

            I don’t know whether it’s my age, or merely my missing brain cells – the ones that have been deserting me since 1987 – but it seems to me that our whole approach to winter has changed since that fateful year.

            It used to be that everyone loved winter. Why, I remember it well, when the temperatures used to go to –40 as a regular thing in February, we all rejoiced at the chance to freeze our jaws off. Now we rarely see –20, and THAT’S Celsius (the Swedish word for wimp) because of Global Warming, the holes in the ozone layer, the tar sands, and Stephen Harper.

            Instead, nowadays you listen to a weather report or ‘forecast’, as I laughingly call those pitiful prognostications, and they routinely use the ‘wind chill’ figure to try and catch our ears and to scare us. When I was in the weather service we were forbidden to emphasize this. I remember the OIC (Officer in Charge) at Sachs Harbour, NWT, telling us: “If people are too stupid to stay inside when it’s minus 30 and the wind’s howling, let them freeze as solid as a brass money’s cojones.” He spoke a bit of Spanish.

            My daughter lives in Calgary and I often tune in to the weather reports from there. I did so last evening to be greeted by the bearded weatherman saying: “Forty-seven below tonight, folks!” I almost fell off my chair to think that my delicate angel would have to go to work in that freezer. I texted her and advised that she move to Hawaii. She wrote back that it was only –18C and she was allergic to pineapples.

            I suppose you are wondering what was so ‘fateful’ about the year 1987. Well… the beginning of this essay I knew, but I just cannot remember now. Talking about missing brain cells. (Thinking I was back in the 1960s, I went to an LSD meeting last month only to find that the letters stood for ‘Local Service District’.)

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

            Has there been a time in the past five decades when there wasn’t a war going on somewhere?

            This week every headline involves the Russians sending troops into neighbouring Ukraine, particularly the part of Ukraine called Crimea. Russia’s president Vladimar Putin sent in the soldiers to protect the citizens of Russian origin. I’m sure that it has been the goal of every Ukrainian cat to hunt down and kill every mouse of Russian ancestry.

            Does this remind us of anything? The years 1935-1940 for example in a different part of Europe? Hitler just had to protect those Germans in Czechoslovakia from being killed so he took over the whole country, with the help of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain who signed a paper saying Britain wouldn’t interfere if German took over the part called Sudetenland.

            After WW II was the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in between those were dozens of minor wars – minor except to those getting killed – all over the world. Grenada, Panama, Israel, Timor, South Sudan, Arthurette Dance Hall, and yada yada yada.

            We were talking about all this at the club on Saturday evening; we just couldn’t see why people couldn’t get along. Of course, as usual, this all erupted in a bench-clearing brawl and I don’t mean at Maple Leaf Gardens. I guess it’s clearer to us now. Bring on the Russians! We’re next.

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

            As one who used to do some carpenter work, I enjoy watching the Saturday evening shows on PBS, whose lack of commercial interruptions is quite pleasing. ‘This Old House’ and three other ones show us all kinds of modern methods to do the things we used to do over the course of hours compared to minutes now.

            I am amazed that computers can now be programmed to build a set of kitchen cupboards. All the carpenters have to do is, I suppose, duct-tape together the final product and spike it onto the kitchen walls. The computer tells the saws to cut a piece of plywood exactly the right size, and all the workers have to do is put the pieces together. Amazing.

            My question is this: If these guys can put together an entire set of kitchen cupboards and have everything fit, why did it take me seven hours to put together this barbecue I bought in a box at the hardware store? The directions were clear as can be – unless one spoke English – and there were only 38 parts missing. I guess I’m a schmuck.         
                                                -end- 

Do I care about Olympic medals? (March 5/14)

Time to put away childish things?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            As I write this column, the first part of it at least, millions of Canadians have their eyes glued to their televisions – and don’t tell me THAT’S not painful – as they watch the Olympic men’s hockey gold medal game between Canada and Sweden.

            My eyes are not glued to the TV screen. Other than the stinging sensation that glue always gives the eyes, I simply don’t care which team – Canada or Sweden – wins the gold medal, as long as it’s not the good old U.S.A.

            Vindictive I know, unpatriotic I know, but there it is. Once the Canadian women beat the U.S.A. for the gold medal, and once the Canadian men beat the U.S.A. in the semi-final game, it was all over. “Don’t you agree, Flug?”

            “I fully agree, Bob. What were you saying?” I explained. “What? Are you crazy? We want those gold medals to hang around our necks so we can go through the border to Maine and brag.”

            “Yeah, Americans really appreciate it when you rub it in like that,” I said.  We argued for a while, with me winning the argument of course, by quoting from the Bible. This usually confuses Flug. “Go to First Corinthians chapter 13,” I said to the big guy. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I fought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

            “Hockey is a childish thing,” I continued. “Time to put it away and turn to adult stuff, like lemonade and computer games such as Doom.”

            Folks, you realize I was kidding about not caring whether Canada won the gold medal, don’t you? My eyes are still stinging from that glue. Put down that rolling pin!

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

            Other news from the world of rock and roll, later ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ and, as they call it now, rock. (After a while it will be ‘r’.) Here is or are the news: A singer who goes under the name of Tony Molina has put out an album called ‘Dissed and Dismissed’, and on that album is a song called ‘Change my Ways’ which is 72 seconds long. I do hope that’s a trend. Surely a songwriter can say everything that needs to be said in a minute and twelve seconds.

            Some people get their knickers in a windmill about this business of The Royal Family. Over the course of my six and a half decades I have often tried to analyze why people are so fascinated by this group of rather ordinary men and women and their somewhat expensive clothes. A few months back, the arrival of a new prince to parents William and Kate (as they are known) was the only thing on the news. On the other hand, it was better than hearing about Syria.

            Sometimes it’s a good thing to know a little of the Latin language - even though it was officially ‘dead’ when I was studying it in school - and sometimes it’s a bad thing. When dealing with my friend Flug, it’s often a bad thing.

            As many people know, the Latin phrase ‘ad hoc’ means ‘up to this moment’ or  that kind of thing. When I visited him on Wednesday morning, Flug was cooking a partridge stew and bragging about how good it was going to taste even though he knew I was and am a much better cook. (My Baloney Milanese is a gourmet treat.)

            Somehow or other, during the conversation I got to showing off my classical education and used the phrase ‘ad hoc’ but he thought I had said “Add hawk”. So here is Flug, late that afternoon, in early March, out in the field with his ancient .303 rifle and trying to shoot a hawk to put in his stew. I never knew how much he valued my opinion; apparently the rangers who took him away weren’t aware of it either.

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

            I began this column talking about organized sports, so I might as well make it a sandwich by ending it the same way.

            Is there any such thing these days as ‘unorganized sports’? That was a rhetorical question of course; certainly there are. Ever seen the Leafs play? Sorry, I couldn’t resist a slam against the Leafs who are, by the way, laughing all the way to the bank.

            It has often been said that kids’ sports these days are ‘way over-organized’. My cousin Elroy said that if a youngster wanted to play tiddly-winks or marbles there would have to be leagues organized for them. Oh wait, kids can’t play marbles any more; their thumbs have evolved so they can only ‘text-message’.

            Here’s my bottom line on the subject: You should have been at Veteran’s Field, Perth, on Saturday, February 6 to watch the hundreds of kids sliding, skating and just having fun. There was no league or association involved, just kids having fun. Remember that?

                                                   -end-

Rewriting the Bible a good idea? (Feb. 26/14)

Almost believed the story, but scepticism kicked in

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Since I am now too old and fat for the other kind of surfing, I often surf the Internet for interesting (non-porn, by the way) news items; Saturday I thought I had found one.

            There it was, plain as Brian Mulroney’s earlobe: “Pope Francis has hired famous and revered children’s author JK Rowling to rewrite the Bible.”

            “This is dyno-mite!” I shouted to Flug, who was watching a British soap opera called Coronation Street. He didn’t even twitch. On the TV screen I could see a barmaid about to lean over and refresh a customer’s drink. I must admit I was distracted myself for a minute, but I dragged my eyes away and back to the computer monitor. They didn’t want to go.

            “It is hoped the author, most famous for her Harry Potter series (the story went on), can make it more accessible and believable for a new generation of Catholics and Christians. (Implying there is a difference?) While the specifics of the rewrite are not yet known, it is believed Rowling is tasked with producing a compelling tale that young Catholics and Christians can engage with.

            “We are very happy Miss Rowling has agreed to the rewrite, we keenly await the first draft,” a Vatican insider said. He (definitely ‘he’) continued: “The sales of the Jesus Christ action figure have dropped by over 200% in the last 10 years, we are in need of new, compelling and toy-friendly characters…our revenue streams are shrinking.”

            At that point I knew it was a hoax because nobody says ‘revenue streams’ any more.

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

            The next story I perused was a very believable one. North Korea had announced that they had landed a man on the sun.

            What made it believable was that the State News Agency of North Korea said that astronaut Kim Kim Kim had landed on the BACK side of the sun, which is obviously much cooler than the front side There was no word in the news article as to when Kim etc. is expected back. Indeed, there was no mention that he would be back. Perhaps this is an attempt by North Korea to move to another neighbourhood altogether, since no one seems to like them here on earth.

            Before I leave this story, I want to apologize to Kim because I was unable to guess whether ‘Kim’ was his first, last or middle name, and which of the three Kims in his full name I should be addressing him by.

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

            I’m going to get serious now, and not even mention silly stories like massacres in Greenland, corn mould in Nunavut wheat, the assault on English grammar by Englishmen, and the brutal winter in southern El Salvador.

            This is a subject I have often decided to write a column on, then changed my mind, then decided again, then chickened out, but this time I’m really going to do it.

            I refer to Kraft Dinners. As I sit here typing out this column at the kitchen table, I am fully satisfied with my meal just enjoyed. KD, as many people call it now, supplies every possible necessary nutrient to my aged frame while presenting me with – if you will pardon me this cliché – a meal fit for a king.

            Ask me if there’s protein in there: of course there is. At least I think there is, but I will get back to you once I ascertain what protein is. Vitamin D? Before I cooked that gourmet repast, I went for a long walk down to the garage in the warm February sun and soaked up all kinds – well, just one kind – of vitamin D, which either makes strong bones and teeth or helps me see better at night. Maybe both.

            KD has vegetables, fruits (don’t bet the farm on this one), grain, essential oils, and a bunch of other stuff. I even did some research. The online encyclopedia said it was ‘first introduced’ in 1937 in the U.S. (of course!) by a Scotsman. Why would they say ‘first introduced’? How many times did they introduce it?

            This may shock people, but I did attend university for a short time in the 1960s –  the mention of that decade will explain why it was a short time – and while there, I and my roomie existed on Kraft Dinner. I’m talking breakfast, lunch, supper, snacks and even more snacks. Occasionally we would buy a bag of potato chips and a bottle of cola, but it was otherwise KD.

            I just wanted to explain why I’m like I am today. You knew there had to be a reason, right? It wasn’t tobacco (nine years a smoker) or lemonade; it was the Kraft Dinners. A news item I read today (just after the North Korea story) said that those who ate more than 1000 Kraft Dinners in their lives are unlikely to be able to form a lucid  sentence by age 66. I’d better write fast. My 66^th birthday is on May 11.
                                              -end- 

Not 'The Caine Mutiny'! (Feb. 19/14)

A 'polar vortex'... ‘at this point in time’

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I guess we have all heard the latest buzz-words – ‘polar vortex’. Apparently, according to the weather people, there’s an area of the Arctic that keeps sending cold weather down to us, meaning Toronto, and it keeps heading east until WE get blasted.

            A decade or so ago the same people said our weather was caused by something  called El Nino which was an area of the Pacific Ocean that was warmer than other areas of the Pacific Ocean.

            Come on guys! Report the blasted weather and do a better job of forecasting it, and leave all the vortices and Ninos to the Grimm’s Fairy Tales people. It seems as if The Weather Channel is more about drama than about weather. It’s like the 1970s Watergate scandal when everyone kept lying and saying ‘at this point in time’ when they meant ‘now’.

            “You just figured this all out, Bob?” said Flug.

            “Shut up, Flug, and finish your lemonade so we can order more.”

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

            When I was considerably younger, one of my favourite movies was The Caine Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart. I thought of that the other day when, as Flug and I were sitting in the club and having large cups of hot chocolate, there arose a frightful clatter outside the club.

            “Holy jumpin’ (expletive deleted)!” shouted Glen Glenn, the mixologist, as the bartender calls himself. He went to the window. “It’s a whole gang of people from the Colony nursing home and they are revolting!”

            “Yeah,” I said, “I know a few of them and they sure are revolting.” He said it wasn’t that kind of revolting; it was more like they were beginning a revolution. I went over to the window and sure enough, about three dozen people were carrying signs saying they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it any more. Most of them were carrying sticks of some kind – shilleaghs, etc.

            I am not proud of what I said next. “Looks like the Cane Mutiny!” I barely escaped with my life and my hot chocolate lemonade.

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

            As an historian of sorts, I am always interested in new theories about events that happened a hundred years ago, even as far back as the beginning of the 20^th Century and was especially interested to hear something new about the Spanish Flu Pandemic that  occurred about 1918-1920.

            Of course the prefix ‘pan’ means that it was everywhere, all over the world. Tens of millions of people died from that disease that was called Spanish Flu for years. Maybe after the recent theory it will be called the Chinese Flu.

            The interview with a scientist aired (I hope not ‘erred’) on CBC Radio’s ‘As It Happens’, and this chap had some pretty good evidence showing how the flu got to Europe in 1918. After that it spread all over the world by soldiers returning from the western front, where all that trench warfare took place.

            In a certain area of China, there was an epidemic of this flu-like disease that also resembled the Bubonic Plaque. Now get this: It was from this area that the Allies recruited a couple of hundred Chinese workers with the idea that they would help to clean up the war’s demolition job on Europe.

They cleaned up Europe all right. The workers crossed Canada in a closed train and sailed from Halifax to France where they got to work. Soon afterward people started dying of a mysterious disease that doctors traced to Spain.

            Is this all true? I didn’t make it up. However, like El Nino and the Polar Vortex, it may be more the product of a person wanting to make headlines and retire to Four Falls. Why not? Great golf course and occasionally a spring ocean view in nearby Perth-Andover.

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

            I shall close off this column with some comments on fashion. When did it happen that males who don’t shave for a day or two apparently got so devilishly attractive?

            I wouldn’t know about fashion of course, but it seems that when a male model or a television actor doesn’t shave for two days, he is then at the height of fashion. I watch TV shows that have these people’s faces prominently displayed and I just see guys who haven’t shaved; they have a designer scruffiness.

A few years ago it was something else I suppose, but to me it’s just a bunch of fashion slaves. “Next thing we know, it will be women showing off their belly buttons,” I said to Flug. “About the scruffy stubble on their faces, I have a full beard, so I must really be attractive to women, although I haven’t noticed it over the past decades.”

            “Bob,” said Flug. “After you reach puberty we gotta have a talk.”

                                                      -end- 

Tempus fugit for sure (Feb. 12/14 column)

Where have all the flowers gone?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Last evening I looked at my calendar to see if I needed to send birthday wishes to anyone in February. It turns out that my cousin – one of the cousins I grew up with – turns sixty-five, and my nephew, who only a few years ago was a teenager zooming around on a snowmobile, is turning fifty.

            How did that happen?

            Oh sure, I am 65 going on 66 (as they say unnecessarily) but I don’t feel a day over 64, so how come these relatives are getting so old? I was going to make a joke about their catching up to me, but I thought about for a while and realized there’s only one way they could do that, and I wouldn’t like that way at all.

Aging is a curious thing. A lot of people get older as they do it, but I don’t; I just get better. (Flug says there’s lots of room for improvement.)

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

            My column two weeks ago asked if bureaucrats and politicians who announce cutbacks and who say there’ll be no reduction in service are (1) stupid or (2) lying.

            I was referring to the latest Horizon Health cuts in numbers of radiologists and their assertion that it wouldn’t affect patient care, but only hours after that column appeared in the paper a similar thing happened, this one involving the federal government.

            Across Canada the feds shut down eight Veterans’ centres and then insisted that the soldiers and former soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome could get just as much help from Service Canada offices.

            The odd thing is, in this case they might be right, because, going by the number of military suicides in the past few months, whatever the government was doing wasn’t working. I have this sinking feeling that this lack of effectiveness has been due to other government cutbacks. That’s their answer to everything, but I think I can safely predict that, as we get closer to an election (provincial 2014, federal 2015) the politicians will stumble upon huge caches of money under beds and chairs.

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

            James, a reporter I know on a weekly (weakly?) newspaper in eastern Ontario phoned me on Tuesday and could hardly talk, he was laughing so hard.

            “Slow down!” I said into the phone. “Turn down the music in the Elks Club juke box and tell me why you’re laughing so hard. I need a laugh because I just received my income tax (the Rides of March) forms in the mail.”

“I had a misprint in my newspaper story about Mayor Roredon,” he laughed. “I meant to write he was INDUCTED into the municipal hall of fame and I typed INDICTED which, as you know, being a famous reporter, means charged by the local prosecutor.”

“I suppose the mayor was not pleased,” I said, still unaware of the source of his good humour.

“He came roaring into the office and was going to shoot me, string me up, run over me with a D-9 Caterpillar bulldozer and then get rough.”

“Then what’s so funny?” I asked.

“While the mayor was yelling at me, Staff Sergeant Wilcox came in and arrested him. Within an hour, he was INDICTED for bribery, corruption, spitting on the sidewalk, and whatever else they could think of. I love it!”

And so we come to the German word ‘schadenfreude’, one that I’ve wanted to use for quite a while. It means ‘enjoying someone else’s misfortune’.

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

We have a new bartender at the club – our seventh this winter – and his name is William Tell. Those of us of a certain age remember that the old TV show ‘The Lone Ranger’ began and ended with a piece from the opera ‘The William Tell Overture’ and I want you to know that this William Tell has nothing to do with that William Tell. The closest he has come is that on Tuesday evening, when it snowed, he was complaining because he left something at the club – the William Tell Overshoes.

We are all rather tired of hearing about the young rock singer Justin Bieber’s problems with the law. Referring to the previous paragraph, I might remind you that the original William Tell was the guy who, trying to gain his freedom, was forced to shoot an arrow through an apple on his son’s head. I hope Justin’s dad is practising his bow skills.

In my (our) Facebook group ‘Old Photos of Victoria County, NB’ there has been quite a discussion about girls’ pants. I am not referring to girls’ panties, but about the days when the female students of almost every NB high school were not allowed to wear pants to or in school. It was the late 1960s before SVRHS in Andover started allowing it so that girls didn’t have to wade snow to their bare knees. You can see the discussion on the FB pages, including one remark: “If the (male) principal insisted on girls wearing skirts in -30º weather, let him try it.” Amen.

                                         -end-