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 20th 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-
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