Can’t
anybody here play this game?
by
Robert LaFrance
A sentence that has stuck in my
alleged mind over the years was uttered by Casey Stengel, manager of the almost
totally incompetent New York Mets baseball team during that squad’s first
season in 1962. The word ‘hapless’ didn’t even begin to describe them.
“Can’t anybody here play this game?”
He asked that question of sportswriter Jimmy Breslin as the Mets were about to
complete their first season in existence with a record of 40 wins and 120
losses.
The reason this train of thought
passed my level crossing this morning was that I was thinking about all the
incompetence I see around me, notably in government of course.
The NB liquor corporation saw its beer sales’
profits drop last fiscal year, and Canada Post ditto. What were the solutions
arrived at by the geniuses who run those companies?
Why, you raise the price of the
product of course. Any MBA (Master of Business Administration) can tell you
that. Well, maybe not. An MBA might say: “Hey, dude, if your product is not
selling, lower the price and lay some advertising in there.”
As to the 33% raise in postage stamp
prices, it seems that Canada Post has just discovered that a lot of people are
using email now. Quite a shock to the Tyrannosaurus Rex types in Ottawa.
“What’s that? He-mail?”
In the same vein, how many years
have we heard that eating saturated fats is just about the same thing as
putting cyanide into the old body? Now we hear that saturated fats aren’t so
bad after all.
How many thousand hours of TV
programming, magazine advertising, and pronouncements by food scientists have
been devoted over the years to warning us not to eat saturated fats? I added it
all up: the answer is 27.3 zillion.
Same goes with eating eggs. For how
many decades did we hear that eating eggs, especially the yolks, was pretty
much the same thing as shooting oneself right between the eyes with a .12
gauge? Then a year or two ago somebody must have looked at the original calculations
and said: “Ooops! I guess eggs aren’t all that bad after all. Ever since then
we’ve been gradually hearing that, rather than being cyanide, eggs aren’t so
bad after all.
Another thing is light bulbs. We’re
told that incandescent light bulbs are the devil, so we all have to use those
curly fluorescent ones. They last 900 years, we are told, and they use far less
energy.
Male cow manure, on both counts! We
started using the fluorescent ones a couple of years ago and I am sure we have
had to replace at least four or five, and, although a 13-watt bulbs is supposed
to give off the same light as a 60-watt incandescent one, it doesn’t. Anyone
who says it does is a ring-tailed earlobe-lipped aardvark with tooth decay. We
replaced 60-watt bulbs with what they said were 23-watt ones, and they STILL
aren’t as bright. I had to duct-tape trouble-lights to the ceilings all over
the house, just so I can muddle around with hitting hall trees and doors with
my face.
Remember how Al Capone and his
colleagues came to riches in the U.S. back in the 1930s? It was because the
federal government had passed a law called Prohibition and made all the
bootleggers rich. Because our government has now banned the sale of
incandescent bulbs, we are seeing bulb bootleggers emerging as the new business
elite. Just yesterday a tractor-trailer stopped here and the driver offered to
sell me 1000 incandescent light bulbs for a mere $800. Of course I jumped at
the chance.
People ask me why I’m so cynical,
why I rarely believe anything unless three Rhodes Scholars and my Aunt Maud
vouch for it. We have governments that seem to act only when they are forced
to, scientists (the ones that Harper hasn’t fired) who tell us weird things
about the food we eat, and Global Warming causing all sorts of severe weather
because nobody believes the obvious truth – that the climate is changing faster
than we can believe. Maybe if they were more careful about warning us about
saturated fats, we’d be more likely to believe there is such as thing as climate
change.
My final subject today is television
news coverage. For weeks leading up to the Quebec election, we heard a lot on
that subject. Then, after the separatists got turfed out, punished for not
noticing that most Quebeckers want to continue ‘accepting’ far more than their
share out federal tax dollars, the subject all but disappeared from the news.
Contrast that with the continuing
over-coverage (five weeks later) of the plane missing in the Indian Ocean. It
must be the Titanic Syndrome, still active 102 years after that ‘unsinkable’
ship sank.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment