Some
summer observations and weirdness
by
Robert LaFrance
In the absence of a coherent theme
for this column, I present the following, a compilation of notes I have made
over the past four months or so.
In the spring, ‘they’ raised the
price of beer and postage stamps on the same day. Is there some kind of
conspiracy to prevent us from communicating with each other? Not to be
paranoid, but why are ‘they’ all against us? It sometimes takes a beer or two
for some people to say more than “Good day” and some people only communicate by
letter, and I don’t mean email. It has become clear that ‘they’ are out to get
us. Here in the Scotch Colony the price of postage skyrocketed to something
just under ten dollars to mail a grain of sand to Wapske, or a Kleenex to Four
Falls. On that same day the price of beer rose fifty cents per 12-pack. What’s
next? The price of gas going up? Oh wait, it just went up. Oops, there it goes
again.
In this fast-moving world, what
happens to anachronisms? Words and phrases that aren’t relevant any more but
are still being used include ‘mileage’ and ‘dial a number’. When about ‘penny’?
Might I also include ‘please’ and ‘thank you’?
In the same vein, what about words
and phrases that are rather insulting? My cousin Susan G. in Tilley must get a
little annoyed when she hears the phrase ‘Lazy Susan’, and what do Spaniards
think when they find themselves blamed for the 1918-1922 pandemic called the
Spanish Flu?
There are a great many mysteries in
life, including the question of why truck drivers, whose fuel must cost about a
dollar a minute, need to keep their vehicles running while they go into stores
for ten or fifteen minutes. I know that cars and small trucks want to keep
their air conditioners running, but for the big trucks that’s an expensive cool. The same goes for some of those
huge ‘half-tons’ whose gas kilometrage (?) must be pretty sick.
Speaking of wasting gas, it must be
hard for governments to advise people not to waste money on idling, on electric
power, on tobacco and on alcohol because from each of those items comes tax
revenue.
The CBC-TV show ‘Dragon’s Den’ might
be interesting to some, but I don’t watch it because I don’t like rewarding
bullies. If these rich people on the panel of this show don’t like a proposed
business, why can’t they just politely say “no, thanks” or, better still, not
have the people come on the show? Possibly the producers of ‘Dragon’s Den’ are
also the producers of ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ which are neither funny
nor done at anybody’s home unless people down there live in zoos.
My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance)
recently got married for the 17th or 18th time (even he
is unsure) and he has been on Cloud Nine or at least Cloud 8.5 ever since the nuptials.
I had a hard time dragging him out for fishing in Muniac Stream, but I
succeeded after a while. After we had fished for an hour without success we
decided to separate where the stream forks, one part becoming Bubie Brook. A
short time later I heard him yelling and I dashed up the brook. He was up a
tree because a bear had been chasing him. “I called my wife to come and get
me,” he moaned, “because the road is right near here, and she said she couldn’t
come because she’d just finished doing her nails which weren’t dry yet.” I have
a feeling that his period of wedded bliss has just about run its course. The
honeymoon is toast.
A lot of people scoff at Facebook
because people say such silly things on there. That is unfair. When I wrote
that I was going to be away from my computer for three hours because I had to go uptown for a
haircut, people wrote some pretty awful things. It’s as if they weren’t even
interested.
One morning in early July I stopped
at a restaurant in a town nowhere near you and was just digging in to my fried
eggs (doctor’s orders) when a large chap at a nearby table received a cellphone
call. The ringer of his phone could have been heard in Cambodia and his voice
could have been clearly understood in Sri Lanka. In other words, I wasn’t
pleased. Already my eggs had started to curdle from the vibration. However, it
was a short phone call, mercy me. So were the next seven.
Here is a message to all my friends and
acquaintances: if I get to the point where I don’t turn off my cellphone’s
ringer before sitting down in a restaurant, and don’t know enough to speak
quietly if I do have to answer, take me to the Scotch Colony Home for the
Criminally Insane Journalists.
-end-
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