Flug joined a new group, DWM (Nov. 19)

Like a 98-year-old guy in a harem

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, not related) was railing on last evening at the club about the uselessness of meetings.

            He’s a member of the Quadra-County Council for Esoteric Doldrums or some such organization, and the twelve members, every month or so, decide the need to meet is overwhelming. They always meet at the club and always when the bar is open, which may tell you something right there.

            “I have the minutes of every meeting we’ve had since March of 2012,” he told me, “and I would say that during that time we have accomplished exactly zero. Just reading the minutes tells me that every motion that anybody ever made was voted down by the rest, including those whose round it was next. The only contribution we have made to the economy of this area is the tax money we have paid on all that lemonade.”

            As he went on, expanding on this theme, I listened attentively, meanwhile thinking about what colour I should paint my office walls, whether to wear my grey shirt with my kilt, and whether buying oil stocks would be a good move right now. (I decided to wait.)

            “And in conclusion,” he said, after what seemed like a month, “I have decided  that I am now going to waste my time doing something other than going to these meetings. I have decided to resign the Quadra-County Council for Esoteric Doldrums and form a group called DWM Ltd.”

            “And the meaning of the acronym DWM?” I asked.

            “Down With Meetings,” he answered. “We will meet every Saturday afternoon down at the club.”

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            Even though I was just a kid in the 1950s, I remember the Communist Scares of the time, particularly those coming from the U.S.A., the land of the free etc. (Free if you agree with everybody else.)

            One phrase I particularly remember is “A card carrying member of the Communist Party”. Apparently being a member of the party wasn’t anywhere near as much a sin as carrying a card to proclaim it. I often pictured a chap trying to persuade the police or some other authority figure that he was indeed a Communist and their ignoring him because he wasn’t carrying a card. “Oh, come on guys! I’m a lousy Commie; I just don’t happen to have my card today!”

            This is all leading up to this: ask yourself how many cards you are carry around in your wallet or purse. My wallet is approximately the same thickness as a politician’s skin although the only thing in it is a lonely five-dollar bill and 87 cards, none of them a Communist Party membership one.

            I go into the drug store to buy a toothbrush and before I get out of there I have to produce an Air Miles card, a credit card, a store card, and seven pieces of ID plus a card to show that I have more cards at home including a card that allows me to own a dog. A few minutes later I am at the grocery store where I must produce approximately 41 cards before I can buy a can of soup or a bar of soap.

            The upside of this all is that, although I’ve gotten a hernia from lugging around all these cards, one of them is my Medicare card so I can have it looked after, someday.

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

            Don’t you really, REALLY, enjoy it when you go into a store and they lie to you? The worst thing is, quite often those people don’t even know they’re lying. Here’s what I’m talking about:

            “We don’t have it today, but it will be in on the truck Tuesday morning.”

            They never say Monday; that’s too early in the week. They never say Wednesday because that’s too far into the future; same with Thursday and Friday and of course the next weekend is out of the question.

            I was thinking (watch out!) this morning that if those clerks did happen to be telling the truth, the strain on Canada’s transportation infrastructure would be brutal. Picture this: On Tuesday morning – perhaps next Tuesday morning – all across the country, if every one of those Tuesday trucks started out at the same time. It would be bumper-to-bumper from Halifax to Chilliwack.

            My point? Clerks, please quit lying. If you don’t have the item, say so and quit promising something you can’t deliver, like the 98-year-old guy in a harem.

                                     -end-

Prime Minister Stephen Harper - weatherman (Nov. 12)

Whatever happened to Pamela Wallin?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Many people have congratulated my daughter Kate who did very well on Episode 6 of the CBC-TV show “Canada’s Smartest Person” and when I say ‘many’ I mean  MANY people.

            Facebook, emails, tweets, etc. – she is still receiving accolades for her great performance, but I think I should get a medal or two as well, plus some sort of medical attention for biting my fingernails down to the third knuckle.

            It’s a nerve-racking thing to watch your kid, even if she is 29, stand up there on national TV and not only hold her own, but very nearly win the final over a guy who got his medical degree when he was 23.

            Anyone who wants to watch that episode #6 can go to this URL on the Internet: http://www.cbc.ca/smartestperson/episodes. I feel that on there somewhere should be a big thank you to ME from CBC-TV. I guarantee I was much more nervous than Kate.

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            I try not to talk about the weather too much, but I must say that first winter snowstorm was a doozie. I’ve written to the Prime Minister who has often implied he can control the weather, but so far I have only received a letter from one of his flunkies – a George P. Donleavy.

            Mr. Donleavy asserted that, although PM Harper can indeed control the weather, he was busy at the moment welcoming a delegation from Chernobyl. I understand that they have glowing praise for the job the prime minister has done so far.

            I just want to say, Mr. Prime Minister, that I am totally unimpressed with your first huge snowstorm of the year and I sincerely hope that will be it until Dec. 24 when you will drop just enough to make it a white Christmas. Then perhaps Global Warming will take over and we will be out in our pools by the first of February.

            (NOTE FROM MY FRIEND FLUG: The only pools Bob has ever participated in has been the hockey pools or pool halls.)

            Back to the subject after that unauthorized interruption, I was not greatly inconvenienced by the huge snowstorm, but I must soon do a story on garage owners. They are now part of the ‘nouveau riche’ culture because their garages have been going night and day putting on winter tires. I have called three garages this morning already and the earliest they could ‘fit me in’ has been January 27^th.

            Here are a few more observations from someone who doesn’t always have enough useful things to do: The first one involves birdseed. I am about to sue (for false advertising) the companies who sell birdseed; this past spring, for the second year in a row, I planted birdseed in the garden and not one chickadee or robin grew. All that came up were sunflowers.

            I’m also thinking of suing a certain communications company. In July I saw an ad for a ‘bundle’ consisting of satellite TV, high-speed Internet, and land-line telephone, all three for $115 a month plus tax. A month later I added $15 worth of programming so that my total monthly bill should have been $130 plus tax. My smallest monthly bill so far has been $238 and every time I get my bill I have to phone the company and complain that they’ve charged me for things that must have been added by my dog Kezman, like extra mileage for the guy hooking up the TV since he lives in Saskatoon. I think I’m about to go back to my previous companies.

            The other evening, over a jar of lemonade – actually two jars, he’s not THAT much of a friend – Flug and I were talking about pre-existence. It was late. He said that Louie, a friend of his, had positive proof that he had had a previous life as an assistant to Julius Caesar. Indeed, Louie and Caesar’s wife had married after the emperor had been murdered by Brutus and others. Flug looked a little sad at that point and I asked him what was wrong. “My previous life was as Gene Autrey’s horse, Trigger. I told him that I had long suspected he was a certain part of a horse and this was proof positive. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Gene’s horse had been Champion, not Trigger.

               As I’ve mentioned before, some words find their way into everyday use even though not a one of us has an idea what they mean. A show of hands, please: what does the word ‘algorithm’ mean? I don’t know either, although I hear it about every day. How about ‘matrix’? ‘Parameter’? Remember those forgotten Senate scandals during which Senator Pamela Wallin kept saying the word ‘recuse’ which means drop out or delete oneself? Within the next month every reporter in Canada started using that word in his or her stories.

            By the way, is Pamela going to be recused from the Senate? There’s no recuse for her behaviour.

                                             -end- 

Canada's worst slob (Nov. 5)

I made a slight error in judgement

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            The faithful and long-suffering readers of this column have often heard me say that I am the messiest dude in Canada – a real slob – and I am here to tell you that I have put an end to all that, perhaps not in the way I intended, but “anyway, however”, as Aunt Ruby used to say.

            If I sit down to have a meal and am covered with a tarpaulin, I will find a way to get stains on my clothes. Perhaps the filling of my fried egg sandwich will fly out, bounce off the dog, and end up, somehow, in my shorts, but Whoever Is In Charge will find a way to mess up my clothes.

            About 1:00 pm on Monday, as I was gazing down at my pants and the large stain left there from my spilling an entire can of V-8 juice on them, a lightbulb went on over my head. I thought it was what’s-her-name turning on my reading light for me, but it was in fact an idea.

            Up in my closet, I said to myself, are 15 pairs of pants, each of them stained with some food item. They are like an epicurean biography of my recent meals. “Since I can’t get those stains out by washing the pants in anything (vinegar, nuclear Tide, etc.),” I reasoned, “why not dye the pants? Ipso, chango, no more stains!”

You might say I had had  a brain-wave, or maybe not. Readers, if you go to your mirrors, you will see a person who would not have done what I did next. I came up with a decision that turned out to be as wrong as possible.

            At this point the normal, rational human being would have taken one pair of pants and tried the dye out on them, just to see if it were a good idea. While your columnist is (probably) a human being, the other two adjectives didn’t and don’t apply. I decided to dye all my pants at the same time.

            I had to go to town to buy all that dye, but I found it – enough dye to change the colour of my entire wardrobe of pants – and went to work. I happened to have a galvanized tub from my moonshining days and put “the whole complete unit” (as the late Paul St. Peter used to say) in there. Slosh, slosh, slosh and it was done. The pants were now all a uniform grey. I hung them on the clothesline with confidence and aplomb.

            Late that afternoon they were all dry, but the colours (plural, as you see) were not all grey any more. They were kind of a pastel rainbow but, to look on the bright side, all the stripes were vertical. That would make me look taller.

                                                “Slings and arrows”

            That was probably the first time I ever made a mistake on this scale, except that time in Orillia, Ontario…but that’s another story. In one fell swoop, or as the late Marvin Toner used to say, one smell foop, I had taken fifteen pairs of pants whose biggest crimes had been the fact that I had worn them, and pretty much ruined them.

            “Be careful what you wish for, it may come true,” goes the old saying, and the fate of my wardrobe was an excellent example of that. I had all those pants that were stained, it is true, but they were wearable, and nobody other than friends and relatives made snide comments about them. My ‘new’ clothes were somewhat (shall we say?) gaudy, even if the colours were muted, but what could I do but wear them?

            The first time I wore them in public was at a ceremony in Fredericton where I was covering the story of Prince Charles’s dedicating a new grocery store or something. He took one look at me and, right in the middle of a sentence, burst out laughing. Beside him Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was in stitches, and that must have hurt. I decided then and there to buy an entirely new pants wardrobe.

            “I say, did you have an explosion in your house?” asked Prince Charles after the ceremony. “I have just the thing to help you out, old chap. Since I never wear a pair of pantaloons (he said that) twice, I will donate my entire week’s discards to you.”

            So if you see me at Save-Easy and wearing what looks like some rather foppy trousers, or pantaloons, that is the whole story. I am now a clothes-horse, or some part of a horse. I no longer have to endure, as Shakespeare wrote in ‘Hamlet’,  “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Thanks, Chuck.

                                                 -end-