The
Bully Pulpit has returned
by
Robert LaFrance
There is a television show called ‘The Dragon’s
Den’, in which resides some of the rudest and most obnoxious people in Canada.
These individuals look down on people who are trying to sell their inventions
and products and bully them. That is apparently the job of these highly paid
jerks.
It must be a decade ago when I saw
for the first – and last – time a show called ‘American Idol’. A bully named
Simon Cowell was browbeating a performer who was competing in the contest. He
made the young man cry right there in front of millions of people and then
smirked.
The reason I mention these two shows
is that I recently heard that the jerk named Simon is ‘worth’ something like
$500 million, largely because of the popularity of ‘American Idol’ and the one
he’s in now, ‘The X Factor’. Guess whether I watch it or not.
Cowell and the bullies on ‘The
Dragon’s Den’ are all rich celebrities because they are bullies. It says a lot
about the society we live in, doesn’t it?
Moving on to a more pleasant subject
– the refrigerator – I was looking at ours yesterday afternoon and was really
quite amazed at the amount of information on it. Grocery list, a couple dozen
photos, an envelope of postage stamps, newspaper advice columns, various pins
and magnetic things, a page of cellphone numbers, a $2 bill, a few cartoon
strips – it goes on and on. A computer hard drive would be envious of all the
information stored there.
My question is this: where did
people stick all this stuff before there were fridges and ice boxes? The
obvious answer is “in the fireplace”, but I think we should delve a little
deeper. We’ll say that the year is 1901. There are iceboxes of course, but not
everyone can afford one. Many people store their food in brooks or springs, or
in the shed behind the axe.
I can only guess where a lot of the
information was stored back in 1901.
The grocery list, consisting of a
maximum of three items, list was in the head of the ‘housewife’. “Flour, sugar,
and salt.” The photos would be in an album in ‘the front room’ or ‘the
parlour’. The list of cellphone numbers would be non-existent of course, unless
one had a couple of friends in jail, and the magnetic pins would be waiting to
be invented.
Just to go back a bit to the word
‘icebox’, few people would think that I am old enough to remember the days when
iceboxes were used, but I certainly do. (I’m 66, but my wife says I don’t look
a day over 65.)
It looked just like a fridge;
housewives (that word again) stored food in them just as they do today, but the
icebox had an insulated compartment that held a big block of ice that we had to
replace about every week. Father would drive our 1949 Monarch to downtown
metropolitan Tilley and pick up a block from a guy named Bernard. That little
barn is still there today. We would go up and get a sawdust covered block and
take it home – which makes sense I guess.
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I am, and have always been,
completely at a loss to understand how to pronounce most of the Bosnian and
Herzegovinan names and others from the Balkans - Serbia for example. However,
Serbia, Montenegro, and other countries that made up the former Yugoslavia do
occasionally use vowels in their languages.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, whom I
mentioned first for a reason, is the toughest of them all for its names. It
would not be unusual for a 10-letter name to have only one vowel, or perhaps
only the letter ‘Y’, which is only half a vowel.
The town of Brcko is an example of a
shorter name, and it went a bit overboard (into the Adriatic Sea perhaps?)
because 20% of its letters are (is) vowel. There are lots of other examples,
but I’ll just move to the reason I brought up the subject.
On the MPBN Radio Show ‘Car Talk’
the hosts reported on an important news event in the late 1990s. U.S. President
Bill Clinton, noting the plight of Bosnians, filled two C5 cargo planes with
vowels and sent them to Bosnia on an airlift of mercy. He had the planes drop
thousands of vowels over a dozen major cities. Was he successful? Look today at
Gracanica, which used to be called Grznnztrtwx, and make up your own mind.
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