We all love the metric system (Dec. 30)

Imagine…Bob in a no-fly zone

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            On the 17^th of December, CBC Radio’s Maritime Noon featured a call-in show about coincidences. People called in with a whole whack of them and they were interesting.

            Of course I was in a ‘no-fly zone’ at the time and couldn’t use my cellphone to call the program. The police said that if I hadn’t slammed on the brakes I wouldn’t have ended up in that ravine, which she called an ‘almost-dead’ zone.

            Back to the point, coincidences. There have been a lot in my career. Back in the late 1960s I was attending UNB with the (original) aim of becoming a civil engineer, but by February 1967 I had long since given up that dream and decided I wanted to be a jack of all trades, which in fact I became. Except I don’t know anything about any trades except journalism.

            I and a bunch of other types from the Arthurette, Tilley, and Perth areas shared a basement apartment in Fredericton and pretty much all decided at the same time (another coincidence!) that we would go out to Campbell River, BC, to work. I think it was something like –52ºF when we passed Woodstock, NB, and +25ºF when we got to Hamilton, Ontario, so the weather was giving us some good messages.

            To cut to the dénoument of this story, after another week or so we found ourselves on a BC Ferry and on our way to Vancouver Island from the mainland. When we were about halfway to Nanaimo (and all its bars) a tall gent struck up a conversation with us and of course we got to trading information about where we lived when we weren’t on ferries.

            He lived in Fredericton, NB. Where abouts (a Canadian expression) did you live, we asked him. The Forest Hills area, he said. Quite a coincidence: that’s where our apartment had been. What street did he live on, we asked. Wallace Street. That was our street. What number?

            I’m not kidding and I’m not even lying (for a change) but he had lived NEXT DOOR. He described several places we had passed every day, and even described the old Volkswaggen van that was parked across the road from our place.

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

            Still with CBC Radio, to which I listen a lot, I recently heard a documentary feature about how pleased (?) we Canadians were when we were told in the early 1970s that Canada would be changing to the metric system within the next few years.

            “On April 1, 1975, CBC weatherman Bill Lawrence informed a somewhat confused and cantankerous public that it was one degree Celsius. Then someone threw a pie in his face,” said the announcer in 2015.

The weather was first to officially go metric on April 1, 1975 and, wouldn’t you know it, I was working in the Northwest Territories in the federal government’s weather service.

“The frustration that many Canadians felt that day can be traced to 1742,” continued the announcer, “when astronomer Anders Celsius decided that the more logical way to measure the weather was to divide the temperature into 100 units between the freezing and boiling point of water. He fixed 0 as the boiling point of water and 100 as its freezing point…The Celsius scale was seen as a metric measure.”

At that time only six countries in the world used the old Imperial scale. They were:  the United States, Liberia, Brunei, Yemen, Burma and Canada. The Americans, being Americans, refused to change of course.

In Canada, we went “cold turkey” although Americans had dismissed Celsius as “claustrophobic, negative, and damaging to tourism”.

And today, here we are, happy as can be to drive at 110 km/hr and buy our gas by the litre. Aren’t we? Maybe not, but a miss is as good as a mile.

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

Other notes from our world in New Brunswick:

I get a great kick out of seeing so many unshaven guys on TV. Somewhere around five years ago an unknown fashion god in Paris or London decreed that males should have quasi-beards. Certainly they are not real beards, but just a bit of scruff which, I assume shouts: “I am a macho male!” I have news for you guys: you just look scruffy and unshaven. No doubt to women you are handsome enough to die for, but women also liked you in (or out of) Corfu Pants, whatever they are.

After all these many years, people who make posters on white bristol board continue to use yellow marker on much of the lettering. They clearly don’t step back and look, because if they did they would see (or not see) that the letters made with yellow marker have disappeared. There could be a sign that says: “Orgy tonight at ten” and all people would see is: “Or y  onig t a  t n”. Very informative.

                                           -end-

The lemonade is so delightful (Dec. 23 column)

“Your call is important to us”…NOT

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I just hung up the phone – and I know that “hung up” is a misnomer in this age of smartphones – after waiting 17 minutes to talk to a human and thought: “Gosh darn. Clearly these businesses don`t want MY business.”

            I happen to know that all their operators are NOT busy taking calls, and I happen to know that my call is not important to them in the least. Like government, bank, or insurance company voice mails, they just want to get me off the line so they can go back to finding other ways to ignore me.

            Remember the good old days when there was a building full of telephone operators? The last one I recall was located in a brick building that’s still there in Andover.

            You picked up the phone in Tilley and a few seconds later a female voice asked what number you wanted. You would say 471 and she would connect you, or at least your voice, with someone who lived at the phone number 471. If it rang and rang she would say: “There can't be anyone home. I think they went to the Fort (Fairfield) shopping. Ethel’s sister works at the hardware store over there.”

            PRIVACY ISSUES!!!!!!! Today that operator would lose her job and would be lucky to escape execution for letting out private information. Very serious.

            In 2015 the world is a little crazy about privacy issues, don't you think? Of course if we look around, the reason is almost always that government wants to keep any kind of information from us. I especially like (dislike) the routine: “I can't comment because it`s before the courts.”

            We had better get used to it. Governments and every other big organization see their main function as keeping information from the public, we who pay their salaries. If there is any excuse for not answering a question, they will seize it.

            “What time is it?” I asked a government bureaucrat.

            “That matter is before the courts.”

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

            “O, the weather outside is frightful, but lemonade is so delightful…”

            As I walked by Flug’s house, I heard this ‘music’ coming from the big guy’s living room. His wife MaryAnne was on a stepladder and painting some trim along the door. I was astonished. None of Flug’s 17 spouses had ever been of the domestic variety and therefore didn’t last long, but this one seemed different. Could he have finally found the gorilla of his dreams? (One of his favourite phrases.)

            “Come in Bob, and have a lemonade!” he shouted from where he was hand sanding a coffee table. I sat down quickly. Flug and that kind of work have always been allergic to each other. I took a whole case of lemonade from his fridge. MaryAnn smiled at me.

            I left that place two hours later with a feeling of euphoria, not all due to the lemonade. Flug, whom I’ve known since he was a barber on Parliament Hill back in the 1970s, had finally found a mate. A rich mate. Abigail Remelle, who kept her own name when she married Flug two weeks ago, is the CEO of Microsoft Canada. Their living room was chock-a-block with electronic equipment, showing that she meant to work from home.

            I’m very happy for my old friend, especially since his heart was broken in early December when he went to Toronto with the idea of marrying Suzanne Leonard of The Weather channel and she turned him down. She said living in the Maritimes with all its snow was too depressing an idea to consider.

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

            I didn’t think I could ever be surprised at things that happen south of our border, but they have done it again.

            The American people have accomplished some wonderful things in the past 150 years, but they are now known more by the totally moronic things they continue to do. Cops shooting people in the back, Donald Trump (who defies description), the fascist Tea Party, their Electoral College which is weird, their electing of judges, sheriffs, etc., and O. J. Simpson – those are just a few.

            Last week though was the topper as far as weird goes, and I think it was a serious news story.

            From the Roanoke-Chowan Herald-News: “A town council in North Carolina rejected plans to rezone land for a solar farm after residents voiced fears it would cause cancer, stop plants from growing and suck up all the energy from the sun.”

            There are a lot of brilliant and decent people in the U.S., but the morons have taken over. At one time that country was the leader of ‘The Free World’. Now it’s working toward being just a collection of gun-toting idiots revelling in their stupidity.

                                          -end-

Kids do a lot of iPadding (Dec. 16 column)

Hornets don’t really die, do they?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I only dare to tell you this now because my friend Flug is away on his honeymoon (#17 I think, or is it #18?) and won’t be back until almost Christmas day.

            He made me swear not to tell anyone, and I’m not telling ANYONE, am I? I’m telling you and I know you won’t mention it.

            In late September Flug walked out into his garage and there was a hornet’s nest nestled against one of the roof trusses. He hadn’t noticed it before. He took a hoe handle and hit the underside of the roof, near the nest, and there was no action there, which is something we often say at the club.

            He didn’t knock down the nest then, when it was quite cold, but waited until the next day when the temperature had risen to +22ºC. Do I have to tell you what happened?

            Believe it or not, I’m a little nasty myself when I wake up too soon and those hornets sure were.

            By the way, his newest bride is NOT Suzanne Leonard, a meteorologist of The Weather Channel. Flug has been enamoured of her for months and we all assumed that when he went to Toronto a few days ago he would persuade her to leave that city and come live in the Scotch Colony, which has yellow lines on some of its roads and is otherwise a rather frisky place.

            I am told that she turned him down and he decided to marry an Abigail Remelle, who is the CEO of Microsoft Canada. I hope they have a lovely stay in Flin Flon, which is not a place I would choose for a honeymoon.

            Indeed, when my bride and I wed in the fall of 1982, we motored to Cape Breton Island where the motor fell out of our Gremlin and we had to take the bus home. It’s been downhill ever since, rolling pin wise.

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

            People often comment that kids nowadays don’t play outside the way that they used to, but some of them do.

            The afternoon following our big snowstorm of Dec. 3, I was uptown and stopped by to visit a family who lives along one of the back streets of the village – out of the flood zone, but not exactly downtown. This family had three kids, all over five and under ten.

            Neither their front or back lawn held a human’s track; apparently the kids, whom I could see texting and iPad-ing away in the living room, didn’t play outside, which must have saved the family big bucks in winter clothes.

            When I came outside, I asked Derrax (not his real name) who it was who lived next door. The front and back lawns were trampled down as if by a flock of elephants, and I could hear kids playing in the nearby woods.

            “Oh, that’s the Hendersons,” he said, Henderson not being THEIR real names. “They have three kids, the same age as ours. They don’t even have iPads and suchlike and have to play out in the snow.” Poor little waifs!

            Just a final note on that subject: I can’t remember the details of the story, but one chap – a friend of a friend of a friend – was telling his friend that his son had just bought a mini-pad. The friend’s wife, who was listening to this, suddenly turned beet-red and found something urgent to do in the house. Go figure women eh?

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

            I was afraid my friend Flug and his brother-in-law Clyde were going to come to blows last evening at the club; that’s how hot the argument became.

            Clyde was bombasting (if that is a verb) about Canada’s bringing in Syrian and other refugees, which is his own opinion and he certainly has a right to it. He ended with the usual phrase: “What’s the government doing for our own homeless? There are even homeless veterans.”

            Flug, speaking very quietly which is a sign that he was girding his loins (right there in the club!) for battle. “Well Clyde, what have YOU done for our homeless lately?”

            Clyde, who in June had spent $175,000 on a Winnebago that he will use 100 hours at most in the coming year, spluttered a bit at that one. “It’s not my responsibility…etc.”

            While not strictly amused, I was bemused at how a perfectly friendly game of 8-ball could turn into an argument. It was a good thing we had sat down by this time and those two weren’t holding pool ball and cues. Those things hurt when you get them upside the head. I remember that time in Minto…

            But that’s another story.

                                                           -end- 

Christmas shopping for husbands (Dec. 9)

The U.S.A. really doesn’t need to fear terrorists

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My friend Elvis was saying last evening as we were going cross-country skiing (there was a skiff of snow on Mount Carleton but a beer store in Plaster Rock) that the United States no longer had to fear terrorist attacks.

            I thought he was joking and was a little annoyed that he would treat such a subject with levity, but apparently he had been serious. That happens sometimes when he gets thinking. I said sometimes.

            “I can picture ISIS and all those other murdering thugs thinking about shooting a bunch of people in the U.S.,” he said, “and then reading the newspapers from Dallas, or Ferguson, or Chicago, or Columbine, or San Bernadino or…”

            “I get the point, Elvis,” I interrupted.

            “Just picture somebody in the Middle East planning to slaughter a bunch of Americans,” he continued, “and then they look over those newspapers. They turn to their fellow suicide bombers and other assorted gunman; what do you suppose they would say?”

            “I don’t know, Elvis. What would they say?”

            “They would say: ‘No need of us travelling all the way over there, eating bad airline food, etc. to kill Americans when they are killing each other off faster than we ever could.”

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

            The description of Christmas shopping from the husband’s point of view is much like the husband himself – simple.

            We go out and buy some power tools for ourselves, some jewelry or clothes for the grown-up kids, and as Dec. 23 arrives, go out and get some kitchen item for the wife. (I sure hope ‘the wife’ is not reading this, or I am ‘toast’.)

            Something in the female DNA forces women, especially wives, to go berserk once December first shows up on the calendar. Everything not nailed down must be decorated with coloured lights or flashing LED signs inviting Santa to stop at their chimneys and leave a bunch of toys although the youngest child is now 23.

            I looked out the window about an hour ago to see a deer and a red squirrel looking back and forth at each other as ‘she who must be obeyed’ (Horace Rumpole’s wife in the novels by John Mortimer) was putting up lights on various trees near the house. I could imagine what they were saying to each other:

            “I say Nigel (it was an English white-tail deer),” says the ruminant to the rodent, “is she in possession of all her faculties?”

            “I couldn’t say,” answered the rodent, “but it is nice of her to light the way to the apple trees.”

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

            A quick off-the-topic note: my friend Big Louis, who is studying music - the gazebo, or gazelle, or maybe the pan flute – asked me what a metronome was. He had read the word in a music book. “A metro-gnome,” I replied, “is a small person who lives in a city.”

            Back to the subject of men and women’s shopping habits: Three days ago I was in a city at one of the ‘big box stores’ (whatever that might mean) and saw Flug with his wife Jolene. He was trailing around behind her – which, when you think about it, is the only way to trail somebody – and he was looking bored. In his hand he held a cordless electric drill.

            “I came in here to buy this drill,” he said, “because it is on sale – twenty dollars less that it was in the summer. I walked down to the power tools section of the store, picked up the drill, and said to myself: that was easy.”

            He sighed the sigh of a husband tortured beyond endurance; in other words, he sighed like a husband because we’re always…no, let’s leave that.

            “And then Jolene decided she wanted to buy some dishcloths and I heard the bell toll. It was too late. She headed for the ‘housewares’ department like a partridge heading for a swamp. That was an hour ago.”

            “But Flug,” I said, “she’s not carrying anything.”

            “No,” he cried in anguish. “As the comedian Lorne Elliott says, “men have no verb for ‘to shop’ but women sure do. Their idea of shopping is to go through an entire store and turn over every item, then put it back, then buy the first item they saw two hours before. I say two hours, but I always was an optimist.” I asked him why he didn’t get a book and go sit in the store’s waiting area to read it.

            “I could read ‘War and Peace’ from cover to cover and make a good start on ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’,” he moaned, “but she’d still be turning over items. She’ll end up getting me a pair of socks and a girdle for her Aunt Ethelreid who really needs a girdle.”

            Not able to endure his pain any longer, I left him there. I know what you’re thinking: with a friend like me he doesn’t need any enemies. So true, but what you see is what you get.

                                                                     -end- 

The 'flower children' have morphed (Dec. 2)

How different from ‘the good old days’

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Driving through one of the built-up areas of Victoria County, I noticed a sign that read: “In business at this spot since 2004”.

            Wow. If we ever want an illustration of how times have changed, that was probably it. This store was (rightly) proud of being in business a whole eleven years, whereas when I was a young gaffer growing up, as it were, in North Tilley, a new business was considered one that has only been there twenty-five years. Some of the businesses in Perth and Plaster Rock – we lived about halfway between the two – had been there since the early 1900s and some even longer than that. A business with only eleven years under its belt would be considered a whippersnapper.

            It’s all due to globalization of course. And greed. In the 1970s, after all the flower children had died and morphed into greedy business people, they discovered they could move their factories from Montreal to Mexico and pay their workers there about 75% less. Of course studies today have shown that they didn’t make any more money that way, and it was all a mistake, but it is a little late for all the people who lost their jobs, their homes and their families.

            Hey, wait a minute! This is supposed to be a humour column.

            Moving to something a bit lighter, I wish to comment, with your permission, on doughnuts.

            Your (and my) mouth waters at the word, but curb that reaction for a few minutes and THEN head for the fridge, because the doughnuts I refer to are found in the trunks of our cars.

            On Tuesday, when I motored to Woodstock to visit my son who is a college student there, I sauntered onto a car lot where there were lots of shiny objects that caught my eye, much as a silver coin catches the eye of a monkey in a tree. Talking to a car salesman who had almost persuaded me to buy a new $45,000 top-end car, I was impressed that the vehicle could do everything but press my jeans.

            “Okay, I’m sold,” I told him. “But only if you can open the trunk and find a full-size spare tire. If I’m paying that much, I want a full-size spare.”

            “We can soon put one in that very trunk,” he said, “and we’ll get you a top of the line Acme all-season radial – AND give you a good deal on winter tires.”

            “No, it has to be in the trunk right now,” I insisted. “Open wide, as my dentist says.”

            Needless to say, when he, talking all the while, opened the trunk, there was a doughnut there. He blamed the garage staff. There should have been one, and on heading to the next car lot, I agreed.

            What do you suppose car company executives think about when they put those doughnuts in cars? Of course we all know the reason: to save money. I thought about that a lot (ten seconds). The bottom line, as they say when the clothesline gets blown to the ground, is that they save less than $20 a car. Now that’s thinking, if the definition of ‘thinking’ is ‘not thinking’.

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

            I do a lot of reading, often hours an evening when my easy chair beckons and the snores aren’t far away. Last evening it was about Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), whom I’ve heard referred to as “the inventor of gravity”.

            Just a guess, but I would say gravity was around several years before this guy showed up in England.

            We have all heard the story of the apple falling on his head, but apparently that was one of those urban legends, or just a lie. The closest any of his biographers would go is that an apple fell near him, so he went in the house, got out his brain, and came up with a formula showing how to calculate the force of gravity at a certain point.

            I don’t know whether I should say this is not, but he proved that we weigh less at the top of Mount Carleton than we do at Mister B’s in Andover. Within hours of this column’s appearance, dozens of Weight-Watchers types will be heading for the mountain. “Look! I’m down to a ton!” Too bad, the fish and chips at Mister B’s are great.

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

            I will leave you with an observation: Now that the cold weather’s here, people will probably be moving to the U.S.A. (in spite of all those guns and anti-refugee sentiments) because it’s warmer.

            I am not referring to Florida or the Carolinas. Caribou, Maine, is clearly much warmer than Limestone Siding, NB. Last evening I was looking at an Environment Canada (my former employer) weather report that said the present temperature here was four below zero. I checked the Caribou weather station figures and it was +26. I’m almost packed.

                                                      -end-

Razor-wire not as good an option as food (Nov. 25)

On the subject of welcoming refugees

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I think we should bring in all the refugees we can, period.

            We all have to remember these two things first: (1) The people risking their lives crossing the Aegean or some other often unfriendly sea to try and make their way to somewhere safer are fleeing the type of ‘people’ who did all the killing in Paris, and (2) this is Canada, a land of refugees. Other than First Nations people, who unwisely welcomed people like us, we are all refugees from somewhere.

            Many people objecting to the idea that Canada will soon welcome thousands of people might do well to use some imagination. Rather than sitting in front of their computers and checking on the latest Facebook revelation, perhaps they (and we all) could picture themselves in a leaking dangerous boat being bounced around on the Aegean Sea.

            “We can’t see land and a storm is building up to the east. We’ve already had one 4-year-old boy drown when he fell off the inflatable raft and disappeared. We escaped from Syria with our last bit of jewelry that paid our passage on this boat and if we ever reach the island of Lesbos (Greece) we hope to get some food and get some country to take us in. We have no money left. Maybe Hungary will take us in, or Serbia.”

No, one of the young men on the boat has a smartphone and said that the Hungarians had put up a 175-kilometre razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia and the Serbian government is building one on its other border. This is to keep tens of thousands of refugees – some starving and many sick, lots of children – from crossing their countries to get to Germany, Austria, Sweden and other countries. Think of the number of refugees all that money spent on fences could have fed and clothed.

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

            The slaughter of all those innocent people in Paris couldn’t have come at a worse time. Not that there’s a good time for terrorism.

            Within hours of these attacks in France, dozens of governors in U.S. states declared that they would not allow any of the Syrian refugees settle there, not in their state. Several European leaders with short memories declared the same, and the Premier of Saskatchewan, displaying Stephen Harper DNA, said Canada should step back from its promise of bringing in 25,000 refugees before 2016.

            I looked around in my head – often a barren cupboard – to try and find an analogy to this and finally came up with one, a poor effort, but you will get the point.

            Bank robbers go into the National Bank of Tilley, shoot a group of innocent bystanders, and escape. The police come along and arrest the bank employees. That’s what it must seem like to the Syrian and other refugees who are now crowded into camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and other countries.

            It’s true that one or more of them might be ISIS suicide bombers, but we here in Canada take a chance every day that some nut case is going to bring a rifle into a campground and kill a dozen people, or shoot a soldier stationed at the War Memorial in Ottawa. So what do we do? Put all Canadians in jail?

            It’s going to be hard work to arrange all the things the refugees will be needing – like the learning of English, unless New Brunswick’s Language Commissioner, Mme. d’Entremont, makes a complaint about that, but this is NB and it’s time we put aside our real fears that there might be a terrorist among the refugees we welcome, though it’s possible.

New Brunswick needs immigrants, but that’s not the real reason we should welcome refugees. They left everything behind in Syria and many thousands of others lost their lives in the Aegean, Mediterranean, and other seas. These people are fleeing ISIS and in some cases the Syrian government.

One argument I’ve heard from the anti-refugee folks is that they will take jobs away from Canadians and go on welfare. I’m not sure they can do both at the same time. Canada’s experience with refugees (Hungary 1956, the Vietnamese Boat People, etc.) shows that they not only are hard-working people, but they themselves often create businesses and therefore jobs.

Sure it’s possible that a terrorist could be among the refugees, but terrorists could be in that next car that comes across the U.S. border, and we’re not going to shut down that ‘undefended’ border are we? We listen to the national news and find that a Muslim woman, a Canadian citizen, in Toronto, going to pick up her kids at school, was beaten  – knocked to the ground and kicked  – by two men because she was wearing a niqab.

Come on, let’s be Canadians.

                                              -end- 

"You guys are full of shirts" (Nov 18)

This might be a smart phone, but…

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I almost spit (or spat) out my lemonade last evening when I glanced at the TV to see a guy rock climbing. I mean REAL rock climbing, like on a vertical cliff 300 feet high.

            Although I did manage to get down that swallow, I wondered just how crazy a person has to be to do that, and even that wasn’t a point. He was taking a ‘selfie’ with his smartphone and sending it to (one presumes) his gal who was out kayaking.

            I’m no expert, but it seems to me that to break one’s concentration while above 300 feet of air is not the smartest thing he could have done. The smartest thing he could have done would have been to stay home and mow the lawn.

            However, anybody that dumb would have shoved his foot into the blades to see how it felt.

            The TV commercial was selling smartphones of course, but I don’t think they knew their audience. If they were trying to sell a smartphone to me, or to Flug, they would have done better to have those actors or models pushing their Lawn-Boys and pausing for a cold drink now and then.

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

            On the subject of those curly fluorescent light bulbs that were going to change the world: It ain’t gonna happen.

            I know three cases of their nearly catching on fire, if the homeowner hadn’t been right there, and another thing is all that lying about how long they will last. The advertising insisted that they would last 20,000 hours or some such ridiculous figure when in fact if you can get 1000 hours out of one you’d be doing well. We have had three burn out on our main floor and one upstairs.

            Something else ‘they’ don’t tell us is that if the light bulb is turned on outside – such as on our porch – the cold will not only shorten its life, but it will get dimmer and dimmer as time goes by. After a while that so-called 100-watt curly bulb will be putting out enough light to illuminate a doghouse, if the dog has good night vision.

            I have heard many times that our former bulbs, the incandescent ones, are no longer being made, so we will soon have to use those curly fries. Therefore people have stocked up on the older kind. You know, the ones that actually work.

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

            Last evening at the club we were talking politics and of course there was the usual mix of right and left wingers, as if politics were a hockey team. “They should put that Mike Duffy right in jail,” said Flambers (left winger), who is famous for wanting right wing types like Stephen Harper to pay for their crimes, real or imaginary.

            “Did you see where Justin Trudeau wants all students to smoke that Mary-jawanna pot stuff or not be allowed to get their high school graduation diploma?” said Dugald Thrump, right winger. (The ironic thing is, Dugald played LEFT wing on our Currie Road Ramblers hockey team back in the 1960s. Ask Donald Rossignol; he wouldn’t lie.)

            “You guys are full of shirts,” uttered Dennis Utarde, who could only be called a middle of the road guy. The discussion went downhill (if there was a downhill) from there, with each of them agreeing to disagree with the others.

            “A good compromise means that everybody’s mad,” I said, quoting Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame. “Sometimes we have to do some damage to do some good.  Remember all those great paintings of John James Audubon? He had to kill the birds and stuff them before he could paint them.”

            Only at the club could a discussion of politics end up on the subject of John James Audubon and his birds. It was late. It made no sense.

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

               The scandal of the Volkwagen diesel cars that had the cheating software in their emissions systems has disappeared off the front pages and from the airwaves – as the pundits call radio and TV while ignoring the Internet.

            Why would this be? The company deliberately fixed its cars to cheat, but it doesn’t seem to have caused everyone to hate them. It almost seems as if people admire their initiative and chutzpah (gall).

            In fact, there was an Unintended Consequence.

            Talking to a noted car dealer in the Grand Falls – Minto area, I was surprised to see him smiling a smile as wide as Manitoba. “Volkswagen, please do it again,” he smiled. Noting my quizzical expression, he explained. “Remember when VW diesel owners were so mad because of the scandal that they said they would ‘give away’ their reputation-stained cars and buy something else? I had the something else, so I went around and bought every VW I could find for mere nothing AND sold them replacements, some of them actually roadworthy. Sunny ways my friend!”

                                                      -end- 

Housecleaning starts with the key ring (Nov. 11)

It’s about time to clean house

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I have a request to make of all the faithful and long suffering readers of this column. Would you go to your purse, your coat, or behind the toaster and find the key ring you use most often?

            Ready? Let’s begin, as they say in those helpful computer ‘help’ videos.

            The object of this exercise is to check each of the keys or other things on that so-called key ring and see (1) what it is supposed to open, (2) if you can actually open something with it, or (3) if you have a vague idea what it even represents. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

            Since I’m here and you’re there, let’s start with my own key ring. First, I weighed it. Approximately two and a half kilograms.

            A brass coloured key was to open my henhouse door. True, we haven’t had hens since my son, now in college, was in kindergarten, and the door is lying in my orchard where it covers my tiller in winter, but at least I recognized the key. I took it off the ring; it ‘clanged’ when I threw it in the empty 48-ounce juice can. A good start.

            The next key had GM on its side, but I knew it wasn’t for our 2004 Buick Century. The last time we had another General Motors vehicle was in 1999 when I gave away our 1983 Chevy Cavalier on a trade-in for our Plymouth Voyager van. Into the can for that key. Clang.

            And so it went until I came across a safety deposit box key. I left that on the ring because I knew that the SDB contained several coins, especially from Expo ’67. Their face value, I knew, was in the $35 range, but after all this time they were worth MUCH more, probably about $37. I could have gained $2 in appreciation from depositing $100,000 in a bank for a year, unless service charges had cleaned it out completely. I resolved to go get the coins and close the SDB.

            Making a long story somewhat shorter, within an hour I had the juice can full of useless keys and my key ring now weighed 76 grams. It felt good to get rid of that useless stuff.

            “What are you doing?” asked my wife as she reached for her rolling pin. “Why are you putting that can of useless keys in the cupboard?”

            “Well…they could come in handy sometime." It was all a blur after that. As my life flashed before my eyes I was saying to her: “Your key ring is next!”

             Two days earlier she had passed me her key ring to start her Toyota and I had suffered a hernia.

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

            Segueing quickly to the subject of politics (the KEY to our well-being, get it?) I note that this week Justin Trudeau will unveil his cabinet so we can judge his carpentry skills, and the defeated Tories and NDP folks will meet to lick their wounds.

            I have noticed that, in each of the last two cases, they are meeting in bars. The ex-Cons and the NDPeers could both meet in the same bar, and that would save some trouble.

            Joking aside, everybody I have spoken to says that the NDP were demolished, as were the ex-Cons. I can’t agree. The NDPeers have 44 seats, which is very good for a third party, but they lost many seats in Quebec because of Harper’s racist campaigning. Well, guess what?

           The only reason the NDP had so many Quebec seats in 2011 was because the late Jack Layton had charmed them; it was a one-off one time phenomenon. (I almost said ‘phenomena’ because so many news readers and commentators use this plural word, like ‘criteria’ when they need a singular one).

            The ex-Cons have 99 seats which is a very large number, and I wonder if anyone else noticed that 99 + 44 = 196, more than Trudeau has. (I never was much good at adding.)

            Canadians are happy though, except Uncle Herbie who has a sore finger and gout, because they got rid of The Wicked Warlock of Calgary. Even if he has resigned as the ex-Cons’ leader he’s still an MP though. Maybe the party will go back to being the Progressive Conservatives.

            I heard a rumour yesterday that our former Tobique-Mactaquac MP, Mike Allen, is ‘considering’ a run to lead the provincial Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick. The provincial Liberals have made quite a few mistakes in the first part of their reign, so maybe that will put them into thinking mode. As a neutral, I’m looking forward to some good skirmishes.

                                      -end-

Whoever heard of toque protection? (Nov. 4 column)

DIARY

A few dozen questions and comments

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            This column will be one of short questions, but few answers because (I have just  been informed) I don’t know much of anything at all.

            There have been quite a few recent television and news feature stories about the automatic car, or self-driving vehicle. It can be set loose in Pincher Creek, Alberta, and pointed at Four Falls, NB and it will arrive, they say. You know how accurate THEY are. My questions are, who’s been asking for it? Who wants it? What insurance company would cover it, except with a tarp? I myself personally (as a former VC Record reporter used to say) can’t picture a scenario in which a car needs to drive itself.

            After the recent road-resurfacing in Perth, someone – DOT, the contractor, or a vandal – put the stop lines at the intersection exactly 55 feet in front of the stop signs. So  you could in theory stop at the stop line, and then, in order to see what’s coming off the bridge, you would have to drive ahead to the stop sign and stop again. Clearly Albert Einstein wasn’t one of the workers there.

            It was only yesterday when I saw in one of those obscure publications that I often read – I think it was called the Toronto Star – that some local politician had attended a broccoli party. I am quite serious. Think of all the ideas this opens up for the ‘hoi polloi’, which is to say us. Eggplant parties, organic corn parties – the possibilities are, while not endless, certainly seeming that way to this country boy.

            I happened to be listening to a commercial radio station this morning (I usually listen to CBC and MPBN) and there was an ad about tooth protection; it was a product to help solidify the enamel on one’s teeth. Trouble is, at first I thought it was toque protection. Even though winter is coming on, I wondered what the heck was going on. One of those weird 1960s-like moments.

            Listening to some hillbilly music in the Toyota (as opposed to the Buick – it makes a difference), I heard about the breakup of a country music duo, but I can’t remember their names. It could have been Flatt and Scruggs, or possibly Stephen and Laureen. Asked the reason for the schism, one of the musicians said: “Bill don’t like to be around me when I’m drinking, and I don’t like to be around him when I’m not.”

            “This is where good intentions come to die,” commented a character in a Dan Brown novel. He was the one who wrote ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in 2003. I didn’t hear the context of this sentence, but I’m hoping it wasn’t Ottawa’s Parliament Buildings. Justin Trudeau is giving people a lot of hope, especially after ten years of what’s his name, and I hope he’s not continually obstructed for no good reason as happens every day in the U.S. of A.

            Looking at a newscast last evening, I was impressed with the influence France still has, in spite of the fact that they haven’t won a war or a battle since about 1814. Every time someone is arguing about anything, France is right in there with both feet. The odious character Charles de Gaulle, who was Premier far too long, seemed to do everything he could to screw up the Allies war effort in the 1940s and never in history did he say thanks to Britain or any of the other allies who saved his country and his life. I guess the secret of France is that its leaders keep telling themselves that they are important. In 1967, when he uttered his “vive le Quebec libre!” he was quickly thrown out of Canada by Lester B. Pearson. Other than bringing us our own flag, I can’t think of anything else Pearson ever did.

            As I was writing this column Flug, looking over my shoulder and sipping one of my jars of lemonade, said: “The only war they really won – no argument – was in 1793 or so.” He was referring to the French Revolution, which France had to win because it was on both sides.

            A final comment: We all think we have perfect judgment, especially when we’re behind the steering wheel. I made this observation as I tried to clean up a scratch on the fender of the Buick. I was sure there was enough room to squeeze between those two Volvos and then get by the BMW and Rolls that were parked at the lemonade store. My insurance broker just called to inform me that the final bill totalled $1,034,211.21. Since we don’t have the penny any more, surely he could have made that $1,034,211.20.
                                                      -end-

The wicked witch is dead (Oct. 28 column)

DIARY

Harper went to the polls and was exorcised

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Good morning. I deliberately waited until the day after election day before starting to write this column.

Yesterday morning voters were streaming into the polls in numbers I had never seen. I had voted in the 4-day advance poll which had a vastly larger number than any previous one. Glad to help.

            How I voted is none of your business, but I am sure that Stephen Harper and many of his merry band of attack ad mavens (which does not include retiring MP Mike Allen, who was our government member for many years and served with integrity and class) were baffled as to why they are now on the Opposition benches.

            The word ‘nasty’ was one I have often used to describe the Stephen Harper campaign. It turned out that Justin Trudeau had 78 days to get ‘ready’ and it turned out that Canadians responded to his non-nasty message with their votes.

            At the age of 67, I have voted in many election campaigns and have never endured one as nasty and unprincipled as Stephen Harper’s. That niqab issue was deliberately set afoot in Quebec, which over the years has proved itself over the top as an ‘anti-furriner’ province. Show them a race or a religion to hate and they will go for it. Muslim women endured curses and worse after Harper brought up the niqab issue as a desperate attempt to drain votes that might have gone Liberal. It turned out that his nastiness dragged votes from the NDP in Quebec and sent them TO the Liberals.

               On election day, October 19, (at last!) I was interested in reading some of the Facebook posts by people around here: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the time has come to give Harper his walking ticket! He's disconnected from reality, he's done nothing more than create division among Canadians and his fear-mongering tactics are comparable to every political tyrant we've ever learned of in History class. And furthermore, I'm sick of seeing his ignorant and benighted commercials.”

            Another comment from a local guy: “Get out there and vote people, don’t make no difference who you vote for as long as Harper goes down the road.”

            And this one that was the best written of them all: “Today is the day...and let’s just say we got rid of Harper with a moccasin print on his ass. lol...VOTE!!!”

            That pretty much covers it.

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

            As I write this, the Toronto Blue Jays – said to be ‘Canada’s team’ – just lost last evening 14-2 to Kansas City, putting them behind three games to one in the American League Championship series. Later news reports made a big deal of the fact that athletes are superstitious and maybe that was a reason for the loss. No kidding.

            One of the Blue Jays didn’t want one of his former coaches to attend the game because every time he did the Jays lost. So the former coach went to a dingy bar and watched the game from a corner. Seriously.

            Wayne Gretzky used to have a certain way to tuck in his jersey but he apparently didn’t have it tucked in on October 19, because he supported Stephen Harper who went from that endorsement to one from crack-smoking Rob Ford, former mayor of Toronto.

            When, as a teenager, I attempted to play hockey for the Currie Road Ramblers, I noticed that a couple of the players, when they had laced on their skates, always skated over to the net on the north side of the rink and tapped it with their left hand. One of them tapped it twice, and one tapped it three times. So silly. I tapped the south side net THREE times and we always won, but only when I didn’t play.

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

            We don’t get a lot of Palestinians here in New Brunswick, and certainly Victoria County, but one has to sympathize with their plight in the Middle East. For several weeks young Palestinians have been attacking Israelis, especially around Jerusalem because of something they think the Israelis had done.

            So the Israelis are equally to be pitied because just walking down the street can get them killed. It’s a killing field to be sure and there are even ‘suicide bombers’, some of them female, which I have not noticed before. The males who do this are supposed to enjoy the favours of eighty virgins, so one wonders about the females.

            Another weird aspect of this little war - and big wars have been started for less – is that some Palestinian mothers are proud of their sons who blow themselves all the way to Berlin.

One mother interviewed by CBC-TV said she’d be happy to supply her other son for the glory of the struggle. In the background was the other son and I could see him saying to her: “Come on ma, can’t we find a cousin or something?”

                                      -end-

Guns in the state of Maine (Oct. 21/15)

DIARY

Flug had a lucky week for sure

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) was beaming when he came over for breakfast yesterday morning. (I have yet to determine why he can’t cook his own breakfasts).

            “Four times in the past twenty-four hours I have received good news,” he said as he started wolfing down my cheese omelette. I started making myself a peanut butter sandwich to have with cold pizza.

            “First,” he said through the omelette, “my divorce from Ellen is now final. My lawyer called yesterday afternoon and there’s no alimony.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the day before, Ellen had won $225,000 in a lottery.

            “Then,” he went on, oblivious of anything but my &%^$#*$ omelette, “I got a call from Candy of Computer Services and it seems I have won a South Seas cruise. All I had to do was send $200 to expedite the paperwork. And three, Candy and I might start going out; we talked a long time. If she can get this weekend off and can book a flight from the Cayman Islands – I’m sending her some money to help out – we will be an item.”

            I marvelled at the ease with which Flug could crawl out of one mudhole and leap headlong into another, likely much deeper.

            He wasn’t done. “And then this morning I was scuba diving on the Internet…”

            “You mean surfing?” I asked.

            “Yes…I was surfboarding on the Internet and went to Facebook where I found a certain ad that’s going to made me financially comfortable (shall we say?).” He pulled a piece of notebook paper out of his shirt pocket. “Here’s what it said: Do you want to earn $5000 a month working 10 hours a week. So I clicked ‘yes’ and I’ll be on my way next week to becoming well off. I just have to send them $450 in administration fees.”

            I knew there was no way I could talk him out of any of this, so I just wished him the best. He and Candy deserve each other.

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

            How many New Brunswickers realize, when they drive over to Fort Fairfield, or elsewhere in Maine to get that cheap milk and gas and deprive New Brunswick of tax money that pays our medical bills, that Maine’s firearm laws are somewhat different from ours? Do tell.

Referring to the slaughter at the community college in Oregon and similar occurences, it was amusing but predictable that, instead of controlling weapons, the American response was to go out and buy MORE guns. Maine is no exception.

            In that state, anybody who is officially sane, or hasn’t killed more than three people yet, can buy and carry a handgun (the law refers to ‘pistols’ but there are also revolvers). They can carry their loaded guns openly in a holster. Remember that the next time you hear of a good buy at Marden’s in Presque Isle or the IGA in Fort Fairfield. Your ‘good buy’ could become a ‘goodbye’ if one of those nutcases doesn’t like your face.

            Americans never seem able to figure out that the more guns that are out there, the more people are going to be shot. It’s a country ruled by the National Rifle Association.

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

            Last week or the week before (the days blur when one is 67) I quoted baseball legend Yogi Berry, and this week it’s ‘Spaceman’ Bill Lee, a former Montreal Expos pitcher. He is about my age.

            He was a spaceman all right, and still is. Interviewed by Michael Enwright on the CBC Radio program ‘Rewind’, he expounded on his theories of pitching and life. Michael asked him how important it had been to him when he was an active player to get the batter out.

            "I used the cosmic snowball theory,” the Spaceman said. “I thought: A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won't matter if I get this guy out.”

Asked what he thought about mandatory drug testing for athletes, he said he had believed in drug testing for a long time. “All through the 1960s I tested everything,” he said.

Another observation from Bill Lee, who had been a left-handed pitcher: "You have two hemispheres in your brain - a left and a right side. The left side controls the right side of your body and right controls the left half. Therefore, left-handers are the only people in their right minds."

                                         -end- 

Interviewing Mike Duffy (October 14/15)

DIARY October 14, 2015

Never mind Aristotle, Socrates and them there guys

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            It is said that those philosopher fellows from long ago knew everything and were always right. People like Aristotle and Socrates seemed to have an extra billion brain cells, even though they often disagreed with each other.

            Later on in life, Socrates made people mad at him and was sentenced to death – suicide by drinking a cup of hemlock – which I thought all this time was a tree. No word on Aristotle, but I think he came back as Don Cherry.

            The reason I mention these philosophers is that the greatest philosopher of them all recently died. Yogi Berra, catcher for the New York Yankees and later manager of that team, Yogi, who even had a cartoon character named after him, was a master of the well-timed and delivered quote. It’s over now for him, but one of his best-known quotes was “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”

            If you get a chance to read a book about him, do so by all means, but remember that he wasn’t just a clown, but one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.

            A few examples of hundreds:

            “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

            “Nobody goes to that restaurant any more, it’s too crowded.”

            “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.”

            (At a Yankee practice) “Pair up in threes.”

            “You saw Dr. Zhivago? Why? Aren’t you feeling well?”

            And his most famous of all: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

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

            Is it really possible in Canada, a country of mostly intelligent people, that this election is going to be fought on the issue of whether two Muslim women may wear a niqab, a piece of cloth that covers their faces when they are to be sworn in as Canadian citizens?

Does it seem as if SOMEBODY in high office is trying to deflect our attention from the rather boring subjects of medical care, unemployment, corrupt senators, bad roads, the environment, and so on and so on?

By inadvertence I was somewhat involved in that niqab business. Yesterday I had to go in a crawl space across some rocky ground to adjust some water pipes in our basement, and was able to do that, but what happened afterward was the weird thing.

I walked outside to get some cobwebs out of my face and who should come along but Big Denny, the bartender at the club. He shrank backward, as if he had seen a skunk sticking its head out of my coat pocket.

“You can’t wear THEM!” he said, paling and pointing at my legs. “The police will come along and arrest you.” It took me quite a while to persuade him that ‘niqabs’ and ‘knee-pads’ are two different things and that religion had played no part in my garb.

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

On October 5 I took all our plastic, tin cans, newspapers, and cardboard uptown to the recycling dumpster behind the Perth post office. As soon as I could see the bins I also could see that someone had left six or seven full garbage bags of recyclables in front; this usually means that the bins are all jammed full.

But they weren’t. They were all empty, which meant that whoever brought those garbage bags just didn’t want to bother putting everything in the recycling bins. None of my business perhaps, but it did tend to ruin my sterling reputation. As I was leaving two people drove in, looked at the garbage bags still sitting there, looked at me and immediately thought: “You lazy ^%$#($#&&&!”

I’m innocent I tell you.

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

I think it’s a shame that Mike Duffy’s name is rarely being mentioned these days, but it’s the nature of the news biz today that what is vital and world-shaking one day is old-hat the next.

As usual, whenever I hear his name I ask myself: who is paying his legal bills? He didn’t have $90,000 to pay back those senate expenses, but he hired a lawyer whose billable hours must cost in the range of $5000 each. His briefcase could be traded for a Volvo.

Back to the point, I was thinking that the Duff and Nigel Wright must be feeling a bit neglected these days. Accordingly, I emailed them both last evening and asked if they each wanted to do a text-messaging interview. “Sure!” they both wrote back within minutes.

So sometime in the coming weeks you will read those interviews in this column. They will be hard-hitting ones too. “Is Stephen Harper trustworthy?” I will ask them both. Once they stop laughing you, I, and the rest of Canada will have the answer.

That’s it for this week. Best wishes to all of us.

Now I want to send out my annual greeting and electronic sympathy card to the folks at Alert, Nunavut, where I spent 54 weeks in 1974-5. This year the sun went down for the winter on October 9 and won’t be back until March 4, 2016.

                                       -end-