The Born Loser doesn`t always lose (Jan. 28, 2015)

DIARY

An important – no, vital - winter question

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Each season of the year has its own problems and winter is not an exception. My neighbour Eldridge, who lives just the other side of Flug (and don’t get on the wrong side of Flug!) had just cleaned out our front driveway after one of our recent (and un-forecast) snowstorms, when the important thought hit me that I didn’t know the correct word for what Eldridge had done.

            Should I say he snowblowed the driveway or snowblew the driveway? I mentioned this conundrum to the next several people I spoke to and they all started edging away to urgent appointments. I leave it to the faithful reader – which is correct?

            Thinking of word usage, I remember my Aunt Ella Adams (1905-2004) and some of the summers I spent over in Maine, near New Sweden where she and Uncle Mark had a potato farm. Specifically what I was thinking about was her tendency to warn me about ‘flatulence’ when other people were around.

            “Now Bob,” she would say just before Pastor Dischinger and his wife were to arrive for tea, “I want you to be very careful not to break wind, especially while we’re all eating. What would they think of me?” Of course you can guess what happened almost every time. It got so she would only feed me potatoes for two days prior to this visit.

            Then yesterday my wife handed me a coat as I was preparing to go outside. “Here, Bob, put on this windbreaker.”

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

            In my daily newspaper is a comic called ‘Born Loser’ which I always read, for some reason identifying with it. In one of the mid-January cartoons the Born Loser is sitting and watching television when his wife comes into the room.

            “Why are you watching TV with the sound turned off?” she asked.

            “A lot of the programs are more interesting that way,” was his answer, and I almost fell off my barstool, because only the day before my wife and I had had the same conversation. I was reading while waiting for ‘Downton Abbey’ or something equally realistic to come on, but occasionally looked up at the screen where one of those ‘reality’ shows was struggling to finish its 60-minute life, at least for that week.

            I grew up watching westerns, detective shows, game shows when I wasn’t out fishing in Pelkey Brook – which was most of the time – and, looking at today’s production values, they were TERRIBLE while entertaining, and had plots.

            So I’m not talking about the good old days, when all was cheery and bright and every show was Bonanza; I’m saying that the folks who make TV shows today don’t put a whole lot of thought into plot.

            Did I say they don’t put “a whole lot” of thought into plot? They don’t put ANY  thought into plot. Every show except Jeopardy features incredible violence that takes the place of thought, and those ‘reality’ shows are, at best, laughable – far more than the comedies.

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

            That was enough of a rant for a while; now let’s get on to things that really matter, like the harassment of a totally innocent woman by the local police. I am talking about officers from the Kincardine detachment of the Scotch Colony Police Department who will not let my Aunt Grenadine alone.

            True, Aunt G. does have an illegal still where she manufactures her own brand of fire and water she calls, well, Firewater. “She’s only a whiskey maker, but we love her still,” quipped my friend Flug, who has been known to sample Aunt G’s particular brand of aperitif, especially the morning after a long night of arguing at the club.

            In other news, some parents held a protest at Kincardine Middle-High School about the level of organization that is required of their kids.

            “EVERYTHING is organized right down to the last molecule,” commented Mrs. Ernestine Cauchon, whose son Bobby plays on every sports team that KMHS fields. “Why, Bobby no sooner gets home from school than he’s off to hockey practice and he goes from there to basketball practice, and about eight o’clock every evening it’s Ultimate Frisbee. He’s exhausted! God knows when he gets his homework done.”

            Several other parents rose to speak and they all had the same complaint. After they had said their pieces, Principal Getand Punkin rose to address the fifteen or so parents. “I have an idea,” he said. “If your kids are in too many sports, they may drop out of some. Is this rocket science?” (He didn’t say that last part out loud.)

                                                 -end-

Anabaptists and Druids? (Jan. 21/15)

DIARY

There’s a lot of B.S. going around

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Buy green, buy green, buy green. I keep hearing that, but just last week I took some green ham out of the fridge and it smelled like the south end of a northbound horse.

            There’s a lot of such nonsense loose in the world – not that it’s nonsense to want to buy “green” products. I’m talking about all the companies that are leaping on the “green” bandwagon because that’s a good way to sell their products. However, when I am told that a certain company is selling “green” or “ergonomic” chainsaws or snow scoops, I have to step back and take a look.

            One such ad appeared on my TV last evening. The commercial was selling a certain snow scoop that was so much more efficient and easy to use than anything since Caesar’s mule. The next morning, after Mother Nature had dropped about 20 centimetres of heavy snow on this mountain and particularly on our driveway, my wife went out to try out the new scoop. (I had a soft tissue injury where I had fallen off the couch.) “How’s it going?” I said after I had hobbled to the doorway.

            “Trouble is, the snow’s not ergonomic,” she muttered. “I think those ads are a bunch of Male Cow Manure,” she added, and went back to work. Only she didn’t exactly say Male Cow Manure. In my pain, I settled back down in my easy chair with some medicine and resolved to speak to her about her language.

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

            It was quite amusing during the past holiday season to see the number of people on Facebook and elsewhere as they battled for the right to use the terms “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” in the face of all that pressure to say simply “Happy Holidays”.

            The funny thing, I didn’t see anyone trying to take away that right.

            Maybe there were Anabaptists and Druids or possibly Martians who objected to the politically correct deletion of ‘Christmas’ but I didn’t meet any at the post office or at the Irving. Generally people said “Merry Christmas” the same as they always did and I didn’t see any police officers tasering them for it. Those who watched Facebook though, could see postings (as comments are called) like this: “I’m going to say Merry Christmas and that’s that. No one is going to force me to say “Happy Holidays”!”

            Yeah, okay. It all brought to mind that old saying from Proverbs: “The guilty fleeth when no man pursueth.”

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

            A question: What is so super about superstition? I could see if it were called STUPIDstition. We all know it’s stupid – except our own – so where and when did it become super? It reminds me of the phrase ‘The Great Depression’ or even ‘The Great War’ which we now call World War I. From every book I’ve ever read about the depression and that war, I can safely guess that neither was great.

            While on the subject of jobs, I just heard today on the radio news that several big Canadian companies will soon be cutting thousands of jobs because the shareholders haven’t been satisfied with their returns. Many companies demand a 3% profit margin and if a certain store – especially one in a rural area – only has a 2.89% margin, then it will close or its staff will be cut enough to ensure a 2.5% margin next time they measure it. Then it will be closed.

            Please note that if there is a layoff that the only ones who will get laid off will be those who do the actual work while the ones who merely know how to “work the system” will sleaze away like a July python in a Fort McMurray holding pond.

            Some other points to ponder (as they say in Reader’s Digest):

            I could do this the easy way – go to Google or the dictionary – but I would like the reader to let me know what the word “smithereens” means. Each week I smash the English language to it, yet I don’t know what it means.

            We are rained on every day by clouds of redundancies. People routinely say “first started” or “hot water heater”. A few days ago I heard someone refer to a certain athlete as “more unique” and only an hour after that I heard the phrase “all-pervasive” as if “pervasive” weren’t pervasive enough. Now I listen to my radio tell me that two companies were going to be made into “a single entity”. An entity is an entity; that’s all she wrote, and the word “vital” means just that. Saying “Vitally important” doesn’t make it more vital or more important.

                                           -end-

Stephen Harper and I are similar (Jan. 14, 2015)

DIARY

Dealing with maxed-out credit cards

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            People keep asking me what I got for Christmas; I always answer “through it”.

            That isn’t strictly true of course. While it’s true I got through Christmas, my many bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards, change bottles etc. are now over there lying in the corner and whimpering.

            What is it about Christmas that makes people spend money as if they had a billion dollars in cash reserves? In July or September I don’t stop for a meal at every restaurant I (don’t) pass, and I don’t buy a $231 electric drill when I already have two in my workshop. It’s as if suddenly money doesn’t matter; I just want to see smiles on the faces of the people around me.

            My wife was smiling. From her Uncle Ted she received a brand new stainless steel rolling pin that exactly fits the contours of my head. Ted, the former soda jerk in the 1950s and now a real jerk, has never liked me since I put the raccoon in his Ford pickup. He found at an office in Renous, NB, photos of my head from several different angles and with Computer Assisted Design and a 3-D printer, had this rolling pin made by a company in Bangladesh.

            So some people are smiling after the late holiday season, but I can only look forward to anxiety and paying off all those maxed-out cards. I believe the total is $29,331.28.

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

            On another but related topic, I recently read a newspaper description of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s personality and was quite surprised at how similar we two are.

            Each of us is married; he has two kids and I have three, which is pretty much the same thing, and he has two cats, Stanley and Gypsy. I hate cats, which more or less evens things out there.

            The newspaper article said that he and his family enjoy going sliding in the Laurentian Mountains, and there you go again. I used to slide when I was a kid, and I have twice visited the Laurentian Mountains when I lived in Ottawa in the latter part of 1973.

            Slipping into a description of PM Harper when he’s on the job, the article said he was “the boss” and he “would accept no criticism” once he had made a decision. Same here in this house, when my wife is away. Harper was said to lead “an extremely busy life, both at the office, on the government plane during a vital mission to Bermuda or the Cayman Islands, or at home. I too am scandalously busy when I’m in my office here at home, but I must admit I haven’t been in the Cayman Islands for some time. Too many caymans (caymen?) there for me.

            Another similarity - Stephen Harper’s wife Laureen trained as a journalist and photographer, and I didn’t. Enough said about that; the article described her as “personable” and anyone who knows me has to agree that I also am personable which my dictionary defines as “pleasing in person” and “attractive”.

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

            Here are a few things to think about as the year 2015 lurches into full force:

            Take the planet Uranus. There are two ways to pronounce its name and both of them mean trouble if you’re in elegant company. I am trying to picture a conversation when people are taking turns saying the names of planets in our solar system. Mercury, Mars, Venus et al are all right, and other people had already named the others (including an argument whether Pluto is a planet or a dog) so when it came my turn there was only Uranus left. Should I say “Your anus” or should I say “Urine-us”? I compromised. “How about You ran us?” I said. I always was a wimp.

            What is going to happen to the Ford Motor Company in 2015? They had been relying on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford throughout much of 2013 and 2014 – talk about brand recognition! – to sell their products, but Rob and Doug have pretty much disappeared from sight now that Toronto has a new mayor, John Tory. Should I buy a new Ford Focus this year, or stick with my 1986 Gremlin?

            Stephen Harper and I have been thinking about the federal election set for this year. Will the Mike Duffy trial have a big effect on the vote? “I don’t know, Steve,” I said yesterday after he called me. “How should I know? Don’t bother me when I’m trying to watch Downton Abbey.”

            I was reading an Andy Rooney book from 1989. He wrote: “While women in western society have jewels and things hanging from their ears, they wouldn’t be caught dead hanging something from their noses…” How things change. Today even males hang things from their noses, lips, and other areas, and nobody is afraid of tattoos any more. Flug’s 7^th wife Windemere had one…well, let’s leave that one.

                                             -end-

Gourmet canned soup (Jan. 7, 2015)

DIARY

Things that drive this writer around the bend

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            In this first column of 2015, I will begin with a list of things that drive me crazy, although there are those who would say that the journey would be a short bike ride. I have a ways to go yet – in my opinion anyway. I begin:

            1. Getting up in the morning and finding that the windstorm of the evening before has spread a hundred shingles all over the white snow and there’s a hole in the garage roof big enough to drive a C-130 Hercules through and if you’ve ever flown in a C-130 you know it could go pretty much where it wants to. I’ve spent almost 20 hours in one – great plane, but not exactly comfortable.

            2. Receiving a letter from an admiring reader and then discovering in the last paragraph that it was really meant for Rex Murphy. While we both hail from Atlantic Canada, I am a much better writer, although I must admit that he knows one or two more words than I do. Anyhow, I think he writes because of a surfeit of cupidity whereas I write for money.

            3. Ordering the take-out chili from the little local restaurant, having a quick few spoonfuls in the car before I start for home, and finding that the chili contains liquid fire. Naturally this would be one of the few times I would be without a water bottle. (As I stumbled down to the river and drove my face through the ice, I could hear people tittering.)

            4. When I phone someone and they don’t immediately leave whatever they’re doing to talk to me and give me the information that I seek. I called a mechanic the other day and, although he could have set down that transmission, he yelled that he would call me later. Another thing that really bugs me is when people call and expect me to drop whatever I’m in the middle of and talk to them. Are they the centre of the universe or what?

            5. People who pronounce the last letter of the alphabet as ‘zee’ instead of ‘zed’. Those American spellings (favor, flavor, etc.) don’t bother me at all, but that ‘zee’ thing is ridiculous. It’s like lighting a cigarette at Midnight Mass. I know that we’re saturated with American ‘culture’ but can’t we at least keep our ‘zed’?

            6. Ordering a delicious sounding meal at a new restaurant and finding out that it’s about the equivalent of canned soup? One evening last fall my wife and I tried a meal at La Citron Blue in a city near you; I ordered a pasta-cheese dish whose description sounded like a gourmet’s dream, and she ordered a chicken dish that, according to the menu, had been prepared by the gods of ancient Athens. I got macaroni and cheese and she got KFC. And the cost! Something along the line of two car payments and a year’s supply of bratwurst.

            7. Working all morning to complete a couple of long news stories and dealing with the five photos, and then the power goes off, or the Internet decides it would better serve people on the Planet Zorboan3. Or doing all this and finding out that the Internet at the main office is taking a hike, so I would put all my work on a travel drive and head for the office 40 kilometres away only to find that my wife had taken BOTH of our cars uptown. How does she do that?

            8. Reading in the paper or seeing on the TV news that a certain writer who trained with me, all those years ago, just had his book published with a $425,000 advance. This is the guy who, in class, couldn’t tell the difference between a verb and a noun and whose prose was very much like hen droppings. Yes, I’m talking about you, Rex Murphy.

            9. Family members and other alleged humans having the idea that, because I work at home, I’m always available to do work here, like piling wood. Gross. I broke a fingernail in early November and am still feeling the effects. I hereby announce that just because I work at home doesn’t mean that I’m sitting here and watching my Manchester United vs. Chelsea FC soccer game and bemoaning that fact that in the 67^th minute my team is behind 3-1.

            10. Ben Mulroney.

                                          -end-

Ending 2014 with an enema (Dec. 31)

Happy colonoscopy to one and all

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            As I write these words, I want to extend my best wishes to my friend Flug who is kind and brave beyond measure, besides being good-looking, but not as good-looking as I am. Goes without saying.

            Flug is just naturally kind, and he is ‘brave beyond measure’ because in mid-December he underwent a colonoscopy which is a medical procedure that shows most of one’s intestinal tract on a TV screen for the viewing pleasure (?) of a doctor and three nurses.

            Flug was as anxious about the ‘scope’ as if it had involved the amputation of several limbs and his left ear, plus the replacing of five or six organs with latex computer mice. His family doctor had been saying to Flug for three years: “Hey, bud, you’re over sixty now; get your (butt) in to that hospital. You watch TV? Katie Couric had one on her daytime show. If she can do it on TV you can do it in O.R.”

            “I never said that my doctor said that,” said Flug, who had been reading over my shoulder while I was typing. “I said that he had suggesting it for years and I finally said yes, go ahead and kill me. You know you want to.

            “He said that he himself, not being a colorectal surgeon, would not be doing the actual killing,” said Flug, “but that his heart would be right in the O.R. with that surgeon. He hoped I wouldn’t suffer too much.”

Of course, since Flug is a worrier, every possible delay took place. He was supposed to go under the knife (actually hose) on December 10 and the day surgery person called four or five days earlier to say it had been postponed until the 17^th.

            To make a long story short(er), Flug easily made it through the procedure (with high praise for the nurses and doctor) and as far as he knows, all is okay, but, being Flug, he will worry himself into a small dirty ragged ball of sheep wool because he likes to worry.

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

            On a similar subject, we have all heard how the North Korean government brought the Sony Movie Corporation to its knees by ‘hacking’ into their system, but I don’t believe a word of it.

            Only weeks before the event, Sony laid off a whole whack of IT (information technology) workers, and I mean elite tech workers who were capable of pulling off this hacking routine with their eyes closed. Oh gee, what a coincidence! Blaming North Korea was the easy part. If a wheel fell off a truck in Four Falls – blame Kim Jong-Un.

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

            Back to reality, or what passes for reality in New Brunswick, MLA David Coon of the Green Party has suggested that the NB voting age be lowered to 16 from its present 18. Hearing some of the comments on this notion has been interesting, with the usual one being that a 16-year-old doesn’t know enough about the political process to be a responsible voter.

            The person making this comment was implying that the average person going into a voting booth these days knows all the issues and is making a responsible choice. He did not go on to mention Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

            My suggestion is that the voting age be lowered far below 16 and Flug thinks that when a child passes the rigorous exams of Kindergarten and goes into grade one, he or she should be allowed to vote.

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

            As I often do, this morning I was reading from the writings of E.B. White. This book is a collection of his columns from the New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1976. As I looked up from my book and out the window at the bare field and my summer garden, I thought: “It won’t be long now before I will be planting my peas and lettuce.” White was also thinking about his garden.

Naturally he couldn’t just get seed and plant; he had to quote Voltaire the philosopher and author whose most famous book ‘Candide’ I used to enjoy in my younger days. “Il faut cultiver le jardin,” he quoted.

All this means is we better cultivate our gardens but White decided to overthink the whole thing: “What is meant by this? Perhaps that one should cultivate sense and weed out nonsense, or that in the garden of the world, one must weed out the vile for the desirable to flourish and survive, but arguments could be made for other meanings and implications.”

            I thought: “Holy smokes already! Just plant the blasted garden and get it over with!” So I sent my seed order to Vesey’s and decided to read about rutabagas for a while.

                                        -end-

Taking brand loyalty to an extreme (Dec. 24)

Byron Paris was ‘a Ford man’

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            It’s not seen so much now, but when I was somewhat younger (like 50 years),  men tended to prefer one type of car, or one car company, over all the rest. For example, my cousin, the late Byron Paris, was “a Ford man”.

            (This is not to be confused with a certain Toronto mayor who did not run in the recent election there.)

            I refer to guys who were almost all mechanics and to whom a GM, or a Ford or a Chrysler could do not wrong, no matter how many times it stopped along the road. To Byron Paris, a Ford was king and that was the name of that tune.

            One day I stopped at his house along the Currie Road and he got to talking about his recent trip to Moncton. “You wouldn’t think it,” he said, pointing at his 5-year-old Ford (of course), “but that car takes almost no gas. I filled it at Lila Goodine’s store and drove to Moncton, went around there all day, even over to Riverview, and then came home. I had not fuelled up and when I got back here I had to drain out two gallons of gas.”

            There are those who might not have believed that story, but I certainly did, because he drove the schoolbus I rode on. Rule: One should try to never annoy the cook or the bus driver.

Speaking of the bad idea of ‘annoying the cook’ that reminds me of the time when I was working on a weather station in the Northwest Territories. We had about a dozen people there and we generally got along well until this chap name Ted, from Winnipeg, arrived to replace our friend Ben, from Amherst.

Well, Ted was one of those guys who just don’t listen. We tried to tell him. “Ted, don’t rile the cook because he’s got an awful temper. The results could be disaster – YOUR disaster!”

And what did Ted do? His first meal at the weather station, he riled the cook, Ray, from Calgary. Ted had been reading some cartoons that a pilot had left there the day before, and Fate decided it should be that the last cartoon he read before going up to stand in line and get his supper was ‘The Wizard of Id’ where the long-serving dungeon prisoner said to the jailer who was supposed to bring his supper: “Hey, where’s my swill?”

You have already guessed what Ted said to Ray. Ted was ordered out of the kitchen area and told never to come back. For the next two weeks Ted only ate what food the rest of us weathermen brought him. Finally we got him to apologize to Ray and he was put on parole with the condition that he shut his mouth except for stuffing swill – er, I mean, food - into it.

I know I lie more than the average Persian rug, but this story was 100% truth. Remember that. Never rile the cook. I can tell you from rolling pin experience that it is just as true today – actually yesterday – than it was in 1974.

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

Just thinking: After World War II it must have been really hard for the children of war criminals to get a job. I remember one day Grampy told me about a guy with an accent who had stopped by his house in Tilley and asked him for a job. He said he would work with horses, cut wood, fix equipment, anything, just so he could get three squares a day. “I said sure, you can help me cut wood,” Grampy said, “and you know he was such a good worker and I had to work so hard to keep up with him that it was three days before I thought to ask him his name. He said it was Jim Hitler and then he threw down his axe and said he supposed I would send him away now.

“I said I should, the way he had treated my axe, but I didn’t care what his name was.” And then Grampy asked him why he didn’t just change his name. He said he had never thought of it. “Not too bright, but he really could lay down the rock maples.”

The bottom line of this story is that Jim Hitler changed his name to Jim Duffy. “I never heard directly from him again after he moved on,” Grampy told me, “but I found out later than he went over to PEI and later had a son who was named to the Senate. Quite a success I guess. Just goes to show you.”

                                      -end-

"Bob, you are an idiot!" - Flug (Dec. 17)

Describe the year 2014 – ZOOM!

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            It’s true that I read a lot, and I read a lot of things that indicate the writer is less than satisfied with the ever-increasing pace of life. One item I recently read was discussing the modern inventions that “…have conquered time and space to a greater extent during the last sixty years than all the preceding six hundred years witnessed; so that a man may now cram into ten years as much experience as his grandfather could have done in fifty.”

            That article was written in 1897, when Queen Victoria, the beloved Queen Victoria, had been on the throne for seven or eight centuries, or so it seems.

            I was recently in Fredericton and, for the first time in several years, rode on a bus. I counted FIFTEEN people who were tapping away on their cellphones, iPhones, uPhones, Androids, laptop, boxtops, and Eye-Pads, and I wondered: “What have those people accomplished during this bus ride?”

            Then I asked myself what I had accomplished by watching them tap, tap, tap. The answer to that second question was ‘nothing’ but THEY at least had communicated with other people and if they didn’t do that they at least played some electronic games.

            Many people – or many persons, to use proper English – my age point to the ubiquitous electronic equipment that’s been set loose as an example of how the younger generation has gone to hell in a handbasket, but those of us who only have a cellphone, a Smartphone and half a dozen laptops plus a desktop computer and a car that relies on computers are doing just the same thing.

            Therefore, when and if January 1^st arrives for me, I am going to resolve that, like Thoreau, I will “simplify, simplify, simplify”. I shall buy a horse and buggy, get rid of anything electronic in the house, forbid the use of cellphones within 400 metres of me, and (as mayor) ban ‘texting’ in the Scotch Colony.

            “That’s not simplifying,” said my friend Flug who was reading over my shoulder  as I typed, “that’s being a simpleton.”

            I demurred, which I understand means the same as disagreed. “Life is too complicated today, Flug,” I said. “I want to go back to the good old days when we were kids, happily playing baseball on the fields of Tilley. Remember the fun we had? All kids do nowadays is wear out their thumbs on those Eye-Pads and suchlike.”

            “Seems to me that you and I were just uptown last week and watched some hockey and basketball games involving youngsters who were in better shape than we ever were,” Flug pointed out in his gentle but pointed way. “You’re an idiot, Bob.” He pulled his Smartphone out of a pocket, “and I’m going to text that sentence to you so that it’s on the record.”

            “On the record,” I snorted delicately. “How can it be on the record when it only exists digitally? There aren’t any records any more, paper records that last and last. It won’t be long before any records we have will only exist like that and when Apple or Google decide to discontinue this phone and we can’t even get batteries any more, they’ll all disappear.

            “There won’t be any more museums, so Quebec will fold up and fly away. Every community in that province has one or two (federally funded) museums…”

            “There is an upside to everything,” sneered Flug who, in his career as a Parliament Hill barber, had had many a run-in with Bloc Quebecois MPs. “But back to reality, if you get rid of everything electronic, what are you going to drink when  lemonade is not available? Your water pump here at your estate is electronic.” I scratched my head in consternation at that one. Actually, I was scratching my head in Kincardine, but as Grampy used to say, the odds is the difference.

            “What will you do for entertainment?” Flug went on relentlessly. When I said I would work at ‘projects’ like cutting wood and painting the garage, he was sceptical. “Bob, to put it gently, you are a lazy bum and always have been. The idea of you spending your days doing physical work is about as likely as Stephen Harper parachuting off the Peace Tower.”

            “Well, thanks for putting it gently, Flug.”

            After I said I would spend a lot of time reading, he asked me how I would get to town “…and don’t give me that male cow manure about buying a horse and buggy. Do you remember taking care of your father’s horse King? The one that squeezed you against the wall of his stable and almost killed you?”

            So let’s go to the bottom line: I decided not to get rid of all my electric and electronic devices, but I would insist on registering my complaint in this column; here it is. By the way, I just checked out the Christmas presents my wife had bought me and left in plain sight at the back of the closet under some clothes in a trunk, and there is a new iPad. I guess I can stand it a while longer.

                                                   -end- 

As a bull services a heifer (Dec. 10)

We must be reasonable and not get sick

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Eilish Cleary, says the province’s health care system is “unsustainable”.

Here’s a warning: whenever you hear a politician in power or some high (meaning important) official refer to ANYTHING as “unsustainable”, continue listening or reading, because it won’t be long before they explain what they mean – closing  hospitals.

That wasn’t Dr. Cleary’s main message, although it was in there of course. Pesky rural hospitals are a pain. Her gist was that the Department of Health is focussing too much on taking care of the sick.

Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of New Brunswick, she opined that: “All the money that is spent in this province is not resulting in the population getting much healthier.” She cited “bed and facility closures” as examples in diverting spending to target the problem.

            Here’s the statement I thought the funniest: “Spending increasing amounts of money on a subset of the population – the ill – will never make us healthier as a whole.

If we want to be successful, we need to put the well-being of people first…the new government must learn to resist that temptation.”

            The further gist of her ideas was that people should get healthier and quickly by eating a better diet, by exercising and (no doubt) by thinking clean thoughts. “A charge must immediately be given to the Department of Health to truly become a Department of Health and not only a ‘Department of Sick Care,’” she said, adding that the political chips must fall where they may. (There’s always a simplistic solution if you don’t do a lot of thinking.)

            She’s absolutely right that our own obesity results in much of the sickness, but every year surely there are five or six people – maybe even a dozen – who fall off cabbage trucks and break their beans. I guess that once we all become athletes we just ignore those inconvenient few, including those who just plain get sick although they’re in generally good physical shape.

            I always cite the example of the late James F. Fixx, the jogging guru of North America. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him, but crossed over from this world to the next via heart attack at the age of 52.

Here’s a point: Last week Dr. Cleary was in Sierra Leone, West Africa, working on the Ebola problem. Leaving aside the question of who financed her trip over there and why she wasn’t here being unsustainable, I wonder if she tells those who come in with the Ebola virus that they should exercise more and have a better diet.

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

            As an experiment, one early morning when I couldn’t sleep, I called some of the companies that ‘service’ us (as a bull services a heifer). I wanted to check with NB Power, Bell Aliant, Shaw, Xplornet, and our insurance company as to how soon I could talk to a real person. I’m like that.

            The first company was right on the ball – it was only twelve minutes before I talked to ‘Raj’ whose accent was so thick it sounded like me trying to speak Swahili. Mind you, before I spoke to Raj, I first had to hear this: “We are sorry, but due to unexpected high call volume, all our operators are busy…etc. etc.”

            After I had gone through the usual tag team activities of punching numbers, the next company answered with: “We are sorry, but due to unexpected high call volume, all our operators are busy…etc. etc.” In 14 minutes I spoke to someone named Terry or Terri. I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to ask her how to spell her name.

            The third and final company (the sun was breaking over the woodshed) was amazing. Seven minutes and there was Raj, the same Raj. I should add that before I spoke to Raj again – we were old pals by this time – I got this shocking message: “We are sorry, but due to unexpected high call volume, all our operators are busy…etc. etc.”

            How could it be that Raj was working in two different call centres at the same time and how could it be that the same voice gave the following message for all three companies? “We are sorry, but due to unexpected high call volume, all our operators are busy…etc. etc.”

            I think it’s magic. Of course another astonishing thing is that all three companies were suffering “unexpected” high call volumes at the same time. Perhaps they should start ‘expecting’ (and quit lying).

                                                             -end-

Seasick on the Bay of Fundy (Dec. 3)

Duct tape – “the handyman’s secret weapon” - NOT

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I’m an experienced reporter, right? I’ve reported on hundreds of hockey games, right?

            You wouldn’t know it from my report of the November 23 game between the SVHS Lady Vikings and the Hartland Lady Huskies. I re-invented the Huskies and all through my report I called them the Woodstock High School Lady Thunder. I found this out on the day the paper came out and a guy at the grocery store mentioned that Hartland had played. “Woodstock, you mean?” I said. No, he said, Hartland.

            I can only blame drugs and liquor; I don’t use them, but perhaps it’s time I started.

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

            On another subject, I first heard a couple of years ago that the worst kind of tape anyone could use for taping together duct work is duct tape. Since then I have asked several people who should know – plumbers, furnace installers, people who watch the Red Green Show – and they all agree that when you want to tape together ductwork you should use practically any kind of tape except duct tape.

            It makes one wonder about everything else in life that we have taken for granted. As a cynical newspaper reporter (believe me, that is as redundant as ‘hot water heater’) I can’t say I ever believe anything, but I was sure that one thing I could count on in life was the efficacy of duct tape. It appears that, once again, I have been betrayed.

            Back in my youth, as I was growing up in the 1960s, I was sure there were many things I could trust: (1) Politicians had risen to where they were because they were smarter than I, (2) Beautiful people like Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy were very virtuous because they were so great looking, and there were so many people watching them. It turned out that those three, and hundreds of rich and famous like them, were on about the same moral plane as the average streetwalker, and  (3) If you’re a good person and you try hard you will succeed and be respected and admired.

            Looks as if I don’t limit my mistakes to hockey.

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

            This might not be cheerful either, but it lends itself to sarcasm quite nicely. I refer to the August police shooting of a teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. Last evening I was watching television and switched to CNN to see the St. Louis District Attorney making the announcement of the Grand Jury’s decision not to charge the police officer. I had predicted out loud – there is a witness – that there were not going to be any charges; anyone could tell by the way he was wording it. Sure enough, no charges against the officer, Darren Wilson.

            A police officer trained in unarmed combat and carrying gun, baton, mace, stun gun and nuclear weapons for all I know facing one unarmed man even if he did weigh 290 pounds. Yes, I could see the reasoning behind the Grand Jury’s decision that it was all right to shoot the young man six times. It’s a good thing there weren’t more; the police would have had to bring out grenades, tanks, and possibly fighter jets.

            Of course I must remember that this was in Missouri, a state in a country where people are not only allowed to own guns, but URGED to do so. The gun freaks over there keep referring to their Constitution, which speaks of ‘the right to bear arms’ but it’s ironic that all this killing comes about because of one misspelled word.

            The Founding Fathers, forced by tradition to wear heavy coats all the time, inserted in their Constitution that they should have ‘the right to bare arms’ and now you can see where that led.

            There is another high-profile case in Cleveland where a police officer shot a 12-year-old boy who was brandishing a toy weapon. A lot of criticism there, but I think people should put themselves in the place of the officer who had about a tenth of a second to decide if that gun were real. I saw a picture of the gun on television; it looked real enough to me, and a 12-year-old kid can kill you just as easily as a 34-year-old unemployed labourer.

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

            Completely off the topic:

            My friend Flug’s nephew Goren and his wife Sheilaxe just returned from a south seas cruise - Saint John, NB to Digby, NS. It was a rough crossing of the Bay of Fundy, but the captain, wanting to stop people from being sick, laid out a snack in the dining area. He started out with 18 guests but they kept turning green and leaving.

            “I’m so happy you eighteen – er, sixteen – folks were able to join me. You eleven must have sailed before. Well, we have seven of us here to partake of the clam chowder. Both of you will enjoy it.” The waiter brought out the chowder. “Take it away!” he said. “I don’t want to eat alone.”

                                                          -end-