Shoulda been shot at the stake (April 22)

Flug got his ‘S’ frozen off

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I like it when other writers do my work for me. I just finished reading a biography of our late Premier Richard Hatfield and have now started reading the David Halberstam book ‘The Best and the Brightest’, about all those brilliant men who got the U.S. into the Vietnam War.

            I say ‘men’ because they were almost 100% males and even included President John F. Kennedy, who was severely against the war but found himself being slowly dragged into it.

            How Richard Hatfield got dragged into this column was because of a description by Halberstam of Robert MacNamara, the U.S. Defence Minister in the mid-1960s. Here’s the description: “He was intelligent, forceful, courageous, decent – everything in fact, but wise.” Thinking of the Bricklin and the Diplomat Motel scandals, plus the marijuana in his suitcase, I’d say the description was spot on.

            Mike Duffy’s parents were also unwise. Next subject.

            There’s been a lot of water under the fridge since the Bricklin and all that stuff, but has anything really changed? As I write these immortal words, the ice still hasn’t gone out of the river at Perth-Andover and people are sweating profusely. Dave Eagan’s berm around Victoria Villa special care home represents, as far as I can see, the only constructive reply to the 2012 flood and request to future floods. The rest of the province seem to think that ‘monitoring’ the water levels is all that can be done.

            When I think of the word ‘flood’ in connection with Perth-Andover, I remember the April 11, 1993 flood. Doing spot news (as they say, but mine was more like spotty) for CJCJ Radio in Woodstock, I recorded a news report from Larlee Creek. I’m not sure if it was broadcaster Dave Rogers or station manager Rick McGuire, but whichever one it was, here’s what I said to him for broadcast in half an hour: “It looks as if this year Perth-Andover is going to be spared a repeat of the devastating 1987 flood. The river level below Perth here at Larlee Creek is quickly dropping and residents are breathing a sigh of relief…”

            Other than all those clichés, there was another item wrong with that radio report heard by thousands; it was totally wrong, dude. Half an hour after the news item went on the air, the village, the police, EMO, the fire department and others started evacuating people from their homes.

            I don’t remember if I included that news report on my freelance invoice, but if I did, I should have been shot at the stake, as my friend Betty used to say.

            Like many others, I say to myself several times a year: “Now I’ve heard everything!” It appears, as of Wednesday, April 15, that I was wrong. On The Current, Anna Maria Tremonti’s weekday morning radio show on CBC, she described the situation of a an Italian man whose body was diseased and pretty much finished and said that an Italian doctor planned to perform a head transplant on this guy, cutting off his head and transplanting it onto a donor’s healthy body. One assumes that the donor had been shot in the head by a South Carolina police officer on a normal shift.

            The operation would take 36 hours and involve 100 doctors; apparently the chief surgeon would carefully examine the recipient’s head, and might I suggest that his own might be able to use a look-see as well?

            Federal and provincial government bureaucrats and elected officials often make mistakes and we forgive them for that, but we don’t hear so much about the municipal people making what were called (in the Meech Lake era) ‘egregious errors’. However, whoever schedules ice time in the Moncton the Colliseum is in deep trouble to the tune of $125,000. He or she scheduled two important playoff games for the same evening, and one had to be moved to Fredericton – teams, players and even ticket holders.

            The QMJHL team Moncton Wildcats had to move their April 17 playoff game  because of this airline-type overbooking. The only reason I can think of is that the Moncton city bureaucrat thought that one of the two playoff series would be all over by that date.

            Speaking of ice, my friend Flug is just getting warm again after his February 3-week vacation in Novosibirsk, Siberia. He saw an ad on the Internet for a vacation package whose total cost was $900 – food, travel, and lodging. The trouble was, Flug thought the ad read ‘Iberian holiday!’ He had missed the ‘S’. As we well-read people know, the Iberian peninsula contains Spain and Portugal, and Siberia contains, well, cold.
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