DIARY
Observations
from my summer notebook
by
Robert LaFrance
Here are some observations of life I
have written down over the past few months. I must admit, though, that many of
them come from my electronic notebook, sometimes called a digital voice
recorder, about which I often say: “What did I ever do before I had this?
This column appears in the Star on
June 24, which means it is now officially summer. Every year I wonder at the
way we all blindly follow someone else’s rule, meaning that summer starts on
June 21st, or sometimes the 20th when we all know that it’s been
summer for weeks. We also know that winter does not start on December 21st.
I have a vague recollection that it started sometime in July last year. My
point is: why can’t the official and actual dates of the seasons coincide?
In a city that shall be nameless, a
few months ago I had a gourmet meal; here we have to stop and define ‘gourmet’
and that definition is ‘scant’. Any self-respecting rabbit would scoff at the
salad the waiter brought as not being worth the bother of dashing from his
warren to the garden. The soup was made of materials I would have put in my
compost pile; and then came the main dish – served on a plate roughly the size
of a 1960 Chevy Impala hubcap. It took some scanning, but I finally detected a
piece of roast pork on there, and a quarter of a potato. I think the green
stuff was parsley. A tiny piece of half-cooked carrot adorned the last acre.
They call that (half) cooking method ‘al dente’ which is Italian for ‘to the
tooth’. No kidding. Don’t get me wrong; it was all delicious, but I’m from
Tilley. When I eat, I EAT. Just look at me.
Like the seasons, official election
campaigns have little to do with actual election campaigns. The federal
election set for mid-October has been going on for some time but it doesn’t
OFFICIALLY start until early September. The NDP have the momentum, and the
Liberals have the advantage of that stupid commercial the Conservatives are
running. You know, the one that says Justin Trudeau isn’t ready yet (to be
prime minister). The problem for the Tories is that, the ad has been running
for so long that by election time he WILL be ready. The party in power at the
moment can’t seem to realize that people get sick and tired of hearing the same
thing over and over again. (People often tell me that about this column.)
I am not kidding about this; you
could look it up: Looking over the companies listed on the Vancouver Stock
Exchange, I noted one called Consolidated Dominion Securities or something like
that. Its name as it actually appears on the stock market reports is CONDOM. I
kid you not; I’m not that type.
For those who are far too interested
in political and other polls and you’re surfing the Interweb some time, try http://www.threehundredeight.com/.
It will tell you far more than you want or need to know. I haven’t believed a
poll since the early 1970s when, just prior to an election, polls put the NDP
and Ed Broadbent at 43% of the decided voters. I think they won 16 of 208
seats. The same thing happened at recent B.C. and Alberta provincial elections;
the polls were wildly inaccurate, and yet the pollsters continued their
predictions and journalists continued to report this foolishness. Our late
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker often said that polls were worthless, except to
a certain animal. “Only a dog knows what to do with a poll,” he said.
When I bought my fishing licence
this spring, and earlier my car registration, I was thrilled to see that,
instead of a small card or small piece of paper that fits nicely in the wallet,
they are now the size of bed sheets. All
these years our information was easily carried around on one small card and now we
need...a paper bedsheet. Wasn’t it great that the Computer
Revolution made us a paperless society?
For a reason unknown to me,
the husband usually drives when he and the wife go for a spin. However, there
are exceptions and you want to know how I can tell, don’t you, even if I don’t
see them actually out driving? If the woman’s left forearm (but not her right
one) is tan or sunburned, you know right away that she does most of the
driving. Another clue is the smirk on his face because he has come up with a
way to sit back and relax while she drives. Otherwise, there’s a smirk on her
face because she doesn’t drive unless she has to; when she takes over the wheel
she speeds, tailgates, drives too close to the edge, etc. and he diplomatically
says: “Pull over and let me drive, for %$#*&% sake!”
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment