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- 

I 'slud' across the floor (Oct. 7)

DIARY

Oh, the excitement here never ends

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Believe it or not, there are people who think New Brunswick is not an exciting place to live, but on September 27 we showed the world where it’s at.

            I’m talking about the Red Super Blood Moon eclipse that my wife and I watched for a long time. We sat out on the porch and sipped hot chocolate (lemonade would have impaired my vision) and watched the shadow of the earth gradually cover the moon and turn it red for some reason. Once, when I was about nine, I got hit in the face with a rock and my face turned red but I don’t think that was the same thing.

            We watched the eclipse for well over an hour, so don’t tell me New Brunswick isn’t exciting. I’ve been to curling matches, I’ve watched poker games on TV, I’ve fished where no fish ever bit a hook, and I’ve watched my wife paint the shed. This all took place in New Brunswick. Just thinking about it I get all a-twitter.

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

            Another exciting event took place in New Brunswick last Wednesday morning. I was in a public (no need to be more specific) building where custodians had just scrubbed the floor. They had put up one of those yellow signs that read: “Caution: Wet floor” but they evidently didn’t also warn that because the floor was wet, that made it slippery.

            The custodians or janitors also did not put up this sign: “Do not trip over this sign”. Maybe they could also have placed an exclamation mark at the end and capitalized the letters: “DO NOT TRIP OVER THIS SIGN!”

            You may have guessed by now what happened. In a word coined by the old baseball announcer Dizzy Dean, I “slud” across the slippery floor, and then I collided, nose-first, against a very unforgiving wall. I wouldn’t have believed that sheet-rock could be so hard.

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

            While I miss a lot of the information I hear, see and read every day, I occasionally find that some sinks in. Listening to the CBC Radio program ‘As It Happens’ one day in late September, I heard that the guy who had invented a way of mass-producing bagels also invented the folding ping-pong table.

            This is information that is vital to our very existence. Daniel Thompson of New York City (he was born in Winnipeg) invented the bagel making machine that allowed tens of thousands of bagels to be baked in one day, compared to about 500 when made by hand.

            He also invented the folding ping-pong table (patented in 1953) that allowed the Tilley Reindeers of 1964 (my team) to win the Southwestern Victoria County Table Tennis Championship that year. Before there were folding tables, we all had to play our matches in a factory in Bairdsville because nobody could get the regular tables out the doorway. You could look it up.

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

            Here are some snippets gathered during the summer and plunked into the notebook I always carry:

            A recent ‘trending’ news story has informed us that Fredericton police chief Leanne Fitch thinks that she should be able to suspend police officers without pay. I can’t go along with that, especially given the length of time that cases take to get to court. Whatever happened to the concept that citizens are innocent until proven guilty? If she gets her way someday, then there should be a guarantee that the suspended officer gets his or her trial within one month. Picture if an officer had to wait four years and three months to go to court. Not mentioning any names.

            I wonder how many years people have been talking about getting hydroelectric power from the Fundy tides? Unlike nuclear power, or damming rivers and streams, it seems obvious that the tides offer a ‘green’ solution and always have. If we had never built Point Lepreau nuclear plant, we could have harnessed (twice a day) all that tidal power for less money.

            Last month, as I mentioned here before, I purchased a smartphone and have been struggling ever since to understand its operation. The young ladies at Telus in Grand Falls have been very patient with me and I want to say thanks. I do say thanks. Thanks. I have found that women have a lot of patience dealing with men because…well, they’re dealing with men and deserve all our admiration.

            My former friend Flug was asking me recently if I were bipolar because when he came over for breakfast one morning I had Johnny Cash music playing, but the next morning I was listening to George Frideric Handel’s Water Music, which, by the way, is not classical but baroque. I knew you were wondering.

            According to the Tory campaign ads, Justin Trudeau is ‘just not ready’, but the ironic thing is that those ads started so long ago that by this time he surely is ready. (I am not supporting any particular political party, just making a comment.)

                                              -end- 

Smartphones smarter than I (Sept 30)

Don’t blame me for the Volkswagen fiasco

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            If someone had told me on April 18^th that I would have to have an air conditioner running in the house on September 18, I would have told them they were either crazy or smoking something legal in Colorado but not here.

            It’s either global warming or Communism, but the weather and climate have become crazy, like a cross between a wolverine and a Komodo Dragon – and what an interesting union that would been.

            Enough talking about the weather and even the election – neither of which I can do anything about – I go on to comment on a story in the Sept. 17 edition of my daily newspaper: “Province’s former youth advocate gets prestigious award.”

            The reporter was referring to Bernard Richard, former cabinet minister, ombudsman, etc. who received an unnamed award for “promoting human rights on a volunteer basis”.

            While this award from the NB Human Rights Commission seems to be a good thing, my question is about the use of the word ‘prestigious’. When is an award non-prestigious?

            I’m thinking of my friend Flug, who recently was named “Best Lemonade Drinker Age 60 and Over” down at the club. That was a non-prestigious award, but where do we draw the line? If I get named Kincardine Writer of the Year and go on the Wall of Fame here, is that prestigious? Or does that fall just under the bar, which is what Flug did when he received his plaque.

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

            So many things these days are misnamed, but I am finding smartphones are not.

            Ten days ago I bought one, a Moto E, for a reason that escapes me. My ordinary cellphone was working well, I knew how to set everything on it including the alarm, ringtone – stuff like that – and I needed a smartphone about as much as I needed a fourth earlobe.

            My new phone zooms. Within twenty seconds I can find out how many tonnes of nickel Argentina shipped to Albania last year, just in case that subject comes up during casual conversation.

            It seems that everyone – except maybe Aunt Freda – owns a smartphone now, and several people actually know how to use them. In my own case it was three days before I learned how to answer a phone call – true story. My nephew called me about something and I kept punching and tapping the phone icon to no avail. It turned out I was supposed to drag that icon over to another, hidden, icon.

            “How in the &^%$#(# am I supposed to know there’s a picture of a phone sitting there?” I asked Flug. He said that I was an idiot.

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

            Speaking of Flug, he’s quite sad these days because (1) he just got divorced from his 14^th (or possibly 15^th) wife, and (2) on the same day he asked another lady for a date and she said: “June 17, 2019.” I have tried to tell him many times that women are occasionally cruel, like most of the time, but that he should stay in the game until the last out.

            “This ain’t lacrosse, Bob. I’ve put a lot of time into chasing her around the barstools, but she was one of them professor types. Once she explained that the words ‘discourse’ and ‘intercourse’ can mean the same thing; that I already knew. We were text messaging at the time and I asked if what we were doing was ‘textual intercourse’. The air got frigid at that point.”

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

            There’s a Yiddish word ‘chutzpah’ which means (more or less) gall, not to insult anyone of French ancestry, like myself, and I would say that the Volkswagen company has plenty of it.

            The funny part of the whole Volkswagen fraud is that no one seems upset by it. People who have Volkswagen diesels right now figure that the company is going to suck up to them and recall their vehicles, plus giving them a wad of cash; those who don’t own the VW cars think they are now going to get a tremendous deal on one, and those who are don’t own a VW and don’t plan to buy one are just plain too busy paying off their Prius and Lincoln cars.

            This is undoubtedly the biggest fraud I have ever heard of. On the day it was disclosed, VW stock took a hit of $21 BILLION. The company is facing fines of $18 billion but of course will pay about a dollar seventy-one, and their sales will probably go through the basement floor, for now. The president of the company has resigned and probably will have his Christmas bonus reduced. What a fiasco! I’m envious.

                                                      -end-

A radio frozen in time (Sept. 23)

DIARY

Changing my breakfast habits is on the table

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Yesterday afternoon, not having enough to do, I went up to the attic to look around. The house, built in the late 1880s, hasn’t seen many people go up in that room where there are stored relics from the past century and a quarter, and it was quite an eye-opener, at least until a huge cobweb covered my eyes.

            After digging my way out of that, I held up my flashlight to see what was there. There was a box of baseball cards from the 1920-1940 era and I threw them downstairs to start fires in our wood heater.

            There were a few paintings by someone name Vincent (I couldn’t read the last name but it looked Dutch) and other junk that should have been thrown out long ago, especially one painting of a particularly ugly gent staring right at me. Then I realized it was a mirror.

            A few moments later I got a surprise; it was a radio, one of those RCA ones that had never been dreamed of here in 1886, when the house was started by local volunteer labour. “That should fetch a dollar or two at a yard sale,” I said to myself and to that mirror.

            Down in the kitchen, I put the radio on the table and plugged it in. Believe it or not (I wouldn’t if I were you) it was playing a show called ‘The Lone Ranger’ which I thought had bitten the dust in the early 1950s, because it had. At first I had thought the radio was playing a bank commercial called ‘The Loan Arranger’ but no, it was the Real McCoy.

            Flipping from station to station, I found programs that were clearly from the 1952-54 era, including a Red Sox baseball game in which Ted Williams hit a home run and one of Toronto comedians Wayne and Shuster. And then it hit me: I had found a radio ‘frozen in time’. Imperial Oil was advertising gasoline at ten cents a gallon.

            It was all quite a shock and I soon fainted. When I regained consciousness there was no radio there, just the phone ringing. It was Jezabel from Cardholder and Computer  Services. She was calling with a serious concern about both my credit card and my computer. She wanted the number of my credit card and main bank savings account and my email address, which I gave her of course. Too few people care about others these days.

            Back to the radio, etc. I came to the conclusion that I had been dreaming. That’s the last time I eat special brownies for breakfast.

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

            I don’t really want to talk about the imminent (impending, more like) election, but I feel I should, especially after the miracle that just happened.

            Imagine Stephen Harper’s pleasure when, by coincidence and during his and our election campaign, he heard the announcement that Canada had a $1.9 billion surplus over the past fiscal year.

            After months of bad news from Mike Duffy, ISIS, oil prices, Tory candidates peeing in coffee cups and vomiting polls, wasn’t it great – and a mighty surprise I am sure - that he had that surplus to point to.

            And point he did, but he neglected to mention a few minor items, like the $11 billion decrease in program spending (that’s infrastructure, health care transfers, keeping veterans’ centres open, etc.) that would have made life easier for many groups. So to look at that, if he had spent that money that had already been approved by Parliament, he would have had a $9 billion deficit.

            To look further: He had no control over the Mike Duffy trial, or oil prices, or any of those other things, but one thing he did have control over was that $1.9 billion surplus. You know, if this sort of thing continues, I’m going to become a cynic.

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

            I mentioned ISIS in an earlier paragraph. That group of dandies is only one of dozens of war-mongers in the Middle East – and by the way thanks to Britain and France for exploiting the oil a century ago and starting all this – and it is said ISIS has lots of money from oilfields that they have captured.

            Here’s my solution: Have ISIS finance the exodus of the Syrian and other refugees. I have heard this question for months: why don’t those rich Middle East countries take in a whack of refugees? Germany has taken in half a million in the past year and Canada has bulged that figure with 2330 of our own with Harper scrambling to make that sound like 2,330,000. Hungary, forgetting 1956 when their refugees were welcomed all over the world, won’t even let the Syrian ones cross their country. They put up a 185 kilometre fence. Nice guys.

                                          -end-