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-
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