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-
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