This might be a smart phone, but…
by Robert LaFrance
I almost spit (or
spat) out my lemonade last evening when I glanced at the TV to see a guy rock
climbing. I mean REAL rock climbing, like on a vertical cliff 300 feet high.
Although I did
manage to get down that swallow, I wondered just how crazy a person has to be
to do that, and even that wasn’t a point. He was taking a ‘selfie’ with his
smartphone and sending it to (one presumes) his gal who was out kayaking.
I’m no expert,
but it seems to me that to break one’s concentration while above 300 feet of
air is not the smartest thing he could have done. The smartest thing he could
have done would have been to stay home and mow the lawn.
However, anybody
that dumb would have shoved his foot into the blades to see how it felt.
The TV commercial
was selling smartphones of course, but I don’t think they knew their audience.
If they were trying to sell a smartphone to me, or to Flug, they would have
done better to have those actors or models pushing their Lawn-Boys and pausing
for a cold drink now and then.
**************************
On the subject of those curly
fluorescent light bulbs that were going to change the world: It ain’t gonna
happen.
I know three cases of their nearly
catching on fire, if the homeowner hadn’t been right there, and another thing
is all that lying about how long they will last. The advertising insisted that
they would last 20,000 hours or some such ridiculous figure when in fact if you
can get 1000 hours out of one you’d be doing well. We have had three burn out
on our main floor and one upstairs.
Something else ‘they’ don’t tell us
is that if the light bulb is turned on outside – such as on our porch – the
cold will not only shorten its life, but it will get dimmer and dimmer as time
goes by. After a while that so-called 100-watt curly bulb will be putting out
enough light to illuminate a doghouse, if the dog has good night vision.
I have heard many times that our
former bulbs, the incandescent ones, are no longer being made, so we will soon
have to use those curly fries. Therefore people have stocked up on the older
kind. You know, the ones that actually work.
****************************
Last evening at the club we were
talking politics and of course there was the usual mix of right and left
wingers, as if politics were a hockey team. “They should put that Mike Duffy
right in jail,” said Flambers (left winger), who is famous for wanting right
wing types like Stephen Harper to pay for their crimes, real or imaginary.
“Did you see where Justin Trudeau
wants all students to smoke that Mary-jawanna pot stuff or not be allowed to
get their high school graduation diploma?” said Dugald Thrump, right winger.
(The ironic thing is, Dugald played LEFT wing on our Currie Road Ramblers
hockey team back in the 1960s. Ask Donald Rossignol; he wouldn’t lie.)
“You guys are full of shirts,”
uttered Dennis Utarde, who could only be called a middle of the road guy. The
discussion went downhill (if there was a downhill) from there, with each of
them agreeing to disagree with the others.
“A good compromise means that
everybody’s mad,” I said, quoting Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame. “Sometimes
we have to do some damage to do some good.
Remember all those great paintings of John James Audubon? He had to kill
the birds and stuff them before he could paint them.”
Only at the club could a discussion
of politics end up on the subject of John James Audubon and his birds. It was
late. It made no sense.
**************************
The scandal of the Volkwagen
diesel cars that had the cheating software in their emissions systems has
disappeared off the front pages and from the airwaves – as the pundits call
radio and TV while ignoring the Internet.
Why would this be? The company
deliberately fixed its cars to cheat, but it doesn’t seem to have caused
everyone to hate them. It almost seems as if people admire their initiative and
chutzpah (gall).
In fact, there was an Unintended
Consequence.
Talking to a noted car dealer in the
Grand Falls – Minto area, I was surprised to see him smiling a smile as wide as
Manitoba. “Volkswagen, please do it again,” he smiled. Noting my quizzical
expression, he explained. “Remember when VW diesel owners were so mad because
of the scandal that they said they would ‘give away’ their reputation-stained
cars and buy something else? I had the something else, so I went around and
bought every VW I could find for mere nothing AND sold them replacements, some
of them actually roadworthy. Sunny ways my friend!”
-end-
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