We all love the metric system (Dec. 30)

Imagine…Bob in a no-fly zone

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            On the 17^th of December, CBC Radio’s Maritime Noon featured a call-in show about coincidences. People called in with a whole whack of them and they were interesting.

            Of course I was in a ‘no-fly zone’ at the time and couldn’t use my cellphone to call the program. The police said that if I hadn’t slammed on the brakes I wouldn’t have ended up in that ravine, which she called an ‘almost-dead’ zone.

            Back to the point, coincidences. There have been a lot in my career. Back in the late 1960s I was attending UNB with the (original) aim of becoming a civil engineer, but by February 1967 I had long since given up that dream and decided I wanted to be a jack of all trades, which in fact I became. Except I don’t know anything about any trades except journalism.

            I and a bunch of other types from the Arthurette, Tilley, and Perth areas shared a basement apartment in Fredericton and pretty much all decided at the same time (another coincidence!) that we would go out to Campbell River, BC, to work. I think it was something like –52ºF when we passed Woodstock, NB, and +25ºF when we got to Hamilton, Ontario, so the weather was giving us some good messages.

            To cut to the dénoument of this story, after another week or so we found ourselves on a BC Ferry and on our way to Vancouver Island from the mainland. When we were about halfway to Nanaimo (and all its bars) a tall gent struck up a conversation with us and of course we got to trading information about where we lived when we weren’t on ferries.

            He lived in Fredericton, NB. Where abouts (a Canadian expression) did you live, we asked him. The Forest Hills area, he said. Quite a coincidence: that’s where our apartment had been. What street did he live on, we asked. Wallace Street. That was our street. What number?

            I’m not kidding and I’m not even lying (for a change) but he had lived NEXT DOOR. He described several places we had passed every day, and even described the old Volkswaggen van that was parked across the road from our place.

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            Still with CBC Radio, to which I listen a lot, I recently heard a documentary feature about how pleased (?) we Canadians were when we were told in the early 1970s that Canada would be changing to the metric system within the next few years.

            “On April 1, 1975, CBC weatherman Bill Lawrence informed a somewhat confused and cantankerous public that it was one degree Celsius. Then someone threw a pie in his face,” said the announcer in 2015.

The weather was first to officially go metric on April 1, 1975 and, wouldn’t you know it, I was working in the Northwest Territories in the federal government’s weather service.

“The frustration that many Canadians felt that day can be traced to 1742,” continued the announcer, “when astronomer Anders Celsius decided that the more logical way to measure the weather was to divide the temperature into 100 units between the freezing and boiling point of water. He fixed 0 as the boiling point of water and 100 as its freezing point…The Celsius scale was seen as a metric measure.”

At that time only six countries in the world used the old Imperial scale. They were:  the United States, Liberia, Brunei, Yemen, Burma and Canada. The Americans, being Americans, refused to change of course.

In Canada, we went “cold turkey” although Americans had dismissed Celsius as “claustrophobic, negative, and damaging to tourism”.

And today, here we are, happy as can be to drive at 110 km/hr and buy our gas by the litre. Aren’t we? Maybe not, but a miss is as good as a mile.

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

Other notes from our world in New Brunswick:

I get a great kick out of seeing so many unshaven guys on TV. Somewhere around five years ago an unknown fashion god in Paris or London decreed that males should have quasi-beards. Certainly they are not real beards, but just a bit of scruff which, I assume shouts: “I am a macho male!” I have news for you guys: you just look scruffy and unshaven. No doubt to women you are handsome enough to die for, but women also liked you in (or out of) Corfu Pants, whatever they are.

After all these many years, people who make posters on white bristol board continue to use yellow marker on much of the lettering. They clearly don’t step back and look, because if they did they would see (or not see) that the letters made with yellow marker have disappeared. There could be a sign that says: “Orgy tonight at ten” and all people would see is: “Or y  onig t a  t n”. Very informative.

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The lemonade is so delightful (Dec. 23 column)

“Your call is important to us”…NOT

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I just hung up the phone – and I know that “hung up” is a misnomer in this age of smartphones – after waiting 17 minutes to talk to a human and thought: “Gosh darn. Clearly these businesses don`t want MY business.”

            I happen to know that all their operators are NOT busy taking calls, and I happen to know that my call is not important to them in the least. Like government, bank, or insurance company voice mails, they just want to get me off the line so they can go back to finding other ways to ignore me.

            Remember the good old days when there was a building full of telephone operators? The last one I recall was located in a brick building that’s still there in Andover.

            You picked up the phone in Tilley and a few seconds later a female voice asked what number you wanted. You would say 471 and she would connect you, or at least your voice, with someone who lived at the phone number 471. If it rang and rang she would say: “There can't be anyone home. I think they went to the Fort (Fairfield) shopping. Ethel’s sister works at the hardware store over there.”

            PRIVACY ISSUES!!!!!!! Today that operator would lose her job and would be lucky to escape execution for letting out private information. Very serious.

            In 2015 the world is a little crazy about privacy issues, don't you think? Of course if we look around, the reason is almost always that government wants to keep any kind of information from us. I especially like (dislike) the routine: “I can't comment because it`s before the courts.”

            We had better get used to it. Governments and every other big organization see their main function as keeping information from the public, we who pay their salaries. If there is any excuse for not answering a question, they will seize it.

            “What time is it?” I asked a government bureaucrat.

            “That matter is before the courts.”

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

            “O, the weather outside is frightful, but lemonade is so delightful…”

            As I walked by Flug’s house, I heard this ‘music’ coming from the big guy’s living room. His wife MaryAnne was on a stepladder and painting some trim along the door. I was astonished. None of Flug’s 17 spouses had ever been of the domestic variety and therefore didn’t last long, but this one seemed different. Could he have finally found the gorilla of his dreams? (One of his favourite phrases.)

            “Come in Bob, and have a lemonade!” he shouted from where he was hand sanding a coffee table. I sat down quickly. Flug and that kind of work have always been allergic to each other. I took a whole case of lemonade from his fridge. MaryAnn smiled at me.

            I left that place two hours later with a feeling of euphoria, not all due to the lemonade. Flug, whom I’ve known since he was a barber on Parliament Hill back in the 1970s, had finally found a mate. A rich mate. Abigail Remelle, who kept her own name when she married Flug two weeks ago, is the CEO of Microsoft Canada. Their living room was chock-a-block with electronic equipment, showing that she meant to work from home.

            I’m very happy for my old friend, especially since his heart was broken in early December when he went to Toronto with the idea of marrying Suzanne Leonard of The Weather channel and she turned him down. She said living in the Maritimes with all its snow was too depressing an idea to consider.

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

            I didn’t think I could ever be surprised at things that happen south of our border, but they have done it again.

            The American people have accomplished some wonderful things in the past 150 years, but they are now known more by the totally moronic things they continue to do. Cops shooting people in the back, Donald Trump (who defies description), the fascist Tea Party, their Electoral College which is weird, their electing of judges, sheriffs, etc., and O. J. Simpson – those are just a few.

            Last week though was the topper as far as weird goes, and I think it was a serious news story.

            From the Roanoke-Chowan Herald-News: “A town council in North Carolina rejected plans to rezone land for a solar farm after residents voiced fears it would cause cancer, stop plants from growing and suck up all the energy from the sun.”

            There are a lot of brilliant and decent people in the U.S., but the morons have taken over. At one time that country was the leader of ‘The Free World’. Now it’s working toward being just a collection of gun-toting idiots revelling in their stupidity.

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Kids do a lot of iPadding (Dec. 16 column)

Hornets don’t really die, do they?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I only dare to tell you this now because my friend Flug is away on his honeymoon (#17 I think, or is it #18?) and won’t be back until almost Christmas day.

            He made me swear not to tell anyone, and I’m not telling ANYONE, am I? I’m telling you and I know you won’t mention it.

            In late September Flug walked out into his garage and there was a hornet’s nest nestled against one of the roof trusses. He hadn’t noticed it before. He took a hoe handle and hit the underside of the roof, near the nest, and there was no action there, which is something we often say at the club.

            He didn’t knock down the nest then, when it was quite cold, but waited until the next day when the temperature had risen to +22ºC. Do I have to tell you what happened?

            Believe it or not, I’m a little nasty myself when I wake up too soon and those hornets sure were.

            By the way, his newest bride is NOT Suzanne Leonard, a meteorologist of The Weather Channel. Flug has been enamoured of her for months and we all assumed that when he went to Toronto a few days ago he would persuade her to leave that city and come live in the Scotch Colony, which has yellow lines on some of its roads and is otherwise a rather frisky place.

            I am told that she turned him down and he decided to marry an Abigail Remelle, who is the CEO of Microsoft Canada. I hope they have a lovely stay in Flin Flon, which is not a place I would choose for a honeymoon.

            Indeed, when my bride and I wed in the fall of 1982, we motored to Cape Breton Island where the motor fell out of our Gremlin and we had to take the bus home. It’s been downhill ever since, rolling pin wise.

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

            People often comment that kids nowadays don’t play outside the way that they used to, but some of them do.

            The afternoon following our big snowstorm of Dec. 3, I was uptown and stopped by to visit a family who lives along one of the back streets of the village – out of the flood zone, but not exactly downtown. This family had three kids, all over five and under ten.

            Neither their front or back lawn held a human’s track; apparently the kids, whom I could see texting and iPad-ing away in the living room, didn’t play outside, which must have saved the family big bucks in winter clothes.

            When I came outside, I asked Derrax (not his real name) who it was who lived next door. The front and back lawns were trampled down as if by a flock of elephants, and I could hear kids playing in the nearby woods.

            “Oh, that’s the Hendersons,” he said, Henderson not being THEIR real names. “They have three kids, the same age as ours. They don’t even have iPads and suchlike and have to play out in the snow.” Poor little waifs!

            Just a final note on that subject: I can’t remember the details of the story, but one chap – a friend of a friend of a friend – was telling his friend that his son had just bought a mini-pad. The friend’s wife, who was listening to this, suddenly turned beet-red and found something urgent to do in the house. Go figure women eh?

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

            I was afraid my friend Flug and his brother-in-law Clyde were going to come to blows last evening at the club; that’s how hot the argument became.

            Clyde was bombasting (if that is a verb) about Canada’s bringing in Syrian and other refugees, which is his own opinion and he certainly has a right to it. He ended with the usual phrase: “What’s the government doing for our own homeless? There are even homeless veterans.”

            Flug, speaking very quietly which is a sign that he was girding his loins (right there in the club!) for battle. “Well Clyde, what have YOU done for our homeless lately?”

            Clyde, who in June had spent $175,000 on a Winnebago that he will use 100 hours at most in the coming year, spluttered a bit at that one. “It’s not my responsibility…etc.”

            While not strictly amused, I was bemused at how a perfectly friendly game of 8-ball could turn into an argument. It was a good thing we had sat down by this time and those two weren’t holding pool ball and cues. Those things hurt when you get them upside the head. I remember that time in Minto…

            But that’s another story.

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Christmas shopping for husbands (Dec. 9)

The U.S.A. really doesn’t need to fear terrorists

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            My friend Elvis was saying last evening as we were going cross-country skiing (there was a skiff of snow on Mount Carleton but a beer store in Plaster Rock) that the United States no longer had to fear terrorist attacks.

            I thought he was joking and was a little annoyed that he would treat such a subject with levity, but apparently he had been serious. That happens sometimes when he gets thinking. I said sometimes.

            “I can picture ISIS and all those other murdering thugs thinking about shooting a bunch of people in the U.S.,” he said, “and then reading the newspapers from Dallas, or Ferguson, or Chicago, or Columbine, or San Bernadino or…”

            “I get the point, Elvis,” I interrupted.

            “Just picture somebody in the Middle East planning to slaughter a bunch of Americans,” he continued, “and then they look over those newspapers. They turn to their fellow suicide bombers and other assorted gunman; what do you suppose they would say?”

            “I don’t know, Elvis. What would they say?”

            “They would say: ‘No need of us travelling all the way over there, eating bad airline food, etc. to kill Americans when they are killing each other off faster than we ever could.”

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

            The description of Christmas shopping from the husband’s point of view is much like the husband himself – simple.

            We go out and buy some power tools for ourselves, some jewelry or clothes for the grown-up kids, and as Dec. 23 arrives, go out and get some kitchen item for the wife. (I sure hope ‘the wife’ is not reading this, or I am ‘toast’.)

            Something in the female DNA forces women, especially wives, to go berserk once December first shows up on the calendar. Everything not nailed down must be decorated with coloured lights or flashing LED signs inviting Santa to stop at their chimneys and leave a bunch of toys although the youngest child is now 23.

            I looked out the window about an hour ago to see a deer and a red squirrel looking back and forth at each other as ‘she who must be obeyed’ (Horace Rumpole’s wife in the novels by John Mortimer) was putting up lights on various trees near the house. I could imagine what they were saying to each other:

            “I say Nigel (it was an English white-tail deer),” says the ruminant to the rodent, “is she in possession of all her faculties?”

            “I couldn’t say,” answered the rodent, “but it is nice of her to light the way to the apple trees.”

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

            A quick off-the-topic note: my friend Big Louis, who is studying music - the gazebo, or gazelle, or maybe the pan flute – asked me what a metronome was. He had read the word in a music book. “A metro-gnome,” I replied, “is a small person who lives in a city.”

            Back to the subject of men and women’s shopping habits: Three days ago I was in a city at one of the ‘big box stores’ (whatever that might mean) and saw Flug with his wife Jolene. He was trailing around behind her – which, when you think about it, is the only way to trail somebody – and he was looking bored. In his hand he held a cordless electric drill.

            “I came in here to buy this drill,” he said, “because it is on sale – twenty dollars less that it was in the summer. I walked down to the power tools section of the store, picked up the drill, and said to myself: that was easy.”

            He sighed the sigh of a husband tortured beyond endurance; in other words, he sighed like a husband because we’re always…no, let’s leave that.

            “And then Jolene decided she wanted to buy some dishcloths and I heard the bell toll. It was too late. She headed for the ‘housewares’ department like a partridge heading for a swamp. That was an hour ago.”

            “But Flug,” I said, “she’s not carrying anything.”

            “No,” he cried in anguish. “As the comedian Lorne Elliott says, “men have no verb for ‘to shop’ but women sure do. Their idea of shopping is to go through an entire store and turn over every item, then put it back, then buy the first item they saw two hours before. I say two hours, but I always was an optimist.” I asked him why he didn’t get a book and go sit in the store’s waiting area to read it.

            “I could read ‘War and Peace’ from cover to cover and make a good start on ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’,” he moaned, “but she’d still be turning over items. She’ll end up getting me a pair of socks and a girdle for her Aunt Ethelreid who really needs a girdle.”

            Not able to endure his pain any longer, I left him there. I know what you’re thinking: with a friend like me he doesn’t need any enemies. So true, but what you see is what you get.

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The 'flower children' have morphed (Dec. 2)

How different from ‘the good old days’

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Driving through one of the built-up areas of Victoria County, I noticed a sign that read: “In business at this spot since 2004”.

            Wow. If we ever want an illustration of how times have changed, that was probably it. This store was (rightly) proud of being in business a whole eleven years, whereas when I was a young gaffer growing up, as it were, in North Tilley, a new business was considered one that has only been there twenty-five years. Some of the businesses in Perth and Plaster Rock – we lived about halfway between the two – had been there since the early 1900s and some even longer than that. A business with only eleven years under its belt would be considered a whippersnapper.

            It’s all due to globalization of course. And greed. In the 1970s, after all the flower children had died and morphed into greedy business people, they discovered they could move their factories from Montreal to Mexico and pay their workers there about 75% less. Of course studies today have shown that they didn’t make any more money that way, and it was all a mistake, but it is a little late for all the people who lost their jobs, their homes and their families.

            Hey, wait a minute! This is supposed to be a humour column.

            Moving to something a bit lighter, I wish to comment, with your permission, on doughnuts.

            Your (and my) mouth waters at the word, but curb that reaction for a few minutes and THEN head for the fridge, because the doughnuts I refer to are found in the trunks of our cars.

            On Tuesday, when I motored to Woodstock to visit my son who is a college student there, I sauntered onto a car lot where there were lots of shiny objects that caught my eye, much as a silver coin catches the eye of a monkey in a tree. Talking to a car salesman who had almost persuaded me to buy a new $45,000 top-end car, I was impressed that the vehicle could do everything but press my jeans.

            “Okay, I’m sold,” I told him. “But only if you can open the trunk and find a full-size spare tire. If I’m paying that much, I want a full-size spare.”

            “We can soon put one in that very trunk,” he said, “and we’ll get you a top of the line Acme all-season radial – AND give you a good deal on winter tires.”

            “No, it has to be in the trunk right now,” I insisted. “Open wide, as my dentist says.”

            Needless to say, when he, talking all the while, opened the trunk, there was a doughnut there. He blamed the garage staff. There should have been one, and on heading to the next car lot, I agreed.

            What do you suppose car company executives think about when they put those doughnuts in cars? Of course we all know the reason: to save money. I thought about that a lot (ten seconds). The bottom line, as they say when the clothesline gets blown to the ground, is that they save less than $20 a car. Now that’s thinking, if the definition of ‘thinking’ is ‘not thinking’.

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

            I do a lot of reading, often hours an evening when my easy chair beckons and the snores aren’t far away. Last evening it was about Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), whom I’ve heard referred to as “the inventor of gravity”.

            Just a guess, but I would say gravity was around several years before this guy showed up in England.

            We have all heard the story of the apple falling on his head, but apparently that was one of those urban legends, or just a lie. The closest any of his biographers would go is that an apple fell near him, so he went in the house, got out his brain, and came up with a formula showing how to calculate the force of gravity at a certain point.

            I don’t know whether I should say this is not, but he proved that we weigh less at the top of Mount Carleton than we do at Mister B’s in Andover. Within hours of this column’s appearance, dozens of Weight-Watchers types will be heading for the mountain. “Look! I’m down to a ton!” Too bad, the fish and chips at Mister B’s are great.

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

            I will leave you with an observation: Now that the cold weather’s here, people will probably be moving to the U.S.A. (in spite of all those guns and anti-refugee sentiments) because it’s warmer.

            I am not referring to Florida or the Carolinas. Caribou, Maine, is clearly much warmer than Limestone Siding, NB. Last evening I was looking at an Environment Canada (my former employer) weather report that said the present temperature here was four below zero. I checked the Caribou weather station figures and it was +26. I’m almost packed.

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