Imagine…Bob
in a no-fly zone
by Robert LaFrance
On the 17th 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.
**************************
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.
-end-
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