Rules of life #297 (Dec. 7)

DIARY

A husband should never go Christmas shopping with his wife

                        by Robert LaFrance

            On Sunday, Nov. 27, I went Christmas shopping with my wife. On a scale of one to ten, where ten was the worst mistake since the Crusades, this was an eleven, perhaps a 12.

            Let’s go back to the beginning: she wanted to buy a certain item – ONE certain item of clothing she saw on a sales sheet – at Mark’s Work Wearhouse and said she would only be about half an hour. We had other stops in Grand Falls so I went elsewhere to do them. I said I’d be back in 45 minutes. (I know her quite well.)

            When I returned she was, as my brother Lawrence would say, still turning things over and was no closer to buying that one item than if I had dropped her off at the  Timbuktu, Mali, Elks Club.

            So I decided to have a cold bottle of lemonade, non-alcoholic since I was driving, at Kat ‘n’ Dan’s, a nearby restaurant. When I arrived there after a tiring walk of nearly half a minute, I saw two tables around which were seated nine or ten men. I looked closely and I knew most of them. Can you guess who they were?

            Husbands.

            They were in various stages of mental disturbance and I knew why. Their wives were all shopping, and by the way, that verb – ‘to shop’ – is not part of the male vocabulary. We walk in a store, buy what we want, and go home.

            Feinster had glassy eyes because, as he said later, he had been there the longest, something like three hours. His wife Molly was shopping for socks for their nephew. “He must have 26 feet,” said Feinster, “because the last time I looked, her shopping cart was FULL. I’ll have to work overtime until 2018.”

            Blentan, who is from Tilley, kept drumming his fingers on the table and muttering “damn Santa” which was right on the verge of sacrilegious; his eyes were also glazed over and not from the ginger ale he was drinking. “Why didn’t I stay home?” he asked no one in particular. “She said it would take no more than an hour, guaranteed! I came in here just after Feinster. I just checked and she hadn’t bought anything yet.”

            And so it went, all around the table. The pitiful stories of shell-shocked men, tortured beyond endurance by their wives’ shopping. There was a theme that kept going around among them: “If they want to buy something, why don’t they just go, pick it up, pay for it, and go home?”

            Here’s the answer to that question: BECAUSE. Another answer might be that wives (not necessarily women in general) are wired differently from men. ‘Shopping’ is like the Holy Grail. No, it IS the Holy Grail. Husbands are merely the taxi drivers to hell.

            After a while though, there was a happy ending of sorts. Feinster’s wife came in first and took him by the arm as he, slack-jawed and muttering something about Donald Trump, went out to their car, a 1989 Gremlin. At a guess I would have said the total cost of all Molly’s purchases would have allowed them to upgrade to at least a 1997 Lumina, but that’s just me.

            Blentan was next, followed by Ed Sprant, George Williamski, Pierre Dumas and others I didn’t know. For a while I was happy for them, until I realized that I was sitting there alone. And sitting.

            Just about an hour before most of the mall stores closed, my wife appeared and it was clear she had decided to discard me for a younger model. An athletic looking chap, perhaps a soccer player since he seemed fit, was carrying what looked like 226 pounds (in the metric system it would be whatever equals 226 pounds) of purchases, and he even had some on a little trailer of sorts.

            “Well,” she said, “are you ready? I’ve been waiting by the car for almost five minutes. This is Julian, who kindly offered to carry my packages since my husband was in here swilling lemonade.”

            She drove home. I was in no shape to be behind the wheel where other humans, possibly husbands, were on the road. I had had no lemonade, only a bowl of Shreddies  with peanuts, but I had been reduced to a babbling lump of incoherence. (Don’t say it.) As we passed Portage Road, she said: “We should come up here next weekend; there’s a big sale at Wal-Mart.”

               It was then I stood up like a man and put my foot down. “Do we have to?” I whined.
                                        -end-

Introducing 'The Trump Scramble' (Nov. 30)

DIARY

I have a bit of a twinge myself

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I watch quite a few television shows on the B.C. Knowledge Network and I tell ya, them fellers is quite smart.

            Last evening I sat down with a lemonade and got all ready to watch a show called ‘South Pacific’, but to my surprise and consternation it wasn’t the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical we all love, but a show about the 20,000 islands in the south Pacific.

            (Funny how islands tend to be in even numbers like that, like the Thousand Islands of Ontario. Or the salad dressing.)

            Back to the point, I watched about three minutes of the show up until the narrator said about a certain area of that ocean: “The water is clean, clear and pristine…”

            I tell you my friends, that just won’t do. How is it that we humans haven’t polluted that yet? What’s wrong with us? Surely there must be a nickel plant, an oil rig or some raw sewerage we could haul there.

            Flug, just out of hospital and looking over my shoulder as I typed, said: “A little cynical today, are we?”

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

            Yes, as a registered journalist, I am cynical. I have been in the newspaper (and radio) game since 1978 and before that I thought all the people in responsible positions had gotten there because of their smarts and their caring for the public, or at least their ‘image’.

            Today the elected officials I know are indeed there because of their efforts and their intelligence, but it wasn’t always so. I remember one MLA (not from this riding) whose speech I covered in Perth-Andover and who handed out – on paper I emphasize – some of the remarks he was going to make ‘off the cuff’ or ‘ad lib’.

            It was a 12-page speech, double-spaced, and (I am not kidding) the last paragraph of the speech that had been given to reporters was this:

            “Those were some of the points I wanted to raise and I’m sorry my talk took longer than expected so that I can’t stay for questions.” That sentence was written into the text of the speech that he had read word for word. He put his papers in his brief case and, followed by his assistant (who had written the speech), left for his own riding.

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

            A new dance craze has taken over Canada and the U.S., particularly the U.S., since Donald Trump got elected on November 8^th. I call it ‘The Trump Scamble’.

            It’s amazing how many people now think – or would like us to think – that they had predicted the Trump victory. That’s rather odd really, since as late as the afternoon of November 8^th I didn’t hear anyone except Donald Trump himself make that prediction.

            Indeed, the people on his own election team were implying that he had made a good run for the presidency and they hoped the new administration would take up some of the issues that had made him so wildly popular, like jobs. Trump had taken lying to a whole new level, with a statement one day and a completely opposite one the next day, perhaps in the same city.

            I watched the CBC-TV’s The National last Thursday and Rex Murphy was doing his very best to imply that the reason Trump was elected was that he had said things many people wanted to hear. Shocking.

            Other commentators, especially those in the U.S. on shows like ‘Meet the Press’ (although they’ve never met me) were scrambling to explain why Trump won; it was because he received more votes, right? Wrong. Hillary Clinton received over a million and a half more votes than Trump.

            Of course I predicted the outcome of the election. I predicted it on Nov. 9^th.

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

            Flug has been in the hospital this week for what he refers to as brain surgery. In fact he was having a hernia operation.

            When he told me last week that he was going to get this surgery – he had been waiting in line since 1989 – I was astounded. Flug was not a person that one would expect to see lifting a grand piano and I wondered how he had injured himself.

            “Cards,” he explained as he lay there in his hospital bed, a pitiful sight among the flowers his friends had brought in. The flower I had brought in was a small bottle of Captain Morgan’s dark rum.

             “Cards, I tell you. I go to the grocery store and I need two cards, the pharmacy two cards, and every other store in Canada needs a membership card, a special debit card, and card for this and a card for that. I had to build a trailer for my Toyota Yaris so I could take them to town. I ended up having to carry a big bundle of plastic cards all over the place until finally…POP!”

            Although Flug does tend to exaggerate, I believed him. I have a bit of a twinge myself.

                                                    -end-

My glamorous job as a reporter (Nov. 23)

Some questions about the world we live in

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Sorry about this, but my first comment has to be about Donald Trump. Because he is going to be President of the good old U.S. of A. he has to put all his 500 businesses into a ‘blind trust’ so he ostensibly has no control over them. So who is going to be in charge of this trust? His children Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, that’s who. They will also be on his transition team. Apparently Donald Trump Sr. hasn’t got the faintest idea what a blind trust is. I looked up the definition of ‘psychosis’; why don’t you? Looks interesting for the next four years, eh?

            On the subject of writing for a newspaper, I know most people think it’s a glamorous job with lots of opportunity to meet powerful and beautiful people, but although that is true, there are times when it’s nothing short of brutal. Especially if one is a sports reporter. High school hockey causes me no end of problems because both boys and girls wear the cage type of helmet face mask and to make it even more difficult the girls almost all have pony tails covering up their numbers so I haven’t a clue who they are. At my age, I’m often confused as to who I am.

            The death of poet and singer – well, poet anyway - Leonard Cohen, 82, in early November was covered in all media all over the world. People who wouldn’t have heard of him during his lifetime were suddenly distraught at the news of his death in California and funeral in Montreal. While his song ‘Hallelajuh’ was one of the best ever written, much of his other vocals were a series of mumbles and murmurs accompanied by grimaces. Like Bob Dylan and Aristotle, everybody knew his name but didn’t listen to him much until he died. Of course some say Bob Dylan is still living, the proof being that he was just chosen for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

            I didn’t mention this before Remembrance Day because I wanted the Royal Canadian Legions to raise as much money as possible, but I want to point out that whoever came up with the idea of poppy sales was surely a marketing genius. I bought and lost SEVEN poppies in the two or three weeks leading up to November 11. I spent two dollars for each poppy (and didn’t begrudge the Legion one dime). I would get to a hockey game or the synagogue or macramé class or my hunter’s safety course and find that my poppy was missing, taken on the battlefield of my car’s seat belt. On Nov. 14 I cleaned out the car and found 329 poppies under the seat. And yes, I know about the trick of putting tape on the pin, but that wouldn’t be cricket.

            People who are usually fairly sane and even sceptical in other avenues of their lives will believe anything they see on the Internet. A sure-fire cure for arthritis is touted on Facebook one day and two days later all the pharmacies are scrambling to get more ginseng, ground dogweed, garlic tablets, or Omega 3.1. Here’s an example: “Researchers at the University of North Tilley, Churchland Road campus, has concluded that a compound of arsenic and cyanide will cure everything that ails you. You won’t have an ache or a pain after you take one of these puppies. Guaranteed.”

            I like to keep track of what Flug’s nephew Andrew is up to, and the RCMP is often interested as well. His latest scam…I mean endeavour, involves the selling of RVs, meaning those 40-foot camper trailers (if that’s the right term) that people haul around behind their $60,000 pickup trucks as if they were on vacation. Vacation? Seems to me that if I wanted to go on a vacation I wouldn’t take my house with me. Those things are equipped with everything from full kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms that contain mobile Internet setups (so they can order ginseng etc.), to satellite dishes and all sorts of necessities like that. Some of them even have a well-stocked bar if you can believe that.

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, not his real name) is in trouble again with his wife. No wonder he’s been divorced 17 times. Three weeks ago he acquired or was bequeathed a border collie who is very affectionate and likes to be scratched behind the ears and given some ‘Mutt Bits’ which I believe is made by the pet food company Iams. Flug’s problem arose when he walked into his living room and when his wife, an astrophysicist, made a comment about quantum mechanics or horse racing, something like that. Flug made some stunned comment, then scratched her behind the ears. When he regained consciousness...

                              -end-  

 

Surely Trump is not like Adolph Schicklegruber (Nov 16)

DIARY

A nation stunned – the good old U.S. of A

                        by Robert LaFrance

            About 3:00 am on Wednesday, November 9^th, I woke from a sound sleep and looked at my mobile phone for news of the U.S. election. The nation I used to admire had elected a bully and a buffoon and had let loose the fascist stallion. Pity those whose skin is not quite white.

            When I realized that the filthy election campaign was finally over, I went downstairs and took a shower.

            I can’t say I was gobsmacked by the U.S. election result; the signs were there since FBI Director James Comey announced that his police were investigating still more Hillary Clinton emails. During the next nine days, while the FBI were finding out that that none of the emails was a problem, millions voted in advance polls and millions more fence-sitters made up their minds to vote for Donald Trump. He should go down on his knees and thank James Comey.

            Perhaps someday someone would explain to me EXACTLY what Hillary Clinton’s crimes were. We know about Donald Trump’s hate-filled messages and his treatment of other races, but what did Hillary Clinton do, exactly? I have asked dozens and all they refer to are the emails, the Whitewater scandal from decades ago, and the fact that she’s a woman. “Yes,” I say, “but what exactly and specifically was the crime?” No one knew.

            Anyone who owns real estate in New Brunswick should immediately put for-sale ads into American newspapers; many people are very very eager to leave the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave and emigrate to Canada. (Someone said ‘Land of the Freak, Home of the Depraved’.)

            I don’t think I want to talk about this any more.

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

            Well, I suppose I had better talk about it some more and try to understand why a country with so many intelligent people let itself be railroaded into what happened on November 8^th. If we ever want to know the dictionary definition of the word ‘shock’ we only have to replay some of those TV interviews from that evening.

            CNN, a network that many Americans consider practically communistic, seemed to interview a lot more Hillary Clinton supporters than Trump supporters until it was clear that the former were too shocked to speak coherently. If it hadn’t been such a serious matter, I would have chortled – yes, I said chortled – at their discomfiture.

            Donald Trump, who emerged victorious that night, reminds me very much of an old Italian guy I used to read about. According to Wikipedia, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) “was an Italian Dominican friar and preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He was known for his prophecies of civic glory, the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule and the exploitation of the poor.” On the rare occasions when he rose to speak clearly, Donald Trump sounded like that guy.

            On the other hand, he sounded a lot more like a more recent guy, if we can cast our minds back to Germany in 1933 and before, when the German people saw a guy named Adolph Schicklegruber (his real name) as their Savonarola who would take on the big guys. However, it didn’t seem to occur to Americans that their savior, or saviour if you prefer, was one of the ones who had been exploiting them all along.

            Donald Trump has no financial stake in all those Trump buildings – towers, skating rinks, outhouses, whatever – but there’s his name franchised like a Mcdonalds ‘restaurant’. He found tax loopholes that most of those protesting Americans never heard of and couldn’t have used if they had, and he ended up with tax dollars that should have gone to the man and woman trying to open a restaurant in Wilmington, Delaware.

            When I was a lad, I used to spend some summers on my aunt’s and uncle’s potato farm near New Sweden, Maine, and always found Americans to be friendly and bright, but as in the Joseph Heller novel, ‘Something Happened’.

            We Canadians all know that if Donald Trump governs the way he campaigned, we – and the rest of the world – are in trouble. To quote an interviewee, who identified himself only as Bill from Sudbury, on Anna Maria Tremonti’s CBC radio show The Current: “I don’t know where everything’s going to go from here, but it won’t be good.”

            As Pierre Trudeau said, Canada is a mouse sleeping with an elephant, and up to now we have gotten along, but if we can go by his words so far, I would say that Donald Trump will soon be sending us a message. Let us hope the elephant doesn’t turn over.
                                                  -end-

The ancient computer mavens (Nov 2)

DIARY

Toxic waste and Donald Trump…same thing?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I continue to be amazed that a lot of older people are becoming computer nerds. Considering the amount of time it took me – and I was only 46 when I got my first computer – the old fogeys nowadays are learning the concept in a (pacemaker) heartbeat.

            Flug’s parents, Leroy and Alvira, are visiting with him for a week or so and Flug, NOT a computer nerd, is having quite a time with them. He does have a computer, with a high-speed Internet connection, but his main accomplishment so far has been to send a weekly (weakly?) email letter to Leroy and Alvira who live in Mississauga when they are not travelling through Greece, Iran, Austria or Tasmania – “one a them places” Flug says.

            Almost at the other end of the chronological scale, I notice now that those who run our educational system are now saying that kids should start learning mathematical concepts and stuff like that when they are “pre-K” or before they start kindergarten. We’re talking about children three and four years old. I recall the time when these same educators were saying that  kindergarten kids shouldn’t even be asked to memorize the alphabet or the ‘times table’ because that would affect their learning ability when they start grade one.

            I expect one of these days there will be a pronouncement that babies in the womb will now be expected to do some computer programming.

            Still more or less on the same subject – education – I heard from someone last week, possibly from that bastion of knowledge, Facebook, that it won’t be long before people my age, having learned cursive writing as kids, will use that as a code. After all, many if not most of today’s students do not learn cursive writing - we used to call it handwriting – therefore a decade from now students won’t even be able to understand handwriting. We old fogeys can write what we want free of prying eyes.

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

            We all hate the idea of toxic waste and nasty stuff like that, but it could be that some people get a little overzealous, if that’s not actually an oxymoron. My neighbour Carfoure who lives about two kilometres away from here, to the west, is sitting in a cell right now because he burned an old piece of clapboard that had some lead-based paint on it. His neighbour, whom we call Old Slite of Hand, as opposed to Old Sleight of Hand because he can’t spell, reported him to either the SPCA or the environment department (both with more power than they should have) that Carfoure had a bonfire in his field and was burning a piece of clapboard from a pile that he had taken off his house and replaced with vinyl – so much more environmentally friendly.

The neighbour, whom we can also call Venom, knew that there was lead-based paint on the clapboard and called the police. Soon a S.W.A.T. team arrived and hauled Carfoure away. His execution was set for Tuesday, but I heard he had hired Dennis Oland’s lawyers. His brother hired the same firm in 1999 after he shot three people and a moose. He was acquitted of shooting the people but got 20 years hard labour (no Internet) for the moose.

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

A woman on CTV news about fifteen minutes ago was talking about the way people in Ancaster, Ontario, were dealing with a local problem. She said she had ‘referenced’ a newspaper article on the subject and wanted to find out if and how the problem she was describing would ‘impact’ the local people.

I am not sure when the English language became so corrupted with garbage, but I suspect we owe a lot of it to the Americans. I don’t know exactly why I came to that conclusion, but I think the worst of it began at the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s; John Wesley Dean III used this phrase during one of the Congressional hearings: “…at this particular moment in time…”.

Of course he meant ‘now’, but that didn’t stop millions from doing it the way he did. After all, he was tearing down Richard Nixon who, ironically, is now judged to be one of the best ‘foreign policy presidents’ in the last century. Domestic policy? Not so much.

And that brings us to the event that will take place in the good old U.S.A. on November 8^th – their elections, including the big one for the job of president.

In all my years of following politics in dozens of countries, I have never seen anyone who has tried to take over a country’s top job without a particle of knowledge about what makes that country run. If (and I hope ‘when’) Donald Trump loses, I surely hope he accepts defeat and doesn’t send his followers out onto the streets, but I’m not confident.
                                                                          -end-

My first haircut since 1972 (Oct 26)

DIARY

And they say New Brunswickers are daft?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I am probably not the only person to ever say: “Truth is stranger than fiction”. It hurts me that I didn’t think of that first, but that’s the way it goes.

            Sure, Einstein was the first to think of the General Theory of Relativity, but we can’t all be Einsteins. In fact, none of us can be Einsteins.

            What I’m getting at is a news story out of Ernfold, Saskatchewan, Burdock Capital of Canada and home of famous hockey player Gordie Hull. Gordie, getting a bit bored with retirement from the SHL where adoring crowds cheered him on most nights,  asked his wife Sadie what he could invent to get back in the limelight.

            “Invent washing the dishes for a change!” she roared at Gordie, whose selective hearing didn’t pick that up. Later in the (one-sided) conversation, she said he should do something with his music. He had taken piano lessons for almost six months when he was  nine.

            Gordie pondered and he thought and he ruminated, much like other ruminants (cows and the like, chewing their cuds) in the fields and finally he came up with an idea. That night, down at a bar not unlike the watering hole Flug and I frequent, he gathered together a whole whack of his cronies, bought them each a beer so they wouldn’t make fun of him, and made his pitch.

            “Every pickup truck’s horn has a horn with slightly different pitch than everybody else’s. How about if we create a car horn symphony?”

            It took some more talking and a whole lot more lemonade, but he finally persuaded ‘the boys’ to give it a try. For the next week there was Gordie going around Ernfold with an electronic tuner to find out the pitch of each vehicle horn. Using the same method, except pink gin this time instead of lemonade, he persuaded the ladies to go along with his weird scheme and finally he had 34 vehicles lined up in the driveway of the Ernfold Church of Enlightenment. It was a Saturday night. Hundreds of people, including reporters and camera men and women from Sask TV, were ready.

            And so the universe unfolded, with all those musicians, under the direction of famous retired hockey player Gordie Hull. They played two selections from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and one from Don Messer’s ‘Victoria County Suite’.

It was a huge success. I don’t have to tell you that the whole musical scene was picked up by CBC’s ‘The National’ with Peter Mansbridge and Wendy Mesley describing it in detail. I heard that Wendy wanted to come out and see for herself, but CBC’s vice-president, speaking from Florida where he was on a fact-finding tour, said no.

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

            I was just recalling that when I was growing up in Tilley in the 1950s and 1960s I dreamed of travelling to far-off places like Edmundston and even Montreal, and I later did, but it was pretty much all in Canada, except for a 2-week stay with friends in Columbus, Indiana back in 1970.

            The reason I was reminiscing was that I just received a text message from my travelling younger daughter who is at present in Singapore. Singapore? Where’s that?

            Before that, she and her husband had stayed a week in Hong Kong which was pretty much a good experience. My son-in-law and my daughter discovered an area of Mong Kok, Kowloon that was called Sneaker Street. The whole street sold nothing but sneakers, running shoes – whatever you want to call them. He bought a pair of Nike trainers at a good price.

            To recap, there I was thinking about growing up in Tilley and considering that  Edmundston was quite a journey, and there are my daughter and son-in-law buying shoes in China.

            Speaking of that, my daughter found when she was in Hong Kong that an acquaintance from Upper Kent was working in a city called Shenzhen that was only 17 kilometres away from Hong Kong. However, getting there would have been a problem because it is located in ‘the real China’ as someone called it. It needed visas to get there and they would have taken days to get.

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

            Up to the time of this writing, we have been having a wonderful fall here, referring to the weather. I know, Old Man Winter will soon be here – and may already have arrived by the time this column is printed – and is ‘just around the corner’ as they say so I decided to celebrate.

            No parties for me, I decided to go to a hairdresser and get the old mane trimmed. I had been cutting my own hair since the summer of 1972 when my Vancouver barber made a mess of my hair for the second time in a row (Get me to tell you THAT story some time!) and I bought a pair of scissors.
                                               -end-

Those foot racers are fanatics (Oct. 19)

DIARY

I have finally cleaned my office

            by Robert LaFrance

            Some expressions are beyond the pale, as it were, but some are right on the mark.

 Try driving sometime when my friend Flug is behind the wheel. “He (or she) is driving me crazy!” I have heard people say, but last week, because of a foot injury, I had to ask Flug to drive me to the grocery store. Next time, I take a taxi, or even a limousine service, even though the nearest one is 132 kilometres away.

            I didn’t mind Flug’s backing out of his driveway without looking behind – I assumed he had a backup camera – but going through stop signs without slowing down rather unnerved me. Especially when there was a dog (Greyhound bus) coming at speed. We survived though.

            It was only later that I realized that his 1989 Gremlin didn’t have a backup camera unless someone had duct taped it to the rear bumper.

            It was a harrowing trip, but we returned in one piece, or rather three pieces, but that was what we had started with – Flug, me and the Gremlin. Groceries aren’t worth it. I resolved to dust off my hitch-hiking thumb if the need arose again.

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

            Some of the news stories I am asked to cover for the Victoria Star turn out to be rather brutal. The Dam Run (http://www.runnb.ca/) that took place Saturday, Oct. 8 in Perth-Andover, was one such event.

            There I was, lemonade belly hanging out over my belt, and looking at this gaggle of athletes, real athletes who surely would race Flug’s Gremlin from Perth-Andover to Plaster Rock to Grand Falls to St. Leonard. One guy said he had run 150 kilometres since Wednesday and looked as if a cheetah would fall back in embarrassment if they were competing in a 1000 kilometre foot race.

            A woman from the Jemseg area took off running an hour before the actual 10k race and came back half an hour later, saying she had run to St. Andre just to warm up for the Dam Run. As I was getting ready to take photos of the 10k race, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the River Valley Civic Centre’s front window. Then I looked at all those finely tuned athletes champing at the bit and decided to lose some weight. Tomorrow without fail I will cut down to six bottles of lemonade a day.

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

            Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Facebook. Indeed, if there weren’t, the company running that shebang had better fold up its tents and head for Minto. Facebook is nothing but conversation.

            Yesterday evening I happened to be perusing a few Facebook posts when I saw one from my Aunt Tillie. She’s 98, and got her first computer two years ago.

            And what a brute it is! I mean the computer, not Aunt Tillie. (I’m still in hopes of a hefty inheritance. She bought 1000 shares of Microsoft in 1991 and is now worth somewhat in the vicinity of the gross national product of Algeria.) She told her computer consultant, Harry, who sells used cars, to get her one that “won’t go wimpy on me when I’m trying to get on the %$#@*&$% Interweb”.

            Harry did that all right. The CEO of IBM was by last week to take a look at it. Apparently it has a zillion gigabytes of RAM – random access memory to you non-nerds – and a hard drive that a Sherpa would have a hard time lugging around. The keyboard, made personally by Bill and Melinda Gates for Stephen Hawking who found it too high-tech, is one that runs by speech recognition. If Aunt Tillie is in the garden and feels like insulting Donald Trump (not possible, but she tries) she just says it out loud and the Donald feels a pin sticking into his comb-over.

            Back to Facebook, Aunt Tillie said this morning on FB that she felt a little “unsettled” by all this talk about New Brunswick’s having an aging population and got a lot of responses, one from the prime minister. “Sunny days, Aunt Tillie,” he wrote. “Just because of your concerns, I have set aside an extra $5 billion (with a ‘b’) for your province’s health care system. Anything else you need?”

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

            This morning, first thing, my wife poked her head (as the phrase goes) into my office and pronounced it “the messiest room in the western hemisphere”.

            Of course I was chagrined and nonplussed but, peering between boxes and files, I couldn’t help but agree. I resolved to smarten up and although that resolution didn’t go very far generally, I did decide to clean up this miasma.

            “You can do it, Bob,” said She Who Must Be Obeyed. “After all, London, England cleaned up their air pollution and the sewer that was the Thames River in the 1950s, and Stickney, just below Florenceville, used to be the smokiest place east of Flin Flon, Manitoba and Trail, BC. You can do it,” she repeated.

            And so I did. I am looking at you now from my desk, which is visible from several metres away.  

Building a better fridge (Oct. 12 column)

DIARY

The secret of canoeing and kayaking

            by Robert LaFrance

            I do a lot of thinking, always with the hope that I will come up with a plan that works. The good results of doing all this pondering range from ‘seldom’ to ‘rare’ to possibly ‘go on home’ but I keep trying anyway.

            One thought I had recently was: “Why can’t I design a better fridge than the ones most of us have already?” Surely I can do better than that, I told myself. When I look for jelly, it is ALWAYS at the back of the shelf because I haven’t eaten jelly for two days. When I (and you, don’t deny it!) put something in the fridge, it goes to the front and so on.

            The milk is on the top shelf, left hand side, and it’s the only food item that can be easily seen in that miasma I call our old Maytag. At any given time the top shelf could hold applesauce, leftovers, car parts or non-food items such as my Aunt Maudy’s oatmeal cookies.

            Here’s my idea: Insulting as the phrase is to my Aunt Susie, I suggest that an entire fridge could be a Lazy Susan, with circular shelves one could just spin to find the celery or…oatmeal cookies if one were inclined that way.

            Of course the fridge itself would have to be cylindrical, otherwise there would be a lot of wasted space. Then of course there would be wasted space around the fridge, so…

            Forget it. It’s too complicated. Now, where is that maple syrup?

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

            To paraphrase the late George Carlin, when a columnist finds himself talking about bodily functions, there are some subjects he’s missed, but I’m going to do it anyway.

            I am often impressed by the number, the large number, of euphemisms for things we must do every day. So-and-so has to be excused so he can go and do “number one” and heaven forfend (as the old phrase goes) if he misjudges and it turns out to be “number two” before he gets there. My late Aunt Ella used to say: “I have to go see a man about a horse”. Up in Tilley, if one had ‘the runs’ we called it “the nine flying axe-handles”. No idea where that came from.

That’s enough of that.

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

            My apple orchard is producing many thousands of Novamacs, Libertys and Nova Easy Grows and the bears are happy.

            This might have a bit to do with an item I wrote previously, but I find the bears are getting a little too enthusiastic with their No. 2 production. I have to walk very gingerly around the trees because the bears leave their ‘sign’ (as father used to say) all over the place. “Two big men couldn’t shake hands over that pile,” Flug said as we walked (gingerly) through the orchard where my neighbour Rick had just cleared a big area with his ‘bush hog’.

            He went on to say that his nephew Calvin in western Saskatchewan had phoned him the night before. Calvin’s area of that province had just had an earthquake that measured 6.1 on the Richter Scale and Calvin was happy, Flug said.

            “Yeah, you know how lazy Calvin is, don’t you?” I said I did (lazier than a cut cat) but what does that have to do with Calvin’s orchard?

            “The earthquake shook almost every apple off Calvin’s trees,” Flug explained. “Now he doesn’t have to hire apple pickers.”

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

            More thoughts and observations, some of them even useful:

            A warning to those whose lawns are on hilly ground and who, at the age of 68, buy a riding lawn mower for the first time – only mow UP AND DOWN, not across the hill. I wasn’t killed, but should have been. Those seats are slippery.

            I keep hearing that a certain YouTube video has ‘gone viral’. What does that mean? Along the same line, people say a certain Twitter subject is ‘trending’. It seems to me that the definitions of these words are exactly what the speaker wants them to mean, nothing more nor less. Reminds me of the George Orwell novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Big Brother, who invented his language called Newspeak.

            I’m adding two more thoughts to the Rules of Life Dictionary I am working on. (1) Raspberries are at their very best tasting when they are so ripe that two thirds of them fall off the bush before you can pick them, and (2) If you are alone in the house and sit on the flush, the phone will ring. (I can’t seem to stay out of the bathroom today.)

            There is one huge drawback about canoeing or kayaking and the world’s scientists have yet to come up with a solution. When you kayak downriver, you have to somehow get your craft back up to where you started. My solution? Start well upriver from where you want to START, ride down to your starting point, and go home from there. See, the people who say I’m stupid are very wrong indeed.

                                                       -end-

Yellow letters on a sign - wrong! (Oct 5)

DIARY

The ‘ancient right’ to drive

            by Robert LaFrance

            Every year at this time I observe an anniversary and send a sympathy card to the residents of Alert, Nunavut. I know you’re sick and tired of my talking about it, but I’m old, so indulge me please.

When I lived up there in 1974-5 for 54 consecutive weeks it was in Northwest Territories. Somewhere along the line the government moved that armed forces base and weather station into Nunavut. They must have floated it down the Davis Strait.

The anniversary to which I refer occurs every year on October 9^th or thereabouts, not to be too accurate. The sun goes down for the winter and is not seen again until March 4 – or thereabouts.

On October 9, 1974, after I had been stationed at Alert for five months, all of us weather guys (there were no women stationed at Alert in those days) poured glasses of champagne, otherwise known as Labbatt’s Blue beer, and went outside to pay tribute to that departing sun, as it rose and set in about ten minutes, just the top edge, and we went back inside to watch reruns of the detective show ‘Cannon’. The weather service used to send videotapes of these and other action shows (Mannix, Baretta, etc.) to us. They arrived every Thursday morning in an armed forces C-130 Hercules.

So there we were, sitting in the lounge and thinking about the next five months without the sun. Looking at each other, I’m sure we were all thinking: “This crowd is no replacement for the sun.”

We made it though, but some of us had to cheat to do it. In January, when it was in the –45ºF range outside all day (I mean night) the armed forces C-130s began their fuel run from Thule, Greenland, and for a week the Hercules flew back and forth bringing in fuel oil for us and the army base. Midway through that week I asked one of the pilots if I could tag along on one run and he said sure.

The next afternoon I was in the big turboprop plane and surrounded by black rubber bladders that would be filled with oil in Greenland. “Brace yourself for this, Bob,” the co-pilot said, just before takeoff. In a few minutes we were airborne and pointed toward the north pole, 450 nautical miles away, but of course we would turn back south soon. When we got up a few thousand feet there it was, the best treat of the winter.

Here comes the sun. Hello, old friend.

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

            Staying with the colour yellow and now back in Victoria County, NB, yesterday I was driving along uptown and when I saw a sign at the end of a street. At the top it said “Yard Sale” in fairly large black letters. Underneath those words was…nothing.

            As I got closer, I could see that there had been some kind of attempt to relay information to the drivers going by, but it was a stretch. As I got closer I saw that the letters were yellow and therefore unreadable. Why do people put yellow lettering on a sign they want other people to read? I may be wrong, but if I were putting out a sign like that, I would almost certainly step back fifty feet, a hundred feet, or even more to see if the message was getting out. Yellow’s okay for the sun but not for signs.

            On the subject of Ireland, I know someone, a resident of the very house in which I live, who just got back from a week and a half from Dublin and points east, west, south and north. She took some photos.

            When I say she took some photos, I mean SHE TOOK SOME PHOTOS with her digital camera. A total of 292. Of course it’s my job as a professional photographer to edit and crop these photos – try to make sense of the ones that make no sense. Most are good photos (I have to live here after all) but a few of them border on the bizarre. I thought Mackenzie King and W. B. Yeats were dead, but there they are, reflected on the window of a Tim Hortons in Donegal, Ireland.

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

            Reading a book entitled ‘English History 1914-1945’ I was interested to find out, on page 302, that that in 1920 there were 200,000 motor vehicles registered in that country and that driving tests weren’t compulsory until 1934. Even so, people who had been driving for a long time did so under what was called an ‘ancient right’ and didn’t have to take a test.

            It all reminded me of a story my late Aunt Ella told me in the 1980s. She was standing near Jimmy Stewart’s furniture story in Perth where a police officer, who had been following an old lady, stopped and asked for her driver’s licence. She replied: “Young man, I’ve been driving since 1928 and never heard of such a thing!”
                                                -end-

The Perfessor wet his pants (Sept 28)

DIARY

A major problem, all red and white

            by Robert LaFrance

            In my travels over the past months and years, I have come across things that have no explanation, like the sale of Canadian flags.

            I usually buy one or two a year because the wind up here on this mountain tends to rip them apart and the sun seems to enjoy fading them, so last week I found myself in a small store in Grand Falls.

            “We sent them all back early this month,” the clerk said, without any explanation. “People keep asking for them, but we don’t have them in the store after the middle of September.”

            Let’s go back and talk about the word ‘merchandizing’ or even ‘selling’. I always thought that those who have businesses should “give the people what they want” so if “people keep asking for them” wouldn’t it make sense to get some in?

            Long story short(er), two days later I found myself in a dollar store in Florenceville where there were a couple of dozen Canadian flags of various sizes. Apparently that store knew about merchandizing.

            Another thing that baffles me: why do people leave their vehicles running when they stop somewhere for five or ten minutes? I understand about air conditioners in the summer and I understand about big diesel trucks and the reasons those vehicles are left running, but what about Claude in his pickup with the “Drink Hardy” decals on the side? Does he think it will seize up if he turns it off?

            People are STILL being picky about the calendar date when the 21^st century started and some people are still mentioning the well-known fact that each of us has only one birthday. Technically of course, our new century started Jan. 1, 2001 but it would have been like getting Christmas presents in February if we had waited that extra year. And should we all say to our cousin Phillip: “Happy Anniversary of your 60^th birthday”? I think not. Happy birthday, Phillip.

            Here is a request to the thousands of people who phone here when I’m away and leave completely unintelligible messages: slow down and speak clearly. Last evening I arrived home to find the phone flashing a signal. The message was: “This is xmxmmmmsd talking from Plindter Rooof. Can you be at drwlqq at cttr o’clock tomorrow morning? Call me back and let me know would you? 2dd-9sx9.”

            Yeah, I’ll be there for sure, but first I have to stakfffjw.

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

            Flug’s nephew Andre LeBlanc from just outside Nitchequon, Quebec, was visiting his old uncle last week and got to talking about the days when he was an active member of the FLQ (Front de Liberation de Quebec). “I used to laugh at the English guys at the weather station where I worked, when they would try to do nice things for us separatists. I called it French-mending,” he said, and added that one guy named Henderson actually had a hand in organizing the Quebec government’s hated (by the Anglophones) Bill 101 that has provided a lot of entertainment over the years.

            Flug has gone fishing about 2,000 times in his life and always followed the letter of the law. During all that time he never saw a forest ranger – or any other kind of ranger, lone or otherwise – while he was fishing. This year he thought September 16 was September 15 and went looking for the elusive and savage brook trout. Guess what? He’ll get out sometime in November, about the same time as an axe murderer who has served more than three months of his 20-year sentence. Flug asked the judge for “one a them  concurrent sentences” but that was a no-fly zone.

            Speaking of fishing, one day in July I was fishing with the Perfessor when he stepped behind a tree to perform #1. When he came out the whole front of his pants was  wet. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said sheepishly. I still haven’t found out what it was if it wasn’t what it looked like.

            From my list of strange expressions we use: “I am going to fill the car with gas.” If we think about that at all, we can only hope and pray that we are not about to fill the CAR with gas. Although I remember the time that Willie Dredge, who used to pump gas for Rusty Matheson in Andover, lost his focus when filling the judge’s Lincoln and poured a few gallons onto and into the back seat where the judge had a quarter of a deer he had just shot in Carlingford.

            Many people in the U.S. and Canada, especially in Victoria and southern Madawaska Counties in New Brunswick, hope Trump doesn’t get elected president of the great republic. If he does, Russia’s Putin will likely nuke all U.S. Air Force bases first thing. I hope he has his books up to date about Loring AFB, near Caribou, Maine. It closed in the 1990s.

                                               -end-

The Prints of Whales? (Sept 21)

DIARY

There are more Rules of Life – for sure

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Last week’s column listed several Rules of Life and I was thinking of adding another ten or so this week, but if they are Rules of Life they are going to happen to us whatever we do, so why bother?

Just one this week though – Rule of Life # 248: You’re driving to town to pick up bibles or something and it starts to rain. Your wipers do a good job of clearing the windshield except for one spot – directly in front of the driver. It’s always in that one place. If you bought $99 wipers it would be the same. Keep your money.

            Still on the subject of vehicle windshields and other windows, I have noticed the unintended consequences of vehicles having dark windows; everybody seems to have them now. The result is that people think that New Brunswickers are VERY friendly people. “Whenever I passed anybody they smiled and waved,” wrote a certain Toronto Globe and Mail columnist in last Wednesday’s edition.

            I have news for him: I, and I think most people, wave to other drivers because we can’t tell who they are and we don’t want to take a chance. There are too many nut cases around these days. Somebody with an ISIS-Mafia complex could start blasting away with a Kalashnikov.

            Last Wednesday I was in Grand Falls and stopped at Wal-Mart to buy some rechargeable batteries. Getting out of the car, I carefully locked the doors because I had two Nikon cameras on the front seat. When I came back out and got in the car, I saw that I had left both front windows rolled down. Either Wal-Mart customers are very honest or have bad vision because the cameras were still there when I returned.

            Listening to a radio report from the Rio Olympics, I heard a CBC announcer’s interview with a Canadian swimmer who said he wanted “to concentrate on the performance and not the result”. It took quite a bit of thinking for me to realize what that  meant – nothing.

            I have often said that life is far too complicated these days. Last year we bought two heat pumps and ever since then we’ve been getting hot water out of our cold water taps or vice versa. I am sure that makes sense, doesn’t it? I (vaguely) remember when we bought the pumps; the guy explained that in the winter they got heat from the ground (which would be frozen at the time) but in the summer they would take moisture from the air to cool off the house.

Let’s stop right there. I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m talking about. It reminds me of the medieval guy from what is now Iraq. He said he didn’t trust his brother any more because one day he saw him blowing on his soup to cool it and then, outside, blowing on his hands to warm them. “Anybody who can blow hot and blow cold out of the same mouth can’t be trusted,” he said.

            We hear a lot about the problem of mould (or mold if you prefer) in our houses. We have dehumidifiers running all summer so we don’t get a drop of water leaking out in our basements and causing mould, but look over there at Italy. Check out the city of Venice, whose skirts are under water 24/7. Did you ever hear that Venice has a mould problem? No, just gondolas running into each other.

            More language problems: If we say the Prince of Wales, how do people know we aren’t saying the Prints of Wales, or the Prints of Whales? And where does Wales come into things anyway? Have you seen Prince Charles there – or anywhere else – lately? Is he ever keeping a low profile.

            In the past 68 years or so, I have often criticized NB Power in this column, but this time I want to praise the company. About ten days ago the power went off here for about ten seconds – just enough for me to lose part of a column I was writing – and I was annoyed. Six hours later it went off again. I waited twenty minutes to call in a report. I was telling the call centre guy about the outage (and outrage) when the power came back on. “We’re really quite efficient, aren’t we?” he said. “You didn’t even get a chance to finish your report.” I hate a wise guy, especially when I see him in the mirror after being a victim of one-upmanship.

            I will leave you, my faithful and long-suffering readers with a question: Why, in a province that sees more than its share of snow, do so many people buy white vehicles?
                                                    -end-