Two dogs on lap - distracted driving? (Jan 20)

DIARY

Going down to Computer Prison

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I came into the living room yesterday afternoon and a humidifier was running, pushing out steam and attitude, and a few minutes later I went down to the basement where a dehumidifier was taking it all back in. Isn’t that the way things go these days? We get a significant snowstorm, rain takes most of it off, and the house is cold until we get another storm that banks it all up nicely until the next rain.

            Everyone owns a digital camera these days, or so I think until I want someone to take a photo for me. Then it’s: “Camera? What? No, I don’t know anyone with one, but I have a smartphone.” The word ‘camera’ is a latin word that originally meant bedroom or some dark place, like Stephen Harper’s heart, or what passes for one. The word is amazing for all the jobs that it can do. If a meeting is ‘in camera’ that means just the opposite of what it looks like; it means ‘in secret’. If you’re ‘on camera’ better be careful of what you say. Video cameras have caught people shooting other people even though the first people lies about it later. Now I’ll go ‘off camera’ and have lunch.

            I may have mentioned this before Christmas, but I want to say I really like fruitcake. At this point someone is saying to himself: “Anybody who likes fruitcake IS a fruitcake!” I don’t know where one particular food found so many enemies; it’s as if liver were combined with broccoli to make a modern taste bomb. However, my darling wife makes fruitcake from her late Aunt Ruby’s recipe and it is delicious. Don’t tell her that.

            Every once in a while I think: “Canadians sure are weird, huh?” The recent federal election campaign saw a host of ‘ex-pats’ (who hadn’t been to this country since they received their high school diplomas here) suddenly decide they wanted to vote in Canada. Actor Donald Sutherland, in several interviews, said he should have the right to vote here because he was born here and grew up here. He hasn’t lived in Canada since 1957, yet he was adamant that he should be allowed to vote here. Weird.

            In late October, China, meaning the Chinese Communist Party, changed their 35-year policy of ‘only one child per family’ and decided that two would now be allowed. Did I just say that Canadians were weird? Some genius in the government back then thought it would be a good idea to have these little princes (girl babies were not wanted) going around the country and reminding everyone that they were special. Now this same generation is screwing up the world’s stock markets, just to show they’re no smarter than the previous folks.

            ‘Distracted driving’ has caused and will cause a lot of accidents. Equipment like Bluetooth let drivers have their hands free when they talk on their cellphones or smartphones, but texting is another matter. Not being a total idiot, I don’t text or read texts while I’m driving, but the car we bought a few years ago has a feature that’s almost the same thing. If I receive a text message and the car radio is on, I only have to push a button and hear the text message. Still on the subject of distracted driving, I was nonplussed yesterday to see a female driver go by with TWO small dogs on her lap, scratching at the car window, etc. I’m not even sure that’s illegal but it sure is distracted driving.

            My friend Elroy’s marriage could be falling apart before the very eyes of the Scotch Colony. Although he and his wife Janette attend the same church, like the same sorts of movies, enjoy the same music, there is a serious problem. He likes the varieties of apples that hold their shape when cooked in a pie, and she likes them to become soft, even mushy. All of their neighbours are getting together, forming a support group, and trying to do what they can. It is an important issue.

            I’m not sure whether I have mentioned this in my column, but if I did here it is again. My Aunt Glenda got a computer for Christmas and has been having a wonderful time collecting spam, phish, malware and whatever else she can find. My brother and I call her Auntie Virus. It is quite a phenomenon these days that people who don’t know the first 500 things about how to run a computer are often the ones who use them most. A former editor of this paper used to say that people like that should go to Computer Prison.
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Please, no more 'torrential rains' (Jan 13)

DIARY

Scrambling fighter jets back in 1974

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Before I begin writing this column, I must get out my notebook and write “buy Christmas present for my wife”. Boy, am I in trouble!

            That done, I am back to chronicling the events that have recently taken place in Victoria County, New Brunswick, and its suburbs as far west as the Pacific Ocean.

            “Coffee is an anti-oxidant,” trumpeted a Facebook post by some medical laboratory supposedly connected to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. This little statement was supposed to make us all go out and buy more coffee because it’s so blasted good for us. It cures everything from trench mouth to the piles, and perhaps heel spurs and scrabrous elbow.

            I don’t suppose this announcement has anything to do with selling coffee? No, that would be too cynical, even for a journalist, to suggest. Would it surprise anyone if they found that the laboratory or laboratories were financed by a company like Tim Horton’s? I am sure that’s not the case, but just suppose.

            Where would it go from there? The Quebec Asbestos Corporation could bankroll a ‘scientific’ study that proved asbestos sprinkled on Shreddies improves one’s sex life, or General Motors could break the news that a Chevvy gives off an aura that heals broken bones.

            Okay, let’s get back to reality: If coffee were an anti-oxidant, then doesn’t it follow that those billions of cups consumed every year in Canada and the U.S.A. would result in perfect health for us all?

And now that I’ve demolished that myth, I have to go up to the grocery store and buy some olives. They’re supposed to cure the common cold which I’m about to get since we have recently had house guests who were carried that particular virus.

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            Speaking of news stories, three days ago I rented a truck to take some new phrases to various media, including television, radio, magazines, electronic media and newspapers.

            In the words of the great writer of children’s books Beatrix Potter, “I think I shall go distracted” if I ever again hear the phrase “torrential rains”. Come on guys and gals, there must be some other way you can describe, well, torrential rains. How about a ‘non-trickle’? An inundation? An outpouring? Helluva shower? A monsoon?

            I know that technically the word ‘monsoon’ means ‘wind’ but I would use that anyway, because the wind associated with a monsoon is not what drowns people. The wind is the Smart Car that hauls the rain-filled tractor-trailer behind it.

            “The death toll is expected to rise.” Every time there is a widespread disaster (earthquake in rural Turkey, flood in Bangladesh, torrential rains in Texas, a price rise in Canadian beef) the news broadcasters ALWAYS say: “The death toll is expected to rise.”

            No kidding. I’ve been looking over news reports from as far back as 2015 and it’s true, they always say: “The death toll is expected to rise.” One of these days, shortly after the news headline, “Man bites dog” there will be this one: “Earthquake in Armenia kills 2130, but death toll is rapidly decreasing because of new miracle drug.”

            And speaking of new miracle drugs, probably once a month we hear of yet another cure for cancer, heart disease, a sore knee, or incompetence and after the reporter tells us what the drug can cure, he or she asks the spokesman for the laboratory how long before patients can be treated with this?

            “Clinical tests will begin within the next decade.”

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            A lot of people I’ve spoken to said they were astonished at the verdict in the Dennis Oland trial and I must say I’m among them. Perhaps that verdict is an ‘unintended consequence’ of his coming from a rich family and therefore deserving punishment.

That’s the way the ‘justice’ system works though. There are always ‘unintended consequences’ of every action. I suppose a lot of people are asking that Saint John police officers now have watching ‘CSI’ as a mandatory part of their training.

            Who knows what persuaded the jury to vote ‘guilty’? Maybe they thought he was rich and privileged or they didn’t like his attorneys’ suits.

            Another example of ‘unintended consequences’ was the recent shooting down of a Russian jet fighter. Vladimar Putin banned all tourist travel from Russia to Turkey and cost the latter billions of Turkish lira. Why couldn’t the Turks just make a big noise at the UN about violations of their air space and let it go?

            It reminds of the day in 1974 when one of my colleagues at the weather station of Alert, NWT, gave permission to land to the pilot of a Danish Air Force plane. Whew! Canadian fighter jets were scrambled from as far away as Victoria, BC, and my fellow radio operator was in deep doo-doo. We didn’t see any tourists at Alert for months, same as the previous months.

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Star Wars madness...or is it just crazy? (Jan. 6)

DIARY

A big blaze on the River St. John

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            So the Christmas-New Years holiday season is over for another year. When I went uptown yesterday morning I saw an enormous smoke and assumed people were burning Christmas trees, but then I remembered the village had banned the practice.

So was it a building or a gaggle of car tires?

            It was a humongous pile of credit cards. I had driven across the bridge to Aroostook Road where there was a path down to the ice. The credit cards were blazing away as Perth-Andover firefighters with backpacks watched.

            “What is going on, other than the obvious?” I asked one of the firefighters.

            “Spontaneous combustion,” he said. “Husbands brought their credit cards here after Christmas because they kept catching fire in their wallets. That gets a little uncomfortable you know.”

            After talking to a few other husbands, I had the full story. As a trained journalist, I merely had to find the answers to five questions – who, what, where, why, and how. And perhaps a sixth: “What the hell is going on?”

            What was going on was the rotten underside of the capitalist system: Christmas and its aftermath. I talked to husbands who had bought their wives necklaces and rings, fur coats and cosmetics costing thousands and which put the family in debt until next November. All because of some nice TV commercials that said: “Hey, dude, if you love your wife, buy this totally useless piece of beautiful junk.”

            I talked to this one and that one and the prevailing message was: ‘I just paid thousands of dollars of which 95% was for useless garbage but I was desperate; I felt I was forced to.’

            And that was why a credit card bonfire was such a good idea. Everybody still has to pay off his debt, but the sight of the real criminal going up in flame was so-o-o restful. Next step: television itself.

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

            Some other observations: Flug, who is trying to be a sports fan, was talking about the good old days of hockey when Mark Messiah was a great player for the New York Rangers. I told him I thought the star’s surname was Messier, but then he said maybe he was wrong and then insisted the player was Lionel Messi. I said no, Messi was and is a soccer player for Barcelona. I didn’t even dare to mention The Flower (Guy Lafleur).

            Flug, always the romantic, hired a skywriter (small plane writing in the sky) to write the words “Flug loves Joanne” in the sky over by the Mars Hill windmills so his new bride would be impressed, but two factors intruded: the pilot couldn’t spell, and the wind was blowing a little too hard. What we all saw up there was “F-gloves Jonnn” to which we each made our own translation. Joanne’s reaction was not recorded.

            I happened to be in Fredericton on December 21^st, the day the latest “Star Wars”  movie came to the theatre in the Regent Mall. You know, there are times when I do the dumbest things ever recorded, but I have not stood in line to watch a movie since 1972 when “Reefer Madness” came to Vancouver where I was living at the time. A reefer is of course a marijuana cigarette and madness is, well, madness. It was hard to see the screen for the smoke.

But back to Dec. 21, 2015: There were at least 200 persons standing there waiting for the next empty seats at ‘Star Wars’. I went into the store Chapters across the hall and read about 25 pages of ‘Huckleberry Finn’. This took half an hour, and when I came out of Chapters, the same people were standing in the same places. Some folks need a hobby, I said to myself.

            The parking lot outside (which is a good spot for it) was packed solid. An anorexic aardvark couldn’t have found a place to rest his bones. My son had wanted to go to the mall and buy a few things, and we had to park in Gagetown. For those who don’t know how far Regent Street, Fredericton, is from Gagetown, take my word for it: you don’t want to be carrying no big suitcase.

            Because it was the pre-Christmas season (see credit card comments above), the streets were packed, stores were packed, the sidewalks were packed, but because it was only the 21^st, few husbands had ventured out yet. I almost did some Christmas shopping myself, but remembered I was a husband and couldn’t legally shop until the 24^th.

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