DIARY
What
happened to the 13th floor and Windows 9?
by
Robert LaFrance
My friend Flug came over for a visit
yesterday afternoon and while he was here his friend Gwen Hickman drove by, saw
him standing there talking to me, and stopped. “That’s Gwen,” he said, just
before she got out of her car. “I told her how funny your column is so she
should buy the paper and read it.”
Gwen, a formidable looking woman of
about 55, made her way up my driveway. “Are you Robert LaFrance?” she asked.
When I admitted I was, she said: “I thought you would be funnier. Flug said you
were funny. You’re not funny.”
I was gobsmacked and flabbergasted
at her rudeness and also by her accuracy. You could even say I was amazed,
dumbstruck, bamboozled, astonished, shocked, agape, and bowled over. Why this
person felt she had to stop and tell me this, I had no idea. Five minutes
later, after a few more gratuitous and egregious comments that did not endear
her to me any more than I already was, she jumped into her Gremlin and sped off
back toward Presque Isle, Maine. I had not uttered a word.
It reminded me of the evening back
about 1998 when the Wednesday Evening Fiddlers (I was a member at the time)
journeyed to a Mars Hill, Maine, nursing home to play – free – for the
residents. We had played a few tunes when an old lady emerged from the
audience, walked up to our leader, Garold Hanscom, and said: “We had a group
here last week that was a lot better than you are.” Satisfied that she had
gotten her message across (it was quite audible across the room), she went back
to her chair.
Garold handled it with a lot more
aplomb than I would have. He just smiled and called for us to play another
tune. I believe it was “Wishing for a hand grenade!” or something like that.
**************************
I have been trying to decide whether
long words should be banned from the English language and those who use them
executed, or long words should be praised for their stamina. After all, words
like triskaidekaphobia add a certain something when one uses
them in public. The usual reaction from others is: “What a pretentious horse’s
aspect!”
As we all know, that
jaw-dropping word means ‘fear of the number 13’; I’ve always marvelled at the
fact that it has 17 letters, but I suppose that does make sense.
And then there’s a
word that Winston Churchill (who knew a thing or two about words) used often – paraprosdokians. It refers
to a sentence that starts out sensible and falls into a funny ditch. One
example I found was uttered by the late actor-comedian Will Rogers in the
1930s: “I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat.”
Another late comedian, Mitch Hedberg, used to say this: “I haven't slept for
ten days, because that would be too long.”
****************************
A few more observations:
I’m always amazed at some of the
things that we Maritimers and especially New Brunswickers say. My cousin Jerry
down the road was talking about something he’d done that had ‘unintended
consequences’. He found himself in worse shape than before. “I mayazwella hit
my head against a wall,” he lamented. He was of course saying “I may as well
have…”
Recently looking over some of the
names of government departments, both federal and provincial, I was amazed at
the weighty handles some of them have. One example might be the Department (or
Ministry) of Social Development, Mid-level Education, Hydro Poles (Anglophone),
Delicacy of Restaurant Food, and Storm Surges. Whew! Can one minister handle
all that? I called, and the minister, one Cherlean Antigonish, was on a
fact-finding mission to Bermuda and had been since November.
It seems that there’s an
anagram-crazy person living in this community. The club bartender, Willie
Wiezel, put up on the Lower Kintore arena’s sign “Hockey game Tuesday”, and the
crazy one took the same letters and rearranged them to say: “Haystack yum gee
doe”. That caused a certain amount of confusion, I will tell you. Seemed clear
enough to me.
Where, oh where, has Mike Duffy
gone? Flug and I have been frantic for news of the big guy because we want to
ask him who was paying for his lawyer. Since Mike couldn’t afford to pay back
that $90,000 to the Senate (is that still there?), how could he possibly pay
for that lawyer who would, I am sure, charge $1000 for opening his own car
door.
I mentioned triskaidekaphobia.
Did you know that many owners of high-rise apartment buildings will not call
the 13th floor by that name? There is a 12th floor, and
the next one up is the 14th floor. True story. You could look it up.
And now our favourite (not) computer operating system, Windows, has gone from
Windows 8 to Windows 10. What gives?-end-
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