Animal in my bananas (June 15)

DIARY

When potholes and yes ma’ams are good things

                        by Robert LaFrance

            After there had been a recent rain, I was walking along an asphalt driveway among a host of earthworms trying to get to the other side. Since I was in Boy Scout mode (kind to little old ladies and earthworms) I put a dozen or so into the nearby grass. They immediately started back, although they had been heading in that direction. “I know how you feel, guys,” I said. It was Monday morning. I had been going around in circles myself.

            We all dread getting behind school buses that stop to pick up or let off kids every whipstitch. This morning I timed it exactly wrong and had to follow a school bus for many kilometres because there was really no place for him or her to pull over and let me by. I was amazed at how many potholes, yes ma’ams and crevices that bus hit at full speed. The kids in the back were bouncing all over the place, the poor little dears. I was appalled until I saw their great big smiles and remembered how my own kids used to urge the bus driver to go faster and hit the bumps even harder so they could enjoy bouncing up to the roof. Once when I was taking my daughters to school in my Ford F150 truck, we went over a yes ma’am near Kilburn and they FORCED me to go back and go over it faster next time.

            Ellery O’Brian, who is the son of bartender Olaf Gunderlick and the third cousin once removed of my friend Flug who – I just found this out – is part owner of Kincardine’s number one AM radio station CPOT, is one of the many who will welcome the legalization of marijuana. Indeed, he was the one who suggested the station’s call letters. He is branching out into other media and that will include potcasts, I am told.

            As one who often watches television in the evening (I stayed awake almost an hour once) I sometimes tune in to shows where there is an ‘expert’ talking about his subject as if he knows something. However, two evenings ago there was a farmer/psychologist on there and he has a radical suggestion. Dismantle the walls of every prison and use psychology to keep the criminals inside the facility. Here’s how it would work, in his own words: “Last week, after years of watching my cows tear down my fences and escape from the pasture, I bought an electric fence and a few of the leading cows went over first thing to see what was going on. They soon jumped back. Two days later I unhooked the electricity from it and they didn’t go near again. I say we do the same thing with prisons.”

            We hear stories about people bringing home a bunch of bananas from the grocery store and finding a live tarantula spider in them. The same thing happened to an acquaintance of mine in Inuvik, NWT. It was rare for the government grocery store to have bananas and of course my friend Dave had to have some. He bought a dozen. On the way home to his cabin he also found an animal in his bananas. A roving polar bear grabbed them from his grocery box and headed for the Richardson Mountains, about 130 kilometres to the west.

            Helping Igor wash dishes one evening at the club, I marvelled once again at how much animal and human behaviour resemble one another. As we were putting away the glasses and things, Landon and Larissa Lightstock came in for their usual tipple at that time of day. As usual they were fighting. The word ‘vicious’ must have been invented for those two. A half hour later they had gone and I went over to wash the window where just outside was a hummingbird feeder. As I used my vinegar/water mixture on the window and started wiping it dry, two hummingbirds arrived. They fought each other, scared each other away from the feeder, and just generally used up a lot of energy that could have been better used drinking nectar. I thought of the Lightstocks.
                                           -end-

Gee, aren't computers fun? (June 8)

DIARY

This rainy weather is HUUUGE!

                              by Robert LaFrance

               I try and avoid referring in any way to the Billionaire Buffoon Donald Trump, but it’s looking more and more as if he might be the Republican candidate for the presidency of our huge neighbour to the south. That country did elect George W. Bush – twice, sort of.

               The reason I ‘must needs’ (as the English say) talk about the BB is that he has had some input in my speech and writing. Look in paragraph one and see the word ‘huge’. That’s a Donald Trump word. “The people from South Dakota are HUUUUUUGE!” he might say and probably has said.

               If you see or hear me saying that word, please shoot me.

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

               On to other topics, this of course is the season when gardeners go crazy. Although one summer I had 14 gardens – I am not kidding – this year and for the past few I have had only two and they’re not huge. That year I had fourteen gardens strung around our estate I grew 14 varieties of potatoes, with the seed coming from Bon Accord Seed Farm. I had a root cellar back then and it was packed with apples and vegetables we never ate.

               To return to the present, I am sure that a support group – perhaps with the acronym WACGA – is needed for all gardeners. I, and many more like me if that’s possible, should not be  turned loose anywhere near a greenhouse or any place where garden plants are sold. The Wild And Crazy Gardeners Anonymous should step in and take the gardener by his or her hand and keep that person from buying enough plants to green the Sahara Desert.

               I’d like to say that it was Flug, or Bernie Saunders down the road who did this, but it was I, and only I.

               “What’s that?” my wife asked when I arrived from town. If course it was clearly a cardboard box but I didn’t sneer. Then she looked in the box that had once held 28-ounce cans of tomato soup. It was filled with garden plants and envelopes of seeds.

               Trouble was, I had enough greenery in there to fill 26 gardens the size of mine, and that was just the plants. The seeds, if they ever saw soil, would fill one of the late George DeMerchant’s potato fields where I picked the tubers when I was a teenager.

               Like an alcoholic or an out-of-control slot machine jockey, I just can’t help myself when I get near plants and garden seeds. I cannot picture the space that each of the plants is going to take later on in the summer. Last Tuesday, for example, I bought eight flats of 8 tomato plants each, which would fill one of my two gardens.

               Please help.

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

               Another way the faithful and long-suffering reader of this column may help would be if he or she gave me a new computer. Any nerd will tell you that you should get a new computer every three or four years, especially if yours has suffered through many power outages, and any computer guy or gal will also tell you that Windows Vista was the worst piece of (scat) ever foisted on an unsuspecting public by Bill Gates. Well, guess what? My computer, bought in 2008, runs on Windows Vista.

               As usual, whenever I get on any subject, I think of the old days. I bought my first computer, a 486 IBM clone, in 1994. The late Bob Inman of Perth-Andover was my (unpaid) consultant and advisor. He had an older computer himself, a 286. As we were trying out what later became my computer, he remarked that it would open up a program – like a word processor – in five seconds, as opposed to 15-18 seconds on his.

               I thought he was joking, then saw by his expression (like mine in a greenhouse) that he was quite serious. “What would you do with that extra dozen seconds, Bob?” I asked. He said that wasn’t the point, and I later saw that he was right.

               To continue with the exciting story of my first computer: Bob told me exactly what to buy and we put it all in his car to bring it here. We carried a half dozen boxes to my office and he said: “You can do it all from here on.”

               I looked at the stack of boxes and said: “Bob, if you go past that doorway without helping me put this all together so that it works, I am going to find the nearest Uzi machine gun and shoot all the tires off your car.” Long story short(er), he stayed – for almost three hours. Aren’t computers fun?

                                          -end-

"That remains to be seen" - monkey (June 1)

DIARY

The criminal potholes of Tobique First Nation

                        by Robert LaFrance

            We hear all the time about superlatives referring to sports and many other endeavours – the fastest runner, the best cook, the tallest giraffe – but for the residents of and visitors to Tobique First Nation ‘the worst roads’ is not a description they would like written about their community.

            On May 19 I drove up to Mah-sos School to watch a ballhockey game – a very entertaining one – and drove onto the main street. Hoping for some kind of relief from the bone-jarring potholes, I turned right onto New Street.

            It was like jumping from an ice floe onto the deck of the Titanic one second before she hit the iceberg.

            It had been early May when I saw on Facebook a video that someone had taken  with a camera mounted on the dash of his or her vehicle during a drive through TFN. I was appalled, but not flabbergasted, because potholes are everywhere. There was no sound on the video, so the full effect didn’t come through. On May 19 the full effect did come through the metal, rubber, plastic and glass of my 2014 Toyota Corolla. That stuff sure got rearranged.

            Those roads could only be described as ‘criminal’. That human beings should be obliged to drive on them to go to work, go to town or go and visit relatives is a crime.

            Not one to present a problem and not suggest a solution, I offer this:  Whoever is in charge of those and other criminally potholed roads – probably someone in Edmundston - should be duct-taped to the tailgate of a 1991 Ford pickup truck with broken springs and shocks, and driven back and forth on those roads at the legal speed limit. I guarantee that, after fifteen minutes, that road supervisor, engineer, crew boss or whoever – provincial or federal - decides these things will conclude that his, her or its ‘PRIORITY NUMBER ONE’ has suddenly become filling potholes at Tobique First Nation.

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

            Other major news and revelations:

            Ethel Mannerson, a War Bride who came from England with her husband Roy in 1946, was telling me about some ‘online’ problem she was having. I was surprised to learn that she, age 91, was learning computer stuff. I told her that I was quite impressed since many people much younger had been defeated by Bill Gatesism. “What are you talking about?” she said – one might even use the word ‘sneered’. “When I said ‘online’ I was talking about my clothesline.”

            The great singer Willie Nelson, at the age of 83, just put out a new DvD (can we still call them albums?) entitled “Willie Nelson Sings George Gershwin”. Of course Gershwin is best known for composing music for Broadway musicals and that doesn’t sound like Willie at all, but he managed to carry it off, as he does anything else. I swear, Willie could make great music playing and singing along with an aardvark’s grunt.

            Once in a while, when I want to have my brain scrambled even worse than usual, I think about the commercial items that are ‘vital’ today and which we used to live without. Bottled water comes to mind, dog and cat food, cosmetics – both men’s and women’s, the song ‘Achy Breaky Heart’, seat warmers, and…you get the idea. The trouble is, it is easy enough to say let’s eliminate these things, but if people just quit buying, the world economy would collapse. Pet food sales are in the multi-billions and employ many people who buy houses, cars and bottled water even though the water right out of the tap is just as good.

            The pop singer Beyoncé has recently come out with what is known as a ‘visual album’ (Didn’t we used to call them videos?) named ‘Lemonade’. I have been in contact with her lawyers about the obvious copyright infringement. In other words, she has clearly been reading my column and chose that album name directly from my writing. I’m willing to settle out of court though, because MY legal team consists of Big George, the bartender at the club. He used to watch ‘Perry Mason’ and other TV shows about lawyers and says he is ‘eminently qualified’, whatever that might mean.

            I unexpectedly saw my friend Flug last week at a concert that was being held in a field by Elmo Taggart’s barn and he was looking quite agitated. “Bob, I feel like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” he said. It turned out he was worried about his income tax return which, as fiction, ranked up there with ‘Phantom of the Opera’. “I’ll be going to jail,” he said, “if they discover I don’t own a cottage on PEI.”

            “Relax, Flug, and have a lemonade,” I advised. “As the monkey said after he left a pile of (waste) behind the chesterfield, that remains to be seen.”
                                                   -end-

The odds of winning a lottery (May 25)

DIARY

Confusing the buttocks out of things

                        by Robert LaFrance

            It is said that the odds of winning a million dollars in the Atlantic Lottery – I’m talking about one person buying one ticket – are 6,359,015 to one in a given week.

            I got interested in these odds last week when I chanced to see Gary Overhill, who is an actuary working for an insurance company. An actuary is one who calculates the odds so that insurance companies know how much to gouge – er, I mean, charge - their customers.

            “Gary,” I said, “would you calculate the odds, a ballpark figure, of a person’s chances in this scenario? He bought a $2 ticket every week since mid-May of 1976, now what are his chances of winning anything from a free ticket to the big prize of $1 million?”

            He scratched his grizzled chin. “If you’re referring to yourself, how much have you won?” I answered that I was talking about myself, and I had not won as much as a free ticket in all that time. He reached in his pocket and took out a hand calculator.

            “I would say that you have sunk – if you will pardon the term – approximately $29,656 in that lottery. The odds against your paying out that money and not winning SQUAT are 45,231,668 to one. If you had invested that money in Canada Savings Bonds, for example, it would now have been worth $127,354.”

            “Oh, shut up, Gary. Who asked you anyway?”

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

            Tail-gaters – you gotta love ‘em. Well, maybe not.

            Something strange happened to me last week. I drove about 50 (or more) kilometres and did not have one tail-gater. Usually the case is this: I get in my Buick and head for town and by the time I get there I have collected two or three tail-gaters clinging to my back bumper like so many limpet mines even though I would be driving the speed limit and not holding up traffic.

            I have often wondered what kind of genetic material, if any, is located between the ears of these creatures. When I see a car nuzzling my back bumper, that is a trifle disconcerting. Why do they do it? Is it because they think they will get there sooner? I tried to imagine the ‘thought’ processes of people who do that and couldn’t.

            I have had vehicles cling  to my car’s back bumper – for as much as ten kilometres. I’ve tried speeding up over the speed limit and I have tried stopping along the road, but at this point the driver behind just pulls over behind me.

            When I look in my rear-view mirror and can’t see the car’s bumper – although there have been plenty of chances for her or him to pass – I just wonder, that’s all. Any ideas?

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

            Still vaguely on the subject of roads and traffic, I heard a rumour that D.O.T. (now hiding under the acronym D.T.I.) has applied for an international patent for a process they invented last year.

            If you are familiar with Highway 109 in Perth-Andover, at the Andover side of the bridge, you will remember how the truck traffic had gouged two grooves into the road going up the hill. They were a couple of inches deep where the wheels went up the hill.

            The logical thing to do, one would think, was bring over the asphalt trucks and fill in the grooves, but D.O.T. used an entirely new method of dealing with the problem. They simply moved over the yellow line so that the trucks and we Buick drivers are no longer driving in – and making deeper – those particular grooves.

            When the current grooves are getting too deep, the yellow line can be moved over yet again. The downside, of course, is that sooner or later the driving lane coming down the hill will be in the ditch, but they can always detour.

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

            While he was sitting on my front porch and sipping my lemonade, my friend (against all odds) Flug paused and said to me: “Bob, people are getting tired of your telling them that all this modern electronic stuff is keeping you confused. Why don’t you write about things people understand, like baseball?”

            Yeah, maybe I will do that. The only problem is that I can’t tell what sport I am watching or how many points a field goal is. People talk about violence in hockey, but then I turn on a baseball game to see a Texas Ranger guy and a Toronto Blue Jays guy having a fistfight.

            I think I will stick to my electronic confusion after all. Like yesterday, when I had the air conditioner going full blast and noticed that my car seat warmer was also set at MAX. My rear end was getting confusing messages.
                                            -end-