DIARY
The
police get criticized no matter what they do
by
Robert LaFrance
Police killed another terrorist last
week, this time in Strathroy, Ontario and naturally the police got blamed.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether
terrorists successfully blow up four dozen people at a shopping mall or get
caught on their way to doing this, the police are always in the wrong,
apparently. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Why didn’t they know this guy was
about to do something like this? One of these days the governments will change
their police departments’ application forms to include: “Are you psychic? How
far can you see into the future and into people’s minds?”
I once knew a guy who would have
known how to handle the terrorist threat. His answer to everything was “Lock
‘em up!” In the end the entire population of the world would be in jail. Yeah,
that would do it.
I hear people saying things like:
“The cops should have known that guy in Nice, France, was going to take a truck
and run over forty people. He even said so on Facebook.” What he said was
something like: “The evil Satan must die.”
Speaking of terrorism, I have been
listening to Donald Trump’s utterances for far too long now, but I have come to
a conclusion. I have identified his mouth – it’s George W. Bush’s long-lost
Weapon of Mass Destruction.
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It’s finally happened; I bought a
riding lawn mower.
Since I moved back to NB from the
NWT in 1976, I have resisted getting all the equipment sometimes referred to as
Boy’s Toys, Toys for Big Boys or riding lawn mowers, but this time I couldn’t
resist. My apple trees are now big enough so I can walk under them, so
obviously, being old and lazy, I decided that walking behind a push lawn mower
was something I needn’t do any more.
What kind of riding lawn mower
should I get? I looked at all the specifications of various kinds and finally
decided there needed to be only one specification: it must work. After initial
adjustments, it now works, so if you drive by our estate you might see me
zooming around nearly as fast as a snail gallops. If I ‘cross over’ at the age
of 68, it shouldn’t be under the deck of a piece of mechanical mystery so I
drive slowly.
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After last week’s diatribe in this
column, I was hoping that by this time Canada Post would have ‘got right
around’ (as my late Aunt Ella used to say) and found that missing envelope I
had mailed to my daughter in Woodstock, but not a chance.
Although her apartment was one of
only two in her building, I would have hoped that my mistake of not including
her apartment number on the envelope would have easily been overcome with
‘common’ sense, but I always have been an optimist.
When I send letters, I always put my name and my postal
code, nothing more, for a return address and that should have been enough to at
least get it back, but it wasn’t. I was under the impression that we were the
only ones with that code, but it turns out that my sister-in-law’s house, 200
metres away, also has it. My enquiries of the post offices in Saint John got me
the information that down there in that city they would simply say: “There’s no
such address” and it would go into the ‘undeliverable’ box.
Just to recap, I sent an envelope to my daughter in
Woodstock but it wasn’t delivered because I didn’t have (and didn’t know) her
apartment number in a 2-apartment building. Then they couldn’t return it to me
because there was another house with the same postal code here in Kincardine.
Limbo.
Another little point: Last week my wife received a
letter with the address “RR#6 Kilburn Perth-Andover NB” and postal code S4P
4S6, which is in Regina. (I changed one digit for privacy reasons.) Her real
mailing address is 129 Manse Hill Road, Kincardine with a totally different
postal code. Yet it got to her. Somebody explain this please.
*************************
I have been waiting for this announcement for a long
time and Ford Motor Company has finally come through. Never mind that Tesla has
had a self-driving car for quite a few months and maybe even years, FMC now
says they will have one by the year 2021.
Seriously, that’s how the radio announcement went:
“Ford Motor Company will have an ‘autonomous’ car in four years”.
One car? Seems like a lot of trouble to go to. Can
you imagine how much that car will cost? A space mission would be cheap by
comparison.
It seems that one of the great boons of this
development is that people who have lost their driver’s licences would be able
to just phone and ask the car to pick them up. However, I recall that when I
lived in Vancouver (the last city I lived in) we had the same thing back in the
1970s. We called them taxis.
-end-
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