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-

Flug's unfortunate tattoo (Sept 14)

DIARY

The Rules of life (Part 1) as we know them

                        by Robert LaFrance

            There are certain Rules of Life that we all live by, and they are what might have been called, a few thousand years ago, like about 500 BC, ‘The Law of the Medes and the Persians’. That phrase means ‘law than can never be changed – ever’.

            So it is with the Rules of Life I am about to quantify, whatever that means. I suppose in some ways the R of R are similar to Murphy’s Law; anything that can go wrong, will.

            Think first of the item that takes you from Point A to Point – if you are lucky. The automobile in its many kinds and colours comes to mind right away, with a quick second place on the same subject The Automobile Warranty.

            Say you go out and buy a new car and it comes with a warranty that is good for four years or 90,000 kilometres, whichever comes first. You are driving from Bristol to Arthurette and your odometer tells you that your warranty is going to run out at the old Caldwell place, below Red Rapids on Highway 109. So it turns over 90,000 just as you enter Red Rapids flat.

            You will probably not reach McNeil’s General Store at the upper end of the flat, so you might as well shut off the car now. Your warranty just ran out, so within the next little while the car will fall apart, piece by piece. If you try to make it back to Bristol, your car is doomed. That’s a Rule of Life.

            One more rule involving driving and vehicles. If there is a major pothole in a road, that pothole will be, logically enough, in your driving lane (where everybody drives) and it will be exactly in a shadow. So you are driving along in your usual blissful state and your car’s right front wheel hits this crevice and you say: “&^%$#^%$*! That’s a rule of life, no matter how devoutly religious you are.

            Rule #3 deals with gastronomy, and that has nothing to do with looking at stars and planets. It’s about grub going into our guts. The rule states: “NEVER go grocery shopping when you are hungry!” Once in a while I forget that rule and I pay dearly. Three days ago, for example, I went into the local grocery store and I did not eat breakfast before getting in the car (which has a warranty) and going to the grocery store whose owners are so wealthy already that that put out TWO bags of garbage each week.

            They are wealthier now by far. The cashier had to call three grocery bag carriers to help me get my stuff to the car. I wished I had brought a trailer. The bill came to $489.02. I had only gone in to buy some eggs and canned soup. I finally stopped shopping when I saw myself putting canned aniseed flavoured chickpeas in my third cart.

            This next Rule of Life is not really for me, but for a certain nameless friend (Richard LaFrance, no relation and known as Flug). Here it is: “Never get a tattoo with a loved one’s name on it, because she might not always be your loved one and you know what Hell hath no fury like.”

            Flug, back about three wives ago, thought he was in love with this Paraguayan lady named Dulcie who was doing a bartender exchange course at the Club down the road. (Our regular bartender, Freddy, had decided he wanted to see South America.)

            Flug went to Old Home Week in Woodstock and just by the gate was a tattoo artist named Wanda who tattooed ‘Dulcie’ on Flug’s limb. Well, unfortunately, by the time Wanda had tattooed the letter ‘e’ those two were in love. A match made in Winnipeg. Flug had a problem.

            Here’s a Rule of Life that can be covered by my grandfather, Muff LaFrance’s, one rule: “If you see a chance to keep your mouth shut, take it.”

            I was in town last week when my friend Irvine introduced me to a guy named Leonard Glinn from Tilley. I was quite astonished that Leonard looked strikingly like my acquaintance Glenn Patterlick, also from Tilley. Of course I couldn’t just shut up as Grampy would have, but said that out loud. There was an uncomfortable silence, then Leonard said he had to go. Irvine said: “He looks like Glenn for a reason, you wheelwrench. He was born while his mother’s husband was in the Korean War – for two years before Leonard was born.” Open mouth, change feet.
                                                     -end-

Smart Cars are stupid (Sept 7)

DIARY

The hustle and bustle of Kincardine

                        by Robert LaFrance

“Smart Cars are stupid,” observed my friend Flug as we drove through Gorham, Maine last week. He was driving his 1987 Gremlin, so you can take whatever you like from his utterance.

            I have often wondered why anyone would pay $15,000+ for a vehicle that a brawny kindergarten student could throw into the ditch, but people will be people. From what I understand, a Smart Car will go 879 kilometres on a teaspoonful of gas, but that is rather offset by the fact that any of the Smart Cars I’ve seen could drive under the back of a tractor-trailer and find itself the involuntary passenger all the way to Dallas, Texas. On the other hand, the mileage would be even better on that trip.

            Picture the African Savanna, which is kind of a grassland plain, and picture a herd of elephants stampeding because a drone had scared them. Also running away in fear are thousands of mice. The elephants are tractor trailers and the mice are Smart Cars.

A little farther along in our travels in Gorham, we saw a Smart Car parked along the street. Someone had hit it with a bicycle whose owner was not pleased that his mosquito was damaged by a mouse. No doubt he was at least pleased it hadn’t been an elephant.

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

            I hear about places like Calgary and Toronto who seem to think they have it made as far as public activities go, but they are pikers compared to my community of Kincardine, Scotch Colony, Victoria County, New Brunswick.

            You see? Just identifying it could be defined as an activity, and our mayor, Rayanne Podolski, has a much more unusual sounding name than Toronto’s mayor, John Tory.

            (I have often wondered whether Mayor Tory, when he was merely ‘John’ could have chosen any political party other than the Tories, or Conservatives, or even Progressive Conservative Party. They dropped the word ‘Progressive’ when Stephen Harper was prime minister.)

            Calgary Mayor Naheed Kurban Nenshi is the only Muslim mayor that I know of in Canada and I know Rayanne can’t compete with him for an exotic sounding name. However, she has named her kids Khalina and El Jameed, so she’s making an effort. We can’t all be born with a name like Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, England. It’s a cosmopolitan world now, folks.

            Back to the huge variety of activities found in Kincardine: There’s Burns Night every January and sometimes in the fall there’s even a Harvest Supper, depending on how the gardens have turned out. There was a ‘tea’ down there just last week, so everybody was all excited, including me, but I had thought that a tea meant there would also be food served. Live and learn.

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

            On to more important topics, and could there be any more important subject than  how the roll of toilet paper (called AW when I was a kid) is installed on the roller?

            Seriously, I have even seen this argument appear on Facebook. Should the TP or AW be unrolled from the back or the front of the roll? I have seen paragraphs of explanation on one side or the other – no pun intended – and these people are serious. It’s just a silly topic, don’t you agree? That is, unless someone puts on the roll backwards IN MY HOUSE.

            Still on the important subject of bathroom etiquette, there are those who leave up the toilet seat cover and – here’s a hint – I am not talking about males. Is this something new? Decades ago we males were nagged unmercifully to “always put down the flush cover”; now we all do, but when I have guests I find those of a certain gender leave the top cover up.

            Here’s a list of things I have found in our flush: a smartphone, 6 pencils, a wallet, two passports (different names but same photo – what’s that all about?), a Husqvarna chainsaw, and a riding lawn mower tire with the initials BO painted on it. It could belong to the president of a neighbouring country, but I doubt it.

The main point is, when you’re visiting this estate, put down the flush covers, all of them. The TP roll comes off at the front.

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

            Final point, this one about manners: Last Tuesday I went into the parking lot of ‘a big box store’ as people call Wal-Mart for some reason, and as I got out of my Toyota, I heard a woman say – I thought she was saying it to me – “How’s your bum?”

            Although women in parking lots are often tooting their car horns at me, I have never heard one ask me how my bum was. Just to end the suspense, I told her it was fine just as I realized she had been talking to her toddler.
                                               -end-

Watch those curly light bulbs (Aug. 31)

DIARY

Flug’s problem with an Ottawa woman

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Every once in a while, like the rest of us, my friend Flug says something intelligent.

            “It won’t last,” he warned me, as if I were expecting more. As registered males of the human race, we are dull as dishwater, except for occasional flashes of mediocre thought, or, in this case, brilliance.

            Flug was relating a story about telling a lie and having it come back at him like cucumbers or radish. The lie occurred several years ago when he told a lady in Ottawa that he was the owner of a trucking company in New Brunswick. Remembering that, she wrote to Flug in Tilley (he lives in Kincardine now, but we can always count on Canada Post) that she was coming for a visit, perhaps a long visit. It wouldn’t take her long to realize that Flug’s ‘trucking company’ was a 1999 Ford F150 with lots of rust.

            “What will I do?” he moaned. “She’s on her way here and she is going to shoot me.” I was thinking that he deserved shooting, for that lie and many others, but I was and am his friend.

            “I’d say shooting is the least of your worries,” I commented. “What about Roseanne?” That was and is his wife, either the 16^th or 17^th. “When she answers the door and it answers back with this Ottawa woman, you are going to be in the deepest of doo-doo ever seen in these parts. Have you thought about going on a sudden vacation?”

            He hadn’t, but ruled that out because he was in the middle of a business deal involving the purchase of another trucking company, a 2006 Ford F150 whose asking price was $1500. We talked for a while and didn’t come up with anything, but figured Ottawa wouldn’t be there for at least two days. “We gotta come up with SOMETHING,” he said. Where he found the WE he didn’t say.

            This is when he said something intelligent. “You know Bob, telling a lie is like chicken pox. It doesn’t seem like much at the time, but you look around five or ten or thirty years later and bazooka! You’ve got shingles which is the chicken pox coming back to hit you with a stick. If only you hadn’t gotten chicken pox in the first place.”

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

            On to an entirely different subject (and leaving Flug to sort out his own shingles) I was sitting in my office earlier today and working on this very column when the light in my office started flickering. After four or five minutes of this, the bulb started to make a buzzing sound after which I leapt (if one can leap at age 68) to the switch and turned it off.

            Of course five minutes later I forgot about this and went back to my office. When I turned on the light it made an even louder buzz and crackle. After once more turning it off, I went to the downstairs cupboard and got a 60W incandescent bulb. I specify because the one that made the noise was one of those curly fluorescent bulbs, you know, the ones that were the answer to all our ecological prayers a few years ago. We would do away with the incandescent ones and live happily ever after because these ones would each last 20,000 hours and take half the power. And Goldilocks was a nice little girl except for her minor problem of being a food thief.

            For the reader’s information, the curly-fries bulb was the Noma brand, made in China. Asking around, I have found that those bulbs made in China have caused many a problem including worry because they contain mercury.

            So I decided to change all our house lighting to LEDs (light emitting diodes) and went to the hardware store which is located right near Jim’s Pool Hall and behind the club. I looked at the price tag - $4,320. I said to the clerk: “So how many LED bulbs does that buy?” He gave me an odd look and said it was only the down payment on one bulb.

Now where did I put those candles?

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

               One of the Olympics events reminded me of the Victorian era in England. In the late 19^th century, people were urged to refrain from saying words like ‘leg’ because it was risqué, so they had to refer to a table ‘limb’. In Rio one of the events was the ‘women’s breaststroke’. Times have changed. I don’t know how many Victorian heart attacks would have been caused by women’s beach volleyball. I’m still recovering.

            By the way, the Ottawa woman who was headed this way phoned Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) Saturday evening and said she’d just met the love of her life in Cabano and was going back with him to Fort MacMurray. Just so you know.
                                          -end-