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.

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            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.

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            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.

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            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.
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