DIARY
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.
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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 8th – 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-
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