I do not miss John Wayne (Jan. 18)

A rather surprising set of animal tracks

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I was wading through my orchard day before yesterday and came across some mighty big tracks. They had not been left there by an elephant, but they weren’t much smaller than that pachyderm’s footprints.

It was a bear and all this time I thought I was safe from becoming someone lunch. Shouldn’t all bruins except those in Boston be hibernating by now?

            The reason I mention this is that if you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because a rogue bear has decided to emerge from hibernation a few months early and couldn’t find an open restaurant. Seeing me, he she or it decided that he (she, it) wouldn’t bother going all the way uptown for the chili at Mary’s Bake Shop, but would munch on me.

            On the subject of the words we use, every time I hear someone say they are ‘stacking wood’ I have to remember that, to me, that means ‘piling wood’. Makes sense; you don’t go out to the woodstack to get a stick, you go to the woodpile. Is the word ‘stacking’ from American TV programs or perhaps from another part of Canada?

            Another word I hear people say, referring to what I would call a stick of wood, is a ‘log’. When I grew up in Tilley, people didn’t “put another log on the fire” because to us a log could be the 12-foot trunk of a fir tree. Our little kitchen stove would have been a bit overwhelmed.

            Over the years I have heard a lot of people wonder about the word ‘dooryard’ and if it is used all over Canada or just in the Maritimes. I asked my friend Mr. Google. He gave me several explanations, several of which asserted that ‘dooryard’ is used exclusively in Maine, which is of course typical American bunk. When I lived in BC and when I lived in Ontario I often heard it. However, when I lived in the Northwest Territories I never heard it. Funny about that, until one remembers that most Inuit residences didn’t have one, at least not in the places I lived.

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            This portion of today’s column could be entitled “Things that I don’t miss”. I’m  sure we could all write a column – or five columns – on this, but please don’t; I need the money to make my January VISA payment.

            DIAL-UP. Those who first ‘accessed’ the Internet, or the World Wide Web as people used to say more often, via dial-up, will agree with me that it was a royal pain in the aspect. I remember the day that a certain fiddler in the Moncton area sent me a 4-megabyte photo and it took two hours to download it to my computer from his email.

            I am not kidding – two hours. I clicked ‘receive mail’ on my Eudora email page and it began to arrive. This was about 1:00 pm on a weekday and I am sorry that I can’t remember what day it was. I decided to drive uptown to Bishop’s Grocery and get a few things, then visit a friend, then get a library book. When I arrived back home just before 3:00 pm, the photo was just arriving in full. It was a photo of me taken at a fiddle doo.

            JOHN WAYNE – A few decades ago it was hard to see a movie or watch TV without seeing the big blustering blowhard John Wayne, the American hero. He acted as a brave soldier and all sorts of similar roles and people actually thought he was. Trouble is, they didn’t realize all that time that he was a World War II draft dodger, a fact that was well covered up at the time. Google “John Wayne, draft dodger”.

            MY 1973 PLYMOUTH SATELLITE CAR – I had that vehicle for three months and put $600 worth of repairs on it, the most expensive of them being about $60. I doubt if I ever left my yard, went to town, and came back without the car breaking down. Those were the early days of computers in cars. In the end I sold the car to a friend after telling him about every one of those repairs. I had paid $1600 for it and sold it for $800, considering myself lucky.

            A year after he bought the car, my friend and I saw each other in Perth. Fearing an assault, I made as if to run away, but he said he “had never laid a wrench on it” since he bought it from me. I had fixed all that had been wrong with it. Steve Cronk and I remained friends until his death many years later.

            GEORGE W. BUSH – How many needless deaths is that man responsible for? Many fear that Donald Trump will do similar things, but somehow I think he is smarter than that, although he doesn’t act it at times. 

                                  -end-

Down with rap, hip-hop etc (Jan 4)

Singapore and more

                        by Robert LaFrance

            As you know, I start writing this column a week or more before it appears – as if by magic – in the Victoria Star.

It’s 8:40 on Christmas Day and my older daughter, visiting from Canterbury (not England), is playing Christmas tunes on the piano while her boyfriend, coincidentally also from Canterbury, watches and admires; my son is about to open some presents, as we all are, and my wife is putting the final touches on the Christmas chickens and pork  roast – no turkey for us.

Meanwhile, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, my younger daughter and her husband are touring the city and waiting for us to finish opening our presents and place a Facebook Messenger phone call to them.

That was the plan anyway.

What really happened was that we received a note from Vietnam with instructions to call her via FB Messenger. I called on my ‘tablet’ which is like a smartphone with a big screen, and my daughter told us to put the tablet on a stand so she could just sit back in (the former) Saigon and watch the greed and avarice as we opened our gifts. She got to see and hear all that but didn’t have to clear up the mess.

As usual, I forgot to get my wife a present. The dog Minnie and I will share a meal in her little house. A bit crowded, but that’s the way it goes. On the other hand, my daughter in Canterbury received two rolling pins for Christmas.

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I have no intention of making even one New Year’s Resolution, but I am thinking it’s time to reform the English language. When I hear someone use the word ‘fortuitous’ when they mean ‘lucky’ I wonder why it has to be that way. Let’s ban long words.

Referring to such bloated speech, my son said to me this morning: “The system is flawed.” Then he said: “Did you see that word I just used, the one at the end of the sentence? Why can’t we spell that ‘f-l-o-d’?”

He’s quite a bit smarter than he looks.

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Here’s something I heard many years ago and then this morning once again. A chap on the radio, a Bob MacDonald I think (or it could have been Mae West), was saying that although everyone looks into the mirror every morning before they send themselves out into the world, that face in the mirror is not the one the world sees.

It is a mirror, after all, Bob or Mae said. “So everything is reversed. When you part your hair on the left and think that’s just fine, what the world sees is your dubious face with the hair parted on the right.”

What was his or her solution to this heart-rending dilemma? Use two mirrors in your bathroom. That way, looking into the second mirror which is showing the mirror image of the first mirror, you see the true you.                                                                                                     *************************

Another rule I would like to see is a total ban on one family owning two cars from the same company, but of different years. Our present 2015 Toyota Corolla has seat warmers but our 2009 Toyota Yaris does not. It was quite a shock, so to speak, when I was in the Yaris yesterday and pushed the button for my seat warmer and found I had put my finger in the cigarette lighter.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for others: Have you noticed that so many people nowadays, especially those being interviewed on radio and TV, to start sentences with the word “so”? The interviewer might ask how a soccer player found the change from defender to striker and he answers: “So, at first it was…etc.” I’m baffled as to why he would feel the need to start his sentence with ‘so’.

A question only two weeks before Donald Trump takes office: What is he going to do when he finds out that climate change isn’t really a Chinese hoax? Or when his pal Vladimar Putin turns out to be a hoodlum, an Adolph Hitler wannabe?

At the beginning of this new year, I hereby express my admiration for the marketing geniuses who figured out many years ago that a wonderful fashion statement for teenagers would be jeans with holes and rips all through them. If someone had told me this might be possible, I would have laughed in my lemonade, but since then a billion dollars of these garments have been sold. Hats off – but not my hat, it’s a bit frayed and holey – to these folks. The same to the music companies who, instead of music, chose to record and sell something called ‘rap’ or ‘hip-hop’.
                                                                      -end-

Holiday season is over - or is it? (Jan. 11/17)

Very pertinent observations early in 2017

                        by Robert LaFrance

            The first thing I heard in 2017: my son said Happy New Year and followed that with: “By the way, Papa, did you know that the word ‘oops’ is the plural of ‘oop’?”

            The holiday season of Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year is now over. I have not known what day of the week it is since about Friday the 23^rd of December. The worst thing is, this had nothing to do with drugs or strong drink; it was just the old brain seizing up every time someone mentioned the day of the week. “Wednesday? No, I think it’s Sunday, isn’t it? Oh…it’s Friday.”

            Speaking of brain seizing and freezing, over the holidays a British singer named George Michael died and I had to admit I had never heard of him. Seriously. This guy was a music icon – pardon the overused word – in the 1980s and 1990s and everybody in the world but me knew exactly who he was, even from the days when he was part of the group called ‘Wham’.

            And then I remembered: I kept kids in those days and the only music I listened to was that of Fred Penner and Sharon, Lois and Bram because that’s what my kids listened to and sang. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood…” was my idea of music. That was Mister Rogers’s theme song.

            Even though I look back on the holidays just passed as a pretty good time – we here got to January 1^st without mishap – there was a downside. Some may not think this serious, but in previous years I used to enjoy watching and listening to the Fireplace Channel on my TV. On my current satellite setup, it is channel 285.

            I used to turn off the lights in the living room and have the Fireplace Channel going. It was just like having a real fireplace with the wood flames flickering and cracking. Very relaxing.

            What changed? Some genius decided it would be much better to have the background be Christmas music and no crackling. If I wanted to listen to that I could go sit by the radio that is tuned to the Holiday Network. I just wish people would go by the  adage: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

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            Come to think of it, maybe I will make a New Year’s resolution or two.

            One thing I would like to see and will work toward (or at least wish for, and that ain’t easy) is the making of the visible and audible world a little less impersonal. Someone just told me that they work as an HR person with a large company and I was taken aback, mainly because I had forgotten that HR means ‘Human Resources’.

            Back in the GOD (Good Old Days), we would call this guy a ‘personnel manager’ but somewhere along the way that title became less personal even as it sounded more personal. A human resources manager sounds as if it might have something to do with humans, but that soon changed and became HR. It remains there today.

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            Also back in the GOD, the old pioneers and their horses, oxen and whatever animal they could find worked all day every day, often before daybreak and well after the sun went down, to clear the land for their crops and pastures.

            Our ancestors worked like dogs to feed themselves and other people and now people go out and plant trees on that same land while buying kiwi from New Zealand and California. In more recent memory, people cleared an entire acre so they could build a house and plant trees where trees had already been growing. Three weeks ago, I watched a front-end loader carry a 2-tonne boulder onto one of those front lawns. Very stylish.

            There is soon to be a new president to the south of us, and I don’t mean Gagetown, and the world will be stuck with a man who exhibits every sign of psychotic behaviour. (There goes my chance for a Green Card.) Everyone who has two elbows also has an opinion as to why Donald Trump won the big prize and the bigger curse.

            I have a few theories as to why he won which, by the way, surprised him more than anyone. I am thinking that the folks on the lower end of the U.S. income scale just got fed up looking at billionaires everywhere but at their house, and thought they would teach the ‘establishment’ a lesson, but they NEVER expected so many other people had the same idea.

            Everybody is scrambling to say that they had predicted he would win and it’s pathetic. Unwillingly, I tune in to American TV networks like CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC as well as the quasi-Fascist Fox New Network just to hear these big sillies swear on two bibles that they had known from the start that Trump would win. Of course I knew it, but I have too much class to mention it.
                                       -end-

Flug is scared of dogs (Dec. 28)

Winter in New Brunswick – what fun!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I am so pleased that it’s winter, aren’t you?

            The idea of getting up in the morning and not putting on 17 layers of clothes is a little crazy anyway; I sure like it when I can’t even go to the woodshed for some organic fuel without bundling up in two parkas.

            Sarcasm aside, there is hope.

            Since I don’t remember a December so cold for many years, I am thinking that Whoever is in Charge of the Seasons simply made a scheduling error. As I write this, the weather outside is frightful, but the idea is delightful that we are suffering through February weather, and when February comes along, the mercury will rise to tolerable levels.

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

            Other notes from an exciting holiday season:

            Donald Trump – yes, I an also tired of hearing that name – has now decided whom he wants in his cabinet and as expected they are all right-wingers. Indeed, he was getting desperate at the end and started looking at the NHL to see if he could find more. I shudder to think of how badly the poorer Americans are going to fare during the next four years. Or possibly eight if he can completely dismantle health care, trade agreements, and the highway system.

            My friend Flug is scared of dogs; therefore he gets bitten a lot. Last week he accompanied me when I visited my great grandmother Berylle and, sure enough, gran’s dog Snake bit Flug right on the nose when he bent over to pat it on the head. The thing is, I had told Flug beforehand that Snake had never in fifteen years so much as bitten a living creature. Flug had thought he was safe. Snake, blind, deaf and near the great mausoleum, made a mighty last lunge and gummed Flug’s proboscis, then died. So not only does Flug have a sore nose, but now he’s on gran’s shoot list. “Where can I get a pit bull?” she asked me.

            Speaking of hearing problems like Snake’s, the government of Sweden has passed a law outlawing silent vehicles, like electric cars, because they can’t be heard by people who can’t hear. That was the reason given by the government. It was all a little confusing to me, because if they can’t hear they wouldn’t pick up the sound of a Mack truck let alone a 2007 Corolla or an electric car.

            Still on the subject of cars, the Uber taxi company, if that’s what they are, was upset recently in the Silicon Valley of California when a self-driving Uber taxi went through a red light. Now I am a little confused about the whole thing. Would I ever get into a self-driving car and trust technology to take me from Grand Falls to the University of North Tilley’s main campus? No. If I have a death wish, I will jump out in front out of an airplane, and I don’t mean on the runway. Has the whole world gone mad, or just stupid?

            Just to go back to the beginning of this subject, imagine if you own an auto manufacturing company and have been trying since the 1980s to make it quieter and quieter until at last you have a nearly silent electric car. Then the government of Sweden steps in and says: “No, your car has to make a noise!” It would ruin my whole day.

            When I was a young gaffer my mother emphasized (nagged) that I should be neat and tidy at all times – you can see how that turned out. Nowadays nobody dares to be neat and tidy, because one is in danger of being labelled OCD. This Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is thought by many to be a bad thing; to be very neat at all times is now something not to be desired, indeed to be scoffed at. I will never be called OCD, but those who are should cherish it.

            I own an acoustic guitar, a Yamaha R235 that I bought from my brother Lawrence a couple of decades ago. I go for months without strumming and attempting to sing (only in my living room when I am alone) and when I do take the guitar out of the case it is rather painful on the old left-hand fingertips because I have always used bronze wound strings. Back when I was a teenager my brother showed me a shortcut; stick my fingertips on a hot stove, just for a quarter- or half-second. That hardens them up, but it still can’t give me a singing voice.

            Last evening I held them on too long. The doctors says I can play the violin by February. Happy New Year.

                                               -end-

WHAT is a 'key grip'? (Dec. 21)

Defining three key jobs existing today 

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Some words or phrases don’t seem to make sense until one looks them up in a dictionary. ‘Pipefitter’? Key grip?

            Down at the club, Kincardine Arms, Flug and I were talking about these amid a general discussion of important topics. We hear about pipefitters, of whom I have known a few, but have never known what they do, exactly. Surely they don’t go around all day and fit pipes together.

            Here at our estate we clean stovepipes once every three weeks or once a month; when we put the pipes back together, are we pipefitters?

            No, according to my (paper) dictionary, a pipefitter is “a tradesperson who installs, assembles, fabricates, maintains and repairs mechanical piping systems”. I’m glad that’s cleared up.

            Now, as to a key grip, a phrase we keep seeing in movie credits. They “coordinate with the electric and camera departments alongside the director of photography to control lighting and camera movement and setup. The key grip directs the crew of grips, many with specialized skills such as dolly grips, crane operators, or special equipment operators”.

            So now we know. And here’s another question that Flug and I asked each other as we sipped our lemonade: What does the word “Arms” refer to in the name of this building that we’re sitting in?

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

            Wednesday evening I must have been in a masochistic mood, because I watched a news and public affairs program called ‘View From Parliament’. Boy, if that’s the view that all our MPs have they don’t make nearly enough money.

            Two cabinet ministers from the present federal Liberal government were on there, and two former cabinet ministers from the Tory party were sitting there as well. The last two had been in Stephen Harper’s cabinet and had been well known for their anti-immigration views. Muslims were a bad lot, they thought, but they didn’t advocate buildings a wall on the 49^th parallel and forcing the U.S. to pay for it.

            Anyway, all four of the politicians were padding their parts and trying to be as confusing as possible, somewhat like an insurance company policy or a page of bank services charges. I made a cup of tea for myself and sat back to enjoy the talking points as they say, what H.D. Thoreau used to call ‘vocal intercourse’.

            “What shall I call this in my column?” I asked myself. In my younger and politer days I would have referred to the conversation as ‘male cow manure’, but I think I’ll call a spud a spud and say it was nothing but bul…

            “Better not print that, Bob,” said Flug, who had been watching me type.

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            I cover a lot of hockey during these winter months (as good a time as any) and often think of the days when I played for the Currie Road Ramblers, whose outdoor rink was only a few miles (yes, I said miles!) from my house in Tilley. Donald Rossignol was the centre on the line I tried to play for and Flug was on there somewhere. Looking over my shoulder again, he said a few minutes ago: “Bob, did you say you played FOR the Currie Road Ramblers? I would have said you played AGAINST them. Hahahaha.”

            Truth to tell, I never really liked Flug.

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            At the Perth Elks Christmas Dinner on Thursday, Dec. 8, I was honoured to receive a 30-year pin, which means that the nation-wide organization has refused to kick me out for three decades.

            Perth Elks and Elks Canada do a huge amount of good, much of it for hearing-impaired kids, a lot for people who have suffered disasters such house fires, and I would like people to realize this.

            The Perth lodge became a reality in the early 1950s when Sewell Shaw and other folks in the area worked liked dogs to get enough people interested and they certainly did, including members from Fort Fairfield and Presque Isle, Maine.

            I joined Perth Elks in May 1978 and dreaded the initiation ceremony; Daryl Goodine and I were set to be initiated the same night and were rather nervous, to say the least. We expected to be attacked by a goat, thrown in the nearby river, shot at, and otherwise ruffed up. We want to the bar about three hours before the ceremony and by the time it arrived we were in no shape to worry. Turned out we had to take an oath and sign a paper and that was it. All that lemonade…I was upset.

            Seriously, if I were to advise anyone to join a service club, I would say join the Elks. One meeting a month to set up activities, and one great dinner every month. I can’t wait for January’s meal.

                                                      -end-

            Merry Christmas everyone, and have a great year!   

Garth Brooks - nice guy (Dec. 14)

The dread disease called Bluetooth

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Some people were pleased to see all that snow as it crashed to the ground on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, but I wasn’t. I loathe winter anyway, and the idea of scooping all that wet heavy snow annoyed me to no end. It must be communism, or something.

            We have three snow scoops here, as the Three Bears might have, going from the largest (that’s me, Papa Bear), to Mama Bear’s scoop, and then to Baby Bear’s, bought when he was about twelve.

            Always the optimist, I started with the largest scoop and it wasn’t long before I re-thought that decision. However, Mama Bear’s scoop was also too much to push, so I went to the smallest. That was all right for five minutes, but then I went up and went into  the kitchen where the real Mama was making some kind of soufflée or baked beans, something like that. “What do you want?” she snarled.

            “Let me have the egg spatula,” I said. Maybe I could push that.

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            I love some of those great old words now mostly lost to the good old days. Yesterday my neighbour on the southwest side, Wormley, stopped by and was telling me about ‘swamping’ his pickup truck on Highway 109 near Quaker Brook. “I knew I was going too fast,” he said, “when I found myself out in the pucker-brush.”

            The other day I drove past the former Tobique Truck Stop restaurant site in Perth-Andover and wondered, not for the first time, why it had to close last year with the loss of 25 or 30 jobs. Correct me if I am wrong, but when Ultramar bought that building, they decided immediately to close the restaurant. Somebody in Montreal or Taiwan or Ohio took a look and said: “close it!” The same thing with the former Foodland grocery store on Fred Tribe Road.

Here’s my suggestion: When a company in Toronto (for example)  decides to rip 30 jobs out of New Brunswick, then 30 people from head office should lose theirs. Names drawn from a hat, etc. That would include everyone from President on down.

            One gets to thinking that rich and successful people are all a bunch of jerks, but now I am sure that several are not. Last week I listened to a radio interview with country music superstar Garth Brooks, who has won every award in the world except Dart Champion of Belgium. It was quite a pleasure to hear him speak clearly – he even used the word ‘whom’ several times – and to demonstrate that he was a guy who thought about other people once in a while. I may even buy his new album – ‘Gunslinger’ – although I am not sure how one goes about slinging a gun.

            We have all figured this out: We live in an age when our phones are smarter than we are. My grandfather, Muff LaFrance (1881-1976), would be appalled at the way people of all ages go to their phones whenever they want to know something. Even I shun Encyclopedia Britannica now and prefer to seek knowledge from Samsung and Motorola. What can be done? Nothing by me. I’m much too lazy to go to my office and lift a heavy book when I can merely consult Mr. Google.

            Sort of along the same line of ‘thought’, in these days that include Donald Trump, I am never sure I am getting real news or fake news, but this story sounds weird enough to be true. In the west Africa country of Ghana, located between Togo and Ivory Coast, organized criminals set up a fake U.S. embassy in the city of Accra and sold REAL visas to the U.S.A. for $6000-$10,000 each. I could see such a thing happening for a short time, but ten years?

            More on technology, my friend Flug (real name Richard LaFrance, no relation) is not exactly a high-tech guy and once in a while he makes a boo-boo when referring to the online world or just about any technological occurrence – setting his car clock for example. Yesterday - or was it day before yesterday - he came running over from his driveway and said: “We gotta do something for Lennie Brann! He’s got some dental problem that sounds bad!”

            Once he calmed down he said he had been lounging (chilling) in his living room when Lennie had called. “I’m driving home from Edmundston,” he told Flug, “but it’s all right. I’ve got Bluetooth.”

Just then my phone rang. It was Lennie asking what had happened to Flug, whom he calls Richie, who had hung up on him. I couldn’t speak with all that laughter filling my mouth.

                                           -end-