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.
**************************
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.
**************************
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-
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