DIARY
The
fact is, it ain’t there no more
by
Robert LaFrance
Some people hate Facebook. There’s
no other word for there feeling, unless you want to say ‘despise’ or ‘loath’. I
can understand their hatred, but I find FB a good source of information about whether
Joanne-Lee is planning to make pancakes in the morning or if Jimbo has finally
recovered his sense of smell after inhaling too much ammonia fumes at the
clean-up party next door to the church.
Facebook is valuable – no, vital –
if we want to know what our ‘friends’ are doing. For instance, this morning
about 4:30 I couldn’t sleep and came into my office where coincidentally I am
now, and I went to Facebook.
I learned that my old friend Jeramie
Crookbook had been accused of cheering for Donald Trump at the latter’s
inauguration. It turned out that he had been struck in the head the night
before by a rolling pin. I refer to Jeramie being struck, not Donald Trump. I
doubt if President Trump has ever been struck on the head, but about half the
American people clearly have. Enough said on that.
No, I guess it wasn’t quite enough.
I mentioned journalists and implied that they are very happy about Trump’s
ascension to the U.S. throne (as he sees it). I know I’m quite pleased. Think
of all the stupid things Trump is going to do in the next four years!
George W. Bush, possibly the third
stupidest U.S. president in history, kept us journalists hopping. He said:
"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." Or
how about: " It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the
impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
Trump will simply deny there’s any
pollution and go on from there.
Here in reality land, a race is
going on. A government spokesperson has said that about 19,000 Syrian and other
refugees will be coming to Canada this year, but Hermie Bloch of 201 Green
Street, Silicon Valley, California, has vowed that U.S. emigrants to Canada
will surpass that number by spring.
“We voted against Trump, as did the
majority of the American voters, but there he is,” Bloch said at a recent U.S.
refugee meeting in the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. “Now he’s going to take
his revenge on us.”
************************
To get off the ubiquitous subject of
that gentleman in the White House, I will now drag a few comments out of the
notebook I always carry around with me.
I am
thinking we need to define the phrase “a number of” that we often hear in
newscasts and other places. Reporting on an earthquake in northern Turkey, a
CTV journalist said that, in addition to the deaths near the epicentre, “a
number of residents of the town of Safranbolu were killed…” What number was he
referring to? Was it 27, 14, 91 or some other ‘number’?
Still on the subject of
broadcasting, particularly radio, I wish that those journalists would say to
the interviewees: “Please clear your throat, and don’t interrupt my question
because people can’t understand two people who are talking at the same time.”
Here’s a note I made in late
December, a few days before Christmas: “Flug and his yellow tape”. That
referred to the fact that my friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) who
lives a snail’s sneeze from me, had yellow police tape strung across his
driveway. When I got up about noon one day and saw that, I went over to ask the
former Parliament Hill barber just what was going on. “I figure that out of
every ten people who come in my driveway, I don’t want to see six of them. That
tape should give them a hint.” I told him that surely what would happen was
that those six would barge in anyway, and he wouldn’t even see the other four,
and so it turned out. I’m rarely wrong when it involves human psychology.
A week ago I went to see a show
uptown and there in the front row, as always, was Glenna Foreplaigh. She was
videotaping the show. Her daughter Vivian was sitting beside her. Talking to
Vivian later, I said it was nice that Glenna taped the shows so she could see
them later. “She doesn’t see them later and she doesn’t see them when they’re
going on,” Vivian said. “She’s got a closet full of videotapes and DvDs and has
never seen then.”
A lot of things in life aren’t as
they seem, did you ever notice? Of course you did. Some of the phrases we use
don’t make a whole lot of sense. Canned milk, for example is labelled ‘evaporated milk’. Excuse me, but
if it’s evaporated it ain’t there no more, right? Then there’s that barrel of
‘burnt oil’ that is found in every repair garage. If it’s burnt it also, like
evaporated milk, ain’t there no more.-end-
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