DIARY
Sex
and violence? Or sects and violins?
by
Robert LaFrance
My friend Flug is a bit of a prude
and any of his 17 (or is it 18?) wives would agree with that assessment.
We were walking down to the club one
night last week when a blue Ford pickup truck came slowly up the hill. On the
back were three young, nubile-looking (I think that means sexy or ‘hot’ as they
say) women, and Flug was outraged at their dress or lack of it.
“Girls nowadays don’t know how to
dress,” he roared. “Don’t they realize they’re acting like fallen women?”
“Geez Flug,” I said. “As soon as I
get back to the house and the Internet, I am going to write The Language Maven
website and tell them that Queen Victoria is still alive. That’s the way people
talked in Victorian times.”
He just mumbled something and then
we looked up the road where one of the women had fallen off the truck and had
rolled into the ditch. We started running up to help her, but she got up
laughing. She looked right at Flug and said: “Well hello!” and when I saw him
smile I knew I was looking at wife #18 (or is it 19?).
Imagine, Flug marrying a fallen
woman…she might even be a strumpet and a harlot.
*************************
It doesn’t matter where I turn,
there is the ubiquitous Donald Trump.
I tuned in to the Mensa Network this
morning to hear the voice of the U.S. president who was lecturing the
interviewer, and apparently was doing it in Latin, a language I had studied in
school.
“It’s summum bonum that we have to
look at,” he was saying. “The highest good for the greatest number. I say we
get to work on that wall right away and quit talking about the size of the
crowd at my inauguration. Size matters, but it summum bonum in the end.”
Then the announcer’s voice came on:
“And that is an example of what Donald Trump will do for America during his
first few weeks in office. He plans to put in a new wall between his Oval
Office in the White House and the Secret Service offices. Dominus vobiscum. May
the Lord be with you, Donald.”
****************************
I really think that some people
should leave the humour business – especially puns – to those who are well
trained in it.
I refer to CBC Radio News reporter
Shane Fowler, who recently did a story on a gathering of 10,000 to 15,000 crows
that have been hovering around downtown Fredericton when, in other years, they
set up housekeeping all winter at the UNB woodlot up the hill. Since the
collective noun for a group of crows is ‘murder’ he referred to ‘this large
murder of crows’ that had moved from downtown back up the hill to the UNB
woods.
No one he had spoken to, scientists or sidewalk
theorists, could account for this sudden uprooting of birds from the downtown.
To sum up, he said: “It is a murder
mystery that may never be solved”.
*************************
As a freelance journalist, I write for publications
all over the place. I have even had a photo in Newsweek magazine (April 1983,
of former jockey Ron Turcotte) and usually the editors and I don’t talk much,
but on Tuesday I received an email from an editor in Manitoba. He said I should
use the word ‘alleged’ a lot more.
“For example,” he said, “if you were reporting on
the Whitechapel killings in London in 1888, you should say: Jack the Ripper,
the ALLEGED killer, and you shouldn’t even use the name Jack because the killer
– I mean alleged killer - may actually be named Jack and you would influence
the jury by using that name.”
“Don’t you mean the ALLEGED jury?” I asked. “We have
no proof that those twelve good men and true are the jury, or just people who
came in off the street to use the washroom.”
“Well, I…”
“And furthermore,” I said, “maybe some of them are
called Jack, and then the finger of suspicion would point at them. How could a
jury of Jacks convict a prisoner named Jack?”
***********************
It used to be, when I was growing up, that when we
took a job with a big company, one could reasonably expect to live out his
working days getting a paycheque from that same company. That has all changed
now. I saw a recent TV ad that referred to a company that had been ‘serving
Canadians since 2002.”
That’s why I was so
surprised this morning when I ran across the name of a Vancouver company I used
to work for when I lived out there. (I guess that’s logical enough.) Russell
Food Equipment, where I enjoyed many a happy lunch hour trading quips with my
co-workers, is still going strong and is indeed flourishing. Very unusual.-end-
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