Let's try rim-less basketball (March 29/17)

DIARY

The Queen is coming to Scotch Colony!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Looking at the calendar this morning, I noticed that it was spring already. That winter certainly flew by, didn’t it?

            Well no, it didn’t. Although at my advanced age the time fairly zooms by, that winter we just endured did not. I just hope spring doesn’t arrive too soon; the residents of Perth-Andover know what I mean by that.

            As I mentioned in a recent column, I can now see some of the soil of my front garden even as I type these timeless words. I can picture where a few short rows of radish, lettuce, and beets will be, and a large bed of Touchon and Chantenay carrots. Just over there by the rhubarb patch will be some Caribe potatoes – unless I decide to plant another, earlier, variety like Eramosa.

            To make a radical shift in the subject of this column – people say ‘quantum leap but like me they don’t know what they are talking about – I want to change to pro basketball: I am not a fan of that game that hurts the neck to watch, but occasionally when I am too lazy to change the channel I will look in on an NBA game.

            When I was a kid and after my brother bought a 21” black-and-white television (for a mere $550 in 1961) I used to watch the Boston Celtics and their great players Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, Tom Heinsohn and others; I never ONCE saw one of those players perform a dunk shot and then hang onto the rim. Not once.

            Now it seems that the players do it after almost any shot, or when they just feel like hanging around.

            Here’s my idea to put an end to this very annoying habit: Fine any player who does that one thousand dollars. Even if that were only two minutes salary for those guys, after a while it would make a bit of a hole in their income. Enough so they would have to vacation in Minto rather than Aruba.

            The reason I used to watch Boston Celtics was that in the early days of TV in my area of Victoria County we could only get two channels – WAGM in Presque Isle and CHSJ in Saint John. After a time we could get the ‘educational’ channel that is now PBS or MPBN, but for sports we pretty much had to watch WAGM.

            Therefore, when I watched baseball, I had to watch the Boston Red Sox whose big names were Ted Williams (who often fished in northern New Brunswick), Jackie Jensen, Carl Yastrzemski, Vic Wertz, and two guys with wonderful names – Rip Repulski and Pumpsie Green. Imagine going through life with the name Rip Repulski! There was even a pitcher named Gene Conley who played in the NBA in the baseball off-season. I’ll bet he didn’t grab the rim and hang on like a mindless mule. By the way, he played the Celtics.

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

            Back to the present, I hate to say anything nice about anybody, but I must say I certainly admire Queen Elizabeth II who, at the age of 164, is still going. I was about to say ‘going strong’, but the patient and longsuffering readers of this column can only be asked to believe so much.

            Her husband, Phil, is also still going at the age of about 168, but he’s starting to show his age. I had a car like that once, a 1961 Falcon. It looked great for years but after I hit that hydro pole in Drummond, it started going downhill. Literally.

            Back to good Queen Bessie, I tuned in to BBC-TV last evening to see the Royal One opening a new shopping centre in Bolton, which is just outside Manchester, the home of my favourite football (soccer) team, Manchester United.

            The announcer was saying that the queen rarely opened shopping malls any more,  but this particular one covered about fifty hectares and had 1200 stores, even bigger than West Edmonton Mall. So she wasn’t really opening a shopping centre; it was a city.

            Here in Victoria County, New Brunswick, named for another queen long ago, we don’t get many visits from British Royalty, but that is soon going to change. My friend Flug, unbeknownst to me, started an email correspondence with QEII back in the fall, and, would you believe, he has persuaded her to come over to the Scotch Colony and Tilley this summer to officially open two new pubs, the Colony Arms and North Tilley Pub, the latter built on the site of the now demolished Block X School where I had so much fun in my youth.

            Asked how he had managed to persuade the queen to come over and lend her prestige to what might not be considered important businesses, Flug said: “Well, I may have slightly exaggerated the size of the two enterprises.” I didn’t ask any more questions. It remains to be seen what her reaction will be this summer when she gets here.
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Canadians can't be THAT fat! (March 22/17)

DIARY

Red toes? That is (or are) chilblains

                        by Robert LaFrance

            “But officer,” I said. “I was wearing my glasses when I hit that bridge! They just  happened to be my reading glasses and not my regular glasses.”

            That was my friend Flug talking. He gets himself in some awful scrapes, doesn’t he? I don’t know if, in my nearly 69 years as an inmate of this universe, I have ever heard of anyone driving around while wearing his reading glasses. The closest was the day that Aunt Polly, then in her twenties, drove the Farmall tractor to town while under the impression that it was a Model T.

            It turned out that there wasn’t much damage to Flug’s car – a 1991 Volvo, and they’re tough as old shoe-leather – but his pride took a hit. Off course the boys at the club wouldn’t let that rest.

            They won’t let Donald Trump rest either. Most of them are set up to receive the U.S. president’s tweets. “It all reminds me of something I learned at the University of Edinburgh,” commented the Perfessor, who had attended that school for a weekend back in the 1970s. “There’s a Robert Burns poem that refers to a child who listens to everything. “There’s a chiel among you taking notes,” Burns wrote. That sounds like Donald Trump, who is like a child who just says what he feels like that day.”

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

            To make a radical shift in subject matter, I now want to assert that weather forecasts should be banned and withheld from everyone except school bus drivers and school district officials. We don’t want the kiddies to freeze to death in some sylvan snowdrift.

            As to the rest of us, we are missing out on a lot of activities because of weather forecasts that promise doom if we venture past our woodshed doorstep. Let there be a public forecast of a mere 40 or 50 centimetres of snow accompanied by hurricane-like winds and people postpone or even cancel events that could have taken place.

            Take the Kincardine Club Dart Tournament for example. When we heard the March 14 forecast that we here in the Scotch Colony were about to get snow up the yin-yang, we could have cancelled the tournament, but did we do that?

            No, we did not. Instead, Lefty the bartender simply filled his 1982 Gremlin to the gunwales with lemonade and snacks and we carried on. Each of us brought snowshoes in case the electricity took flight and we had to trudge to the privy-outhouse in a blizzard. As it happened, the power didn’t go away (kudos to NB Power and last summer’s roadside bush and tree cutting) so we didn’t need the snowshoes.

            Good thing. When Jamie Gleeson ploughed out the club driveway the next day he ran over them all.

            My point is, we have to toughen up. A mere 60 cm of snow (which is less in feet and inches) shouldn’t slow us down from our appointed rounds. By the way, if you see any of the spouses of dart players, you could mention that they are still at the club. Jamie pushed all the snow in front of the main door so everyone has to stay there and drink lemonade until spring.

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

            Listening to a CBC Radio documentary one recent evening, I was interested to learn that we Canadians are fat. Oh, they used the words obese, portly, stocky etc. but there at the nub and the gist of it was the word fat.

            “We Canadians are carrying around half a billion pounds of excess weight,” the so-called scientist told the radio interviewer. “Just think what we could do with all that fat. We could use it to run power plants and all sorts of other industrial facilities. Why, it would be a boon to us all!”

            It might be a boon to some, I said to myself, but what about the Canadian economy? The sugar industry would collapse and fast-food places would cease to exist except in our fevered imaginations as we drool over photos of double bacon cheeseburgers. People would start buying cars that run on fat instead of gasoline and we can imagine the problems there. The funeral businesses would tank because no one would die any more.

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

            I mentioned the Perfessor. Last week he had an interesting comment about his feet. To paraphrase the late comedian George Carlin: when you find yourself talking about feet, there must be some subjects you’ve missed.

            The Perfessor said he had ‘chilblains’ at the ends of his toes that were quite red from enduring too much cold. He offered to show me, but I nipped that idea in the bud.

            What was most interesting was the list of treatments: Friar’s balsam, a weak iodine solution, a mixture of eggs, wine and fennel root and warm garlic. I wished him well, then remembered an appointment I had in Saskatoon.
                                            -end-

I wasn't lying about Flug (March 15/17)

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The last 2016 apple is now a memory

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Believe it or not, it’s sometimes a sad thing to eat an apple, particularly if it’s almost spring and the apple you’ve just eaten is the last one from the crop of the fall before.

            Because my Macfree apples were the ones that kept the longest, I saved them until the last. Anybody who knows anything about apples knows that McIntosh are among the first to suffer the ravages, and Cortlands, while fairly long keepers, do not hold a candle to Macfrees. Novamacs are good too. Both are allegedly from the original McIntosh, but neither has the slightest resemblance to it, except for being spherical.

            I started my orchard in 1986, two years after we bought this estate from the United Church. It was the house the ministers lived in over the years, and I did my best to continue upholding their traditions.

            (“You mean their use of certain words?” asked Flug, who had been looking over my should as I typed this trenchant text.)

            The first two trees I planted, ones bought from a nursery in Fredericton, were McIntosh and Cortland, and they turned out to be two of my worst mistakes. Trees of those types are HIGHLY susceptible to scab. If you don’t know what scab is, the name tells it all.

            Hundreds of trees later (I usually have about 80 trees blossom each May although I once had close to 400) I know better. Since I started full-time work in 2002, I haven’t had time to care for them, so to speak, and many have passed on. Deer and bears have ruined more.

            Back to the point, eating that last 2016 apple, the Macfree, gave me a sense of nostalgia, but then what doesn’t when you’re old like me?

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

            Not to actually have a column without mentioning Donald Trump, the original Wild Man of the City, I was recently impressed by his second try to ban Muslims from the hallowed shores of the U.S.A.

            It seems he actually had lawyers look at this one. However, it’s already had casualties. He took Iraq off that famous list of seven countries and it was personal. It turned out that one of his old pals from his days in New York, Ned Amalfi, had somehow got caught up in that first 1930s Germany-type sweep, and had gotten sent back to Iraq.

            So Trump took Iraq off the list. One of Trump’s aides asked why, and ‘The Donald’ said: “It’s because of Iraq Ned,” whereupon the aide, who has a deadly fear of spiders, fainted. He thought Trump had said ‘arachnid’. Talk about unintended consequences!

            Not to spend too much time on U.S. politics, but I should mention to those who have often asked me who my friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) is, that there really was a Flug. I just heard of him yesterday. He was Jim Flug who was prominent in 1970s Washington as a lobbyist and generally a friend of Senators. You can Google ‘James Flug’.

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

            As spring – or as I call it, SPRING! – approaches, I am eager to get fishing in the local streams as well as some in foreign countries like Upper Kintore, Leonard Colony and Carlingford.

            The famous English dictionary guy, Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), had an opinion about fishing and it didn’t quite agree with mine. He lets the catfish out of the bag with his definition of a fishing rod. It is “a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other”.

            Someone else who really enjoys brook fishing is my friend Angus P. Pielder, an actor who recently completed a successful run with his one-man play (“The Man who Didn’t Care”) about former NB Premier Bernard Lord.

            That fact that Premier Lord dropped the least amount of asphalt and chipseal ever to have occurred or not occurred in a (blessedly short) 4-year mandate, figures prominently in the play.

            Angus wasn’t being humorous though, when he called on Friday. Although he rarely watches TV, he said that he had just finished ‘viewing’ (that’s how actors talk) a car commercial that started out showing the sentence “real people, not actors”.

            “I’m a real people, aren’t I Bob?” he moaned. Then he launched into Shylock’s monologue from the Shakespeare play Merchant of Venice, ending with: “…if you prick me, do I not bleed?”

            Having seen him curse when he lost fish, I agreed that he was in fact a real people, but, I told him, his cause would gain a little more credibility if he didn’t launch into Shakespeare every whipstitch.

            “You’re right Bob,” he said. “I will watch that. It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.” And with that Charles Dickens quote from A Tale of Two Cities, he took a bow over the phone and thanked me for being a good audience.
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Potholes CAN be refilled, you know (March 8)

DIARY

Whatever happened to ‘shedule’?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            The snowmobilers have had a good winter I think. I could hear them every week  as they cavorted through the woods and enjoyed all that snow, but I would think that at times there was a little too much of the white stuff.

            I am writing this on the first day of March and it’s raining, but as I walked around to get some cobwebs removed I could hear at least half a dozen machines going through the woods. Occasionally I could see one or two of them crossing a bare patch and it seemed as if they went part of the time on bare ground.

            I cannot mention snowmobiles without mentioning the Yamaha 292 I bought,  back around 1980. It was the first and last one I ever owned – or should I say it owned me? Every time I climbed on it, something fell off, sometimes even me. My chief mechanics were my nephews Terry and John, for whom the machine always worked well.

            Winter doesn’t ‘turn my crank’ anyway, as they say. Now that we are into March (which came in like a spayed bobcat and neither a lion nor a lamb) I can see the light at the end of the stone wall. Another thing that doesn’t turn my crank is the idea of fighting my way to Florida for a few days of sunshine. All the time I would be there I would worry about the trip home; will there be big delays because of weather or Trumpism?

            The big story this week, in lieu of something important, is that vinyl records are making a comeback. I guess all those records we all have in boxes in our basements can now be brought out into the sunshine and sold for scandalous sums.

            Only last evening I was listening to one of those fabulous groups from the 1950s and wondering if the record had been recorded in an outhouse or in somebody’s woodshed. The quality, on a scale of one to ten, was minus 17. Why in the world would anyone want to listen to a vinyl record when they can have a CD or DvD with crystal clear sound?

            Of course it all comes down to advertising. Sunrise Records bought HMV Records and the Sunrise owner and president Doug Putman has been everywhere – radio, TV, print – and telling us all that we should go back to the vinyl recordings. He doesn’t mention why, except that a record is something we can actually hold in our hands, replacing digital recordings that aren’t touchable. Seems to me a CD is as touchable as a vinyl record though.

            As the faithful and longsuffering reader knows, I sometimes criticize D.O.T. (who will NEVER be D.T.I. to me) but I want them to know I am just kidding. In fact, D.O.T. should have some kind of an Oscar for the quality of the potholes we are now seeing along the secondary roads.

            I recently drove to Bath on Highway 105 and was impressed by some of the craters I avoided. Did I really see the roof of a Chevy Cruz in one pothole, just south of the Victoria-Carleton county line? I’m not sure if it’s rocket science or not, but it seems to me that when bad potholes appear they should be filled with some sort of material so that a Mack truck can’t lose a tire in there. If vehicles knock out that material in a week, then perhaps D.O.T. could go back and fill them again.

Once again, I emphasize that I do not criticize the people who actually do the work out there, but government policies that assure our driving on bad roads. Perhaps the government, instead of hiring consultants all over the place, can fill the potholes with consultants. Very organic too.

            There should be some kind of law that stores cannot sell or even display garden seeds until the middle of March at the earliest.

            One day in late February I was coming out of Clarks’ grocery in Perth-Andover when my eye lit on their garden seed display that had been there for weeks. I don’t know how many weeks; I had been trying to avoid looking at the radish, lettuce, pea and flower seeds because I just go home and tremble, looking out at the place where last year’s garden gave me tons of grub. Then we had a bit of a thaw and some rain and I could see the actual garden soil. Not an inspiring sight.

            In the U.S.A. – and I see I can’t avoid mentioning that country – I notice there is a department called the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Looking at a recent photo of President Trump’s cabinet members, I couldn’t help but think “Old Male Billionaires”.

            One last paragraph, this one on words THEY have tried to get us to say and couldn’t. For quite a while we were told by those who should have known better that the word ‘schedule’ was pronounced ‘shedule’. That didn’t take, and now I think those who wanted us to say ‘left-tenant’ when we meant ‘lieutenant’ have pretty much given up.
                                    -end-

Those B-52 garage door openers (March 1/17)

DIARY

Tom Brady or God? Which would you choose?

                        by Robert LaFrance

About two weeks ago I heard a story that involved Loring Air Force Base that used to be located near Caribou, Maine. Oh, how I enjoyed those huge B-52 jets going over our house in Tilley at about a thousand feet altitude. The windows shook and I shook worse, but until the U.S. government closed that Strategic Air Command base in the early 1990s, none of them crashed on our house – which exists today at 210  Churchland Road. There were at least three crashes over the years, but not on us.

That story I heard recently not only involved Loring AFB’s B-52 bombers, but it also involved automatic garage door openers.

A chap I know in Perth-Andover was saying that he had been phoned by a man who lived near Florenceville and wondered why his garage doors kept opening up, seemingly on their own. He went down to investigate and no one could figure it out until a few people were standing outside the garage one day when a B-52 came by and apparently had its electronic homing equipment fixed on the Loring beacon which fixed the position of aircraft.

AS soon as the B-52 got overhead of the garage in question, up goes the automatic garage door, and the same thing happened to the nearby neighbour’s garage door. They had found the solution to the mystery. The cure? Fasten down the garage doors so they couldn’t open until they were unfastened.

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

            The late comedian George Carlin had a routine about people who leave stupid announcements on their telephone answering machines.

            “You have reached the phone of Ethera and Minestrone. We’re not home at the moment, but please feel free to leave a number where you can be reached and the subject of your call.”

            That was an example of a (at least) semi-reasonable answering machine message. Now listen to the one I heard day before yesterday:

            “You have phoned Silly Bird and her husband Clive and also the home of our cat Minerva, who has never had fleas. Our kids Billy and Verticao are here too, so if the message is for one of us, please phone 555-0344 which has more room on its answering machine because with this long announcement there is no more sp-”.

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

            From my notebook, I drag the Latin phrase “morituri salutimus”. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is urging all of us to never give up. In English it means: “Nothing is too late ‘til the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.” Easy for him to say; he had never heard of Donald Trump.

            In the same book was a quote from the old master Epicurus himself, who said that “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”

Even back in 380 B.C. (and I don’t mean Vancouver, etc.) Epicurus knew that today’s vividly consumer society was unevitable. “The commercial world has an uncanny ability to make us think we need things we don’t.”

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

Many times, when people refer to the most famous city of Italy, somewhere in the conversation comes the fact that Rome is built on seven hills – Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Viminal and Quirinal – with Palatine being the most famous. My question is this: how come I can name all seven of those hills and yet I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning?

Another note: In Roman mythology, twin brothers Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, had been raised by wolves. What kind of a scrape would they have been in if they had been born in Minto, NB, where there hasn’t been a wolf since 1971? If they had been raised by a family of skunks, Rome (and Minto) would have had a far different smell over the years. One tends to idolize Mum and Dad.

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

I looked in a few times on the recent Super Bowl game over there in the U.S. of A. and saw that at one point Atlanta was leading New England by a score of 21-0. Somehow the Patriots (perhaps it was that name) and their quarterback Tom Brady came back to win 34-28 and he continues to be someone from another planet.

Just wondering…Among American football fans, if each one of them had the choice between being Tom Brady or being God, which would they choose?

I hope no one takes that as being sacrilegious or blasphemous or some other “ous”, because it only referred to the average American football fan’s devotion to the game. We must remember the origin of the word ‘fan’…fanatic.
                                              -end-

Hitler's favourite book - mein column? Feb. 22

DIARY

What to do with my encyclopediae?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            First off, I have no idea – and don’t want to learn – what the plural is of the word ‘encyclopedia’, as in Britannica. The important point is, I have two of them and have no idea how to get rid of them now that the whole world except Flug has gone digital.

            One is a 1939 version and refers to Adolph Hitler as ‘a Bavarian politician’ and the other is of 1981 vintage. I bought the earlier one at a yard sale somewhere, but for the second one I paid through the nose (That doesn’t sound very sanitary, does it?) in 1981, which makes sense. Hitler was described somewhat differently in that one.

            I have started reading Hitler’s favourite book, Mein Kampf, which outlines his plan for world domination in clear prose, much as a certain U.S. politician did last year, but I guess the difference would be that Hitler didn’t change his mind every time the wind changed direction in Berlin.

            Back to the encyclopediae, I would like to get rid of them to a willing buyer, preferably someone who likes to read. That’s important you know. Just a warning though: the 1939 edition has some slight water damage. If it had been worse Hitler would probably have hailed from Minto.

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

            Here are a few idle comments gleaned from the notebook I carry with me always, even in the bath, if I ever took one.

            I’m kidding. I took my February bath only last week.

            First subject: What is your definition of a friend? Is it someone who will support you – but not necessarily agree – whatever your views or however much lemonade you have imbibed? Is it someone who doesn’t forget you even though you sometimes forget him or her? I think my friend would tell me if my fly were down just as I go up to make an important speech to the Perth Elks, or tell me about the spinach between my teeth or about the small piece of material caught on my nose. We should always clean up after a nasal battle.

            I have another little note here; I wrote U-s-a. Now why would I make a note of those three letters? It’s a little general (not referring to Napoleon) because that huge country to our south has a millions subjects to discuss.

            Then I remembered. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, people here in North America used to buy things made in Japan, which was a synonym for “cheap junk”. This was long before the Japanese decided to start making quality products that actually lasted. (I have high hopes for our Toyota Corolla.)

            The reason I had the entry ‘Usa’ in my notebook was because it referred to a small city on the island of Kyushu, Japan. Many manufacturers moved there so they could put the words ‘Made in USA’ on their products to be sold here in North America. If you don’t believe me, look it up on Google.

            New subject: We have been hearing for a long time about a ‘carbon tax’ or ‘the cap and trade system’ and I can count on the fingers of one foot the number of persons who can define those phrases. Finally, as Yogi Berra would say, I looked it up somewhere. I think the first phrase means that industries (or cattle that contribute methane) that pollute have to pay, which means WE pay. The same goes for the other phrase, which means we all have to go ‘cap in hand’ to the welfare office.

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

            Other notes:

            I used to have a cell phone, or a cellphone if you prefer. A few years ago I bought a ‘smartphone’ which indeed is much smarter than the cellphone was. Now I have a problem. When I refer to my phone, I feel a little arrogant when I call it a smartphone, especially if I am talking to someone with a mere cellphone. I think I’ll just say ‘mobile phone’ now.

Three days ago I pulled in to a gas station in the city and one of those huge ‘pickup’ trucks pulled in at the other side of the two pumps. The driver quickly filled the truck and went inside to pay tribute. He had gone by the time I went inside to pay because, of course, I had been talking. My bill was $136.23. Something wrong somewhere. I didn’t think the Toyota took that much gas. I guess I’ll go see Clyde at the garage.

Last evening on the game show Jeopardy, one of the big winners, Lisa Schlitt, a microbiologist, was beaten out after winning $139,000, but something didn’t add up there either, just as it had not at the gas pump. I looked at her standing beside Alex Trebeck and other contestants and, although she had been introduced as a microbiologist, she didn’t look any smaller than the others.
                                                  -end-