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.
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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-”.
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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.
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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-
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