Einstein wasn't so smart (August 9)

DIARY

Summer observations from here

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Scientific geniuses like Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were alleged to be quite bright, but I’ll bet neither one of them can explain why, every year, it only takes about two weeks to go from April 15^th to August 9^th. I – and many others - can’t figure out why it takes a year to get from the last of November to the first of May.

            Although he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a rocket scientist, Albert Einstein was a fairly smart fellow. Intelligent anyway; I don’t know how smart he was. I refer to the present day questioning of his Theory of Relativity – E=MC². Scientists now say he was wrong in several of his theories but I’m not convinced. Not that I would have the vaguest clue what any of them is talking about. It’s like all those theories of Sigmund Freud who has been proven wrong in many of HIS theories. I think I’ll just stick to Don Cherry. I know what he’s saying even if he doesn’t.

            Venezuela is in the news these days because a lot of people want President Maduro to resign and shoot himself. He has declined that suggestion. During recent  protests the government held an election that was boycotted by the opposition parties. I have never in my 69.2 years on this planet heard of an election boycott accomplishing anything. Does this make sense? You refuse to take part in an election and leave the field wide open for the guy already in there.

            Bottled water. Most people believe it comes from a sylvan and pristine spring in the middle of Labrador or the Rockies, but it’s really just filtered water, almost certainly less safe than tap water. For example, bottled-water plants must test for coliform (poop) bacteria just once a week; city tap water needs to be tested many dozens of times a month. Tap water in most big cities must be disinfected and filtered to remove pathogens, and tested for various viruses. Bottled water does not have to be. Then there are all those plastic bottles.

            On the last day of July, I played golf, sort of, in Plaster Rock with a bunch of elderly gentlemen (probably all younger than I am) and quite enjoyed it. The three chaps I played with did not laugh once at my bizarre shots, and that’s what I call class. There was only one downside on the day and that was the removal of all those groundhog and raccoon bodies from the woods where many of my drives (and putts) ended up. Like the concept of boycotts in the previous paragraph, I cannot figure out how I can aim straight ahead and have the ball end up behind me.

            One of these days I am going to write a very large book called Big Lies of the 21^st Century. Prominent in the book will be this statement that we have all heard from our telephones: “Your call is important to us.”

            One reason that we Canadians should be very thankful to Donald Trump is that in the eyes of almost every other country in the world Canada has now risen about 34 points. People appreciate the fact that Canada’s leaders, though weird at times, don’t tweet. Certain winged creatures should tweet, but that bird in the White House should stick to the ‘reality’ show that is his life. The way the United States is going, Canada is  looked upon as a bastion of sanity and decorum, even if we don’t deserve it. After all, we have Don Cherry.

            Many city folks are under the impression that country living is not dangerous, that a place like Victoria County, NB, is safer than the mean streets of Toronto or Winnipeg. They are wrong. Picking raspberries yesterday morning, I popped one into my mouth without looking and managed to also take in a hornet. He, she or it promptly informed me that he wasn’t (and would never be) on my menu. The swelling has now gone down.

            A chap driving by here on Thursday stopped and asked for directions to Bon Accord Seed Farm and we, in the style of Tilley where I was born, got to talking. His home is in Germany and looks down on the Rhine River which is a heavy traffic area. He could not get over the sight of the empty St. John River, once known as ‘the Rhine of North America’. “You haff such a beautiful river and don’t even use it,” he said. “There should be many boats taking advantage of that wide river. Every family should own a houseboat.” He obviously didn’t realize that New Brunswickers are too busy 4-wheeling  to notice a little thing like a river.

            The English language is a weird bird all right. If there’s a propane, why isn’t there an ‘antipane’? Also, why does the word ‘flammable’ mean the same as ‘inflammable’? Don Cherry and I are looking into it.

                                              -end-

Greetings from France! (August 2)

DIARY

Summer health, wellness and other topics

                        by Robert LaFrance

            A decade or so ago, someone in the provincial government of New Brunswick decided that the Department of Health should be renamed the Department of Health and Wellness. I just remembered that and have been trying for some time to figure out the difference between health and wellness. If you know, email me at BobBewildered@W-Mail.ca. Kidding.

            My friend Flug’s nephew Igor joined the Canadian Armed Forces last December and did what no man should ever do – Igor asked his friend Arnie to look after his, Igor’s,  girlfriend, and don’t let any male predator get near her. Of course we know immediately what happened – Arnie and Igor’s girl Sheila got together and co-signed the ‘Dear John Letter’ to Igor who was serving on a frigate in the north Atlantic. Arnie added a little note at the bottom: “Thanks a lot for the present, old buddy!” Igor didn’t get the note until his ship stopped at Marseilles, France for supplies. He smiled, because Arnie’s former girlfriend Julianne was waiting at a church on Rue d’Arbres, Marseilles, where they would be married. Igor and Julianne had been planning this since last summer. Devious or what?

            Someone asked me last week what was my favourite poem. Since my youth my favourite one has been “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening” by Robert Frost, with number two on my hit parade being “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal” by Rudyard Kipling. There! Now you know all about me. Except for the word ‘snowy’ in the first one, those poems are top dogs in my book. In my younger days, when I wandered around Canada from east to west to far north, I often read the Sestina poem that ends like this: “It’s like a book I think, this bloomin’ world, that you can read and care for just so long, until you get the page you’re reading done, and turn another, likely not so good, but what you’re after is to turn ‘em all!”

            I have mentioned before in these pages that I have got to be the worst slob in Christendom and have seen no reason to revise that assessment. I put on a pair of clean trousers and within minutes I have spilled something on them – almost always something that won’t come out in the wash. If I had more than two shirts I would have to change every hour because of the dirt and stains. My first wife was in despair because she did the laundry (and still does, since I remain married to her against all odds) but it says in the fine print of the marriage contract “thou shalt put up with that klutz”. One day I heard her talking to a friend and saying: “You know, marriage isn’t a word; it’s a sentence.”

            It is curious that some people consider that they have a big problem when in fact it’s mere nothing. Last evening the news came on and once again it was Donald Trump, Russia, Canada-US trade talks, North Korea, Putin, global warming, pollution, forest fires and the Russians who have absolutely no shame. Ignoring all that, I spent at least three minutes tracking down and murdering a big fat housefly. Any person’s problem is important to HIM.

            This morning Flug decided he would do some gardening and told his wife Jellaine that he was going uptown to look for a hoe. She misunderstood. Flug should be able to come home by Monday.

            Here in New Brunswick, hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear once again that people who should be in nursing homes are taking up hospital beds at ten times the cost. In that same news report was the remarkable statement that one of these patients would only cost the government $45 a day if he or she had home care. I know that government bureaucrats are much smarter than I, but I wonder why the new Victoria Glen Manor in Perth-Andover had to be built with five fewer beds than the old Manor? Each of the two modules contain 30 beds, but surely someone could have suggested adding another module and making it 90 beds. But as I said, they’re smarter than I am. Aren’t they?

            I had a question for Flug, since he’s also smarter than I am: “What is the different between heart surgery and open heart surgery?” I was assuming that in the latter case the chest is opened up, but I was put right by my old friend, who used to be a barber on Parliament Hill and had several surgeons among his clientele.

            “Not for the first time, Bob,” he said kindly, “you don’t know your bum from a hole in the ground. It’s not called open heart surgery until the surgeon works on your heart while using bypass equipment, like a heart-lung bypass machine…Got any lemonade?”

                                            -end-

No more cooking from scratch (July 26)

DIARY

“If this guy tries to predict the weather, call the cops!”

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I receive many (one a month) letters from readers who are either irate about something I’ve written or who say they will defend to the death or thereabouts my right to say it. Others point out things that I never would have thought of.

            Rolling pins, for example. A woman in Four Falls wrote to me about the rolling pins that I often mention, since my wife often whacks me upside the head with one. “Do you realize that most housewives today wouldn’t know a rolling pin from a pair of cowboy boots?” wrote Mrs. Emma Doolittle. “Yet you prattle on about your wife and her rolling pin.

            “You see, housewives don’t cook from scratch any more,” the letter continued. “The most ambitious ones tear open a microwaveable package and blast it with radio waves. To most people a stove oven is something to store their pots and pans in, from the old days of their grandmas.”

            First of all, she is the one who used the word ‘housewife’, a noun I would not dare to try around here. I do agree with Mrs. Doolittle though: neither men nor women these days cook from scratch and in this household we rarely cook any other way.

            Still on that subject, a few weeks ago I prevented a murder. A young woman stopped by here around supper time so my wife invited her to stay for a meal. “Where did you buy this fish chowder?” she asked, and narrowly escaped sudden injury. That wasn’t close enough I guess; when the cake arrived she asked my wife where she bought the cake mix and was the frosting from a can?

            It reminded me of the time, almost two months after my wife had borne our second child. In a store uptown, the clerk asked her when the baby was due. I took one look at how things were going and headed for the door. They say that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’ and while I don’t have either one, I know when to skedaddle.

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

            There was a time when I thought I was quite bright, probably around the age of seven, but I have since been informed many times that such is not the case.

            The most notable example of this occurred when one of my children attended his first day of kindergarten. Up to that point I was the fountain of knowledge. I was the go-to person (as they say) for any information required by anybody here, especially the youngest, who was about to become a scholar.

            I went down to the mailbox (we had one then) to meet his schoolbus, and, incidentally, to meet him, and he was beaming. “Papa, you remember how you said we should only fish when the sky was overcast because the fish could see us? Well, Mrs. Grumpski says that’s nonsense. And also…”

            He listed another five items I had taught him, and explained that I had been wrong on all of them. I expected he would also tell me that Mrs. Grumpski preferred cake mixes to baking from scratch, but even that notable lady hadn’t dared go that far. Rolling pins and kindergarten teachers don’t go together any better than rolling pins and newspaper columnists.

            On the subject of the weather forecasts that are available to us here in Victoria County, NB, many people would say we are lucky because we live close to the U.S. border and so are blessed with all their information as well as that from Environment Canada and The Weather Channel.

            However, it is a mixed blessing, as the old phrase goes, the problem being that with about four conflicting forecasts to choose from, we have an information overload, to use yet another old phrase.

            I tend to choose the forecast from my former employer, Environment Canada, for whom I toiled in the 1970s, but I also watch the Presque Isle, Maine, WAGM-TV forecast of meteorologist Ted Shapiro, who is only occasionly right in spite of the fact that if it weren’t for a line of hills at the border, I could see Presque Isle. Predicting the weather for Canada Day, Shapiro was confident that there would be no rain from dawn until 10:00 pm. It rained all day in Perth-Andover, yet in River de Chute, at the border of Carleton County, it was sunny for several hours, at least at JP’s Restaurant, as a friend told me.

            Amid all this complaining about weather forecasts, I should mention that in 1976 I was a television weather forecaster, probably the most incompetent one ever. Relieving vacationing meteorologists at stations along the Mackenzie River, I found myself in Inuvit, NWT, where the meteorologist had just been flown out for an emergency appendectomy. No more needs to be said, except that after my week there the department ran TV ads for a month: “If this guy tries to predict the weather, call the RCMP”.
                                                      -end-

An old football injury? Really? (July 19)

DIARY

More summer questions with few answers

                        by Robert LaFrance

            If you deliberately include carrots, apples and similar brain-building foods in your diet, with the idea of becoming a smarter person, wouldn’t that be artificial intelligence?

            We are inundated with information about AI through every media from radio to television to Internet, but they always seem to be talking about some kind of electronic device that is really a robot.

            On to another subject – summer is like that – I should mention that my old friend Flug is laid up with what he calls ‘an old football injury’. We were supposed to go fishing at Trout Brook (one of the 27 in the Maritimes) but he called that off because he was limping so badly. Of course I had to ask what his ‘old football injury’ was and, eventually, he told me. He had been watching the 2006 Grey Cup game and tripped over a coffee table, making toothpicks out of it and spraining his beer mug.

            Some say my own diet is a little weird and different. I usually resent that, but last Friday I decided to make pemmican, that vital food eagerly eaten by old-time voyageurs and others. They made it mostly of meat and some fat but if they had listened to the First Nations people already here, they would have added berries and other taste treats. Anyway, I did make pemmican and it tasted much like a cowboy boot – if I were ever planning to taste one. I gave it to the dog Minnie, who gave me a look and walked away.

            Walking through my 200-tree apple orchard and nearby fields, I am struck by the almost total absence of ripe wild strawberries. Three weeks ago the field was almost white with the blossoms, but they have developed into – well, nothing. I can’t figure out why all those blossoms didn’t translate or transmute into a plethora of tasty fruit. Anyone who has an explanation please write, phone, text, tweet Instagram etc.

            The rest of my crops are doing well, as is this year’s crop of convertibles. The nice weather (between showers) of June and July seems to spawn the things. Males between the ages of 45 and 60 seem most susceptible to the purchase of a convertible Trans Am, Grand Am or other kinds of ‘Am’. I sure hope they are able to convert back to car mode when it starts raining.

            When I did finally get fishing last week, I caught a 10-inch trout (even bigger in metric) and was thinking about throwing him back. Why? Because a 6-inch trout tastes so much better. See how perverse we humans are? And further on fishing, I was wondering two weeks ago when I heard about the wicked hailstorms in Plaster Rock, Tilley and Aroostook: what are the fish thinking when those white ice marbles are falling from the sky?

            Bernie Madoff was a New York stockbroker who defrauded investors out of an estimated $64.8 BILLION. Unlike many of his contemporaries who are still running countries or are living in giant estates in Minto, NB, Madoff was caught and actually found guilty of what the government called a Ponzi Scheme. His jail sentence was and is 150 years. Considering the crowd now running the U.S., Madoff will probably be on  parole by next Tuesday.

            If we watch television at all, or listen to the radio or look at a newspaper, we have to keep seeing and hearing the name Trump. A show of hands…who is sick and tired of hearing about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election over there? The latest revelation has been that Donald Trump Jr., who seems like an oxymoron without the oxy, almost openly colluded with agents of the Russian government to dig up scandalous material on Hillary Clinton. With all this talk, the government can’t concentrate on its main job – depriving its poorer citizens of health insurance.

            Gardening and working in my orchard are two jobs I enjoy in the summer; in the winter (fast approaching, says the pessimist)            I think about those jobs. Yesterday afternoon I was weeding in my garden that’s located near the house and I had a cordless phone in my pocket. Anybody with any sense would have simply put the house phone on ‘call forward’ to his cellphone, but there you go.

            I kept hearing noises from the cordless phone, as if I were pressing keys, but I ignored them. I was pulling some rough pigweed from around my onions when I fancied I could hear a voice that kept getting louder. Taking the phone from my pocket, I was amazed that someone with an Australian accent seemed to be talking, trying to get someone to answer. If you’ve ever seen the hilarious Clarke and Dawe skit ‘The front fell off’, that’s what he sounded like.

            It turned out I was listening to someone named Leonard in Melbourne, Australia. Ouch! My poor phone bill.

                                                    -end-

A firing squad is involved (July 12)

DIARY

Some summer questions and comments

                        by Robert LaFrance

            A few weeks ago I was interviewing someone and after I finished a query he/she said: “That’s an excellent question.” I felt as if I’d been patted on the head. Trouble is, he or she never did answer it. People rarely answer excellent questions.

            Driving around Bristol two days ago, I saw a very large man on a riding mower and wondered why, since he could stand to lose some weight, he didn’t use a push mower. “Ask yourself that question,” said my friend Flug, who had been reading over my shoulder. I resolved right then and there that (1) I would go on a crash diet, and (2) I wouldn’t ever again let Flug into my office when I was typing. One out of two ain’t bad.

            ‘Better late than never’ is one of those expressions that sound reasonable until one examines them. My old friend The Perfessor had gone all his 77 years without ever breaking a bone or having to go to the hospital when he tripped over his dog Merton. “Better late than never – BAH!” he waved his cast at me as we shared a large jug of lemonade at the club. “I am thinking that I would have preferred NEVER.”            

             Another example I thought of involved a firing squad, if it were about to deal with me out in the secret police target ground. I really would have preferred ‘never’ because ‘late’ implies that they did get there eventually.

            We recently celebrated an anniversary here in rural New Brunswick, in the hamlet of Kincardine. It was exactly 19 years ago today that the federal crown corporation called Canada Post took away our mailbox delivery and made us drive two kilometres every weekday to pick up our junk mail. Their reason? Because it was too dangerous for the letter carrier to stop along the road, although our letter carrier didn’t see a problem, since he could pull his car completely off the road. This is the same outfit that hired a group of Newfoundlanders to assign civic numbers to our houses and who insisted that we lived in Lower Kintore and not Kincardine at all. That took some doing to fix that.

            My nephew Seymour turned green at a recent conference of potato farmers. I don’t mean that he suddenly advocated organic farming, tree hugging and going chemical-free forever (he sprays Lysol on his cornflakes); I mean he spilled a whole litre of a green coloured energy drink on the front of his white pants. Was he embarrassed? Oh yeah. I’ve done similar things myself, but I am such a slob that I always assume I will spill whatever I am holding and therefore carry spare clothing. The bottom line about Seymour’s problem was that Jock McDrason, a Glascow Scot, lent Seymour his kilt to wear for the remained of the meeting that he had to cover for his newspaper. See-more indeed.

            Visiting another friend, Gladwin, in Morrell Siding one day last week, I was impressed at the restoration job he had done on his 1950 Ford Meteor. Except for the colour, it was identical to the car I drove around Tilley when I was 12 or 13. Glad had painted his car a pale blue, and the one I used to drive was grey. It even smelled the same, a sort of mustiness from spilled lemonade.

            Glad even let me drive it up to Portage and back on the old Trans Canada Highway. It purred right along, just like the one I used to drive until I hit the hydro pole that had no business being where it was that late at night, and on a turn.

            It all got me thinking about vehicles that we drive today. It is practically a catastrophe if one doesn’t have air conditioning now, and heated seats are a must for the winter months which, by the way, are much, much warmer than when I was a kid. I remember one day in February 1967 when a bunch of us started out for Campbell River, BC; the temperature in Tilley, NB, was –52ºF. (We hadn’t heard of the metric system.)

            On our car today we have a backup camera, sensors to alert the driver about EVERYTHING including a slack tire; we have Bluetooth included, a cabin filter to help prevent halitosis I guess, and any number of other arcane devices.

            In spite of all that, when Glad and I returned from Portage, I offered an even trade of our 2014 Toyota Corolla for his 1950 Meteor. He looked at my registration and said he’d have to phone my wife to sign it. You can guess how that turned out.
                                               -end-

Van Gogh's prices have risen (July 5)

DIARY

Those ‘good old days’ were better only in some ways

                        by Robert LaFrance

            When I began my short-lived university career (September 1966- February 1967) in Fredericton it was a major project to talk to my own father.

            He lived in Tilley, a 2-hour drive (at least) from UNB and he might as well not have had a phone because his was ‘a party line’. Eight households on the one phone line so if I ever phoned home, everybody on that line would be hearing what I was calling about. Usually it was to find out of he needed any money that I could send him right away.

            Wait…maybe it was the other way around in reverse, as the comedian says.

            As an old person (I hope to make 70 next May) I have seen at least some of the ‘good old days’ and some of them weren’t so good. However, although there were not the miracles of today, at least we knew what was going on, and a millionaire was a very rich person. In the year 2017 one doesn’t get called rich until he or she is ‘worth’ at least $100 billion.

            Henry David Thoreau, one of my favourite authors, would have been aghast at the way things are done today compared to the 1840s when he built his cabin near Walden Pond. He said a pair of pants didn’t get comfortable until he had worn then them at least 25 times. Not all in a row of course; he did have friends and didn’t want to offend them.

            I have often wondered if he were from Victoria County, New Brunswick. He wrote about comfortable clothes and said that kings, from youth to death, never knew the feeling of wearing a good-fitting suit because they only wore each suit once. My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) must be especially comfortable because he has been known to wear a shirt for two weeks.

            Probably what astonishes me most about modern times is how expensive everything is. My first car, a 1961 Ford Falcon that I bought in Hamilton, Ontario in the late 1960s, cost me $200. That wouldn’t buy two tires for my 2014 Toyota Corolla. My old friend Llewelyn bought a brand new Chevrolet Impala in 1972 for the grand total of $3200. A much-used 2005 Buick Century would go for that now.

            And yet we don’t complain. We just go on, day after day, knowing that we can’t afford whatever it is being sold on that particular day. I knew a guy who bought a $6000 Rolex watch that he has to take in for servicing every two years at a cost of $600 each time. I wear a $19 Timex and figured I had splurged when I bought that.

            When I was in my teens and the government was paying a million dollars a mile to build the Trans Canada Highway through Madawaska, Victoria and Carleton Counties, we ordinary citizens were amazed. At that time a Vincent van Gogh painting sold for $800,000. Now the government can’t seem to even fix potholes and a van Gogh painting went last week for $119 million.

            Has anything improved enough to justify the enormous cost of everything? Vincent vG is still dead and not making much money on the increased ‘value’ of his paintings, and roads are still roads. What seems to have changed is the people buying paintings and using the roads. Driving my Toyota around town and stopping at intersections, I am always interested in the fact that at each stop, there is a million dollars worth of hardware sitting there and idling within fifty metres of me.

            The cost of insurance, bank fees, vehicles and even coffee, compared to 1980 or 1995, has taken what experts are fond of calling ‘a quantum leap’ whose meaning I have yet to figure out. I think it means a lot.

            Possibly the point of this column is that we don’t need $6000 Rolex watches and we don’t need $64,000 pickup trips when we are not hauling freight between Grand Falls and Fredericton and don’t need to know the Rolex time. My father bought a sturdy 1952 International truck for hailing gravel and then lost his job working for the government because he was on the wrong side of politics, and that truck – I swear – was no bigger that the 2016 Dodge truck Flug’s nephew Glen bought last week. The heaviest thing Glen will ever carry on that truck will be a case of Railcar Brewing Company craft beer or a gallon of chain oil sitting on four garbage bags to avoid spillage of the oil. Mustn’t get the truck dirty.

                                 -end-