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-
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