DIARY
Notes from a dwindling summer
by
Robert LaFrance
What’s wrong with television’s
weather boys and girls? They are getting a bit ahead of themselves.
I have counted five instances when
one of them referred to September 1st as “the last day of the summer
season”. This has to stop. It’s not unusual (as the singer Tom Jones used to
bellow) for us to have very warm weather in late September and even the first
half of October, but I’ll tell you one thing: the first day of September is not
the border line between summer and fall.
True, as I write this on September 6th,
it is quite cold and feels like fall – or even winter – and it will be quite a
few weeks before the season changes from summer. Officially it’s something like
September 21st. Let’s appreciate that as well as any warm weather we
have left.
I don’t know if it’s the season, the
weather, or the position of the moon in the heavens, but the word ‘Houston’
seems to have driven people crazy – crazier than usual that is.
Tomorrow, because of refineries
having closed in Texas, that price of gasoline at the pumps is supposed to rise
something like 14 cents a litre and Frankie, my wife’s third cousin’s
father-in-law’s uncle, drove from Moose Mountain to Perth-Andover to fill his
Gremlin with gas. When he finished doing that, the gasoline in the car was
worth more than the car itself, but that didn’t faze Frankie.
All over the place, people were
emerging from their homes to fill up with gas before the price went up. I was
not innocent. I jumped in my Corolla that was three-quarters full of gas and
started for town, 20 kilometres away, but before I got to the bottom of Manse
Hill where I live, sanity sneaked in. “Do the math!” I said to myself, and I
did. Driving that far would use up more gas than that price increase would take
care of in two weeks.
In other important commentary, I
often notice, as you have, signs that read “Lots for sale”. One of these days I
hope to see a sign that will help to even things out. How about this one? “Not
a lot for sale, just a bit. A pittance really.”
It’s wonderful how the English
language is evolving. Back in the old days, when we ran up against something
that we would rather not have, it was a problem. Now, in 2017, it’s
“problematic”. People use the word ‘impact’ as a verb when we already had a
perfectly good one – ‘affect’.
Two days ago I heard someone uptown
say: “Roll up the car windows, George!” Most car windows these days are
mysteriously moved by something electronic and that is not rolling. (As soon as
I wrote this, I thought of Frankie’s Gremlin. He still rolls up his windows.)
I think advertising is a great
occupation, with some of the world’s greatest ideas seeing the light through an
advertising agency. The Mormon Church commercials from years ago were great,
and how about those Volkswaggen bug commercials that were more entertaining
than the shows they were attached to? Tim Horton’s commercials are great.
However, great commercials don’t ALWAYS mean a great product. It is my
considered opinion that the people who make those excellent commercials
advertising Coors beer should be incarcerated.
Just a thought: Many people don’t
know the different between ‘cement’ and ‘concrete’ and use the words
interchangeably. Correct me if you must, but I am fairly certain that cement is
an ingredient of concrete and not the final product such as my front step on
which I just fell and gave myself a bruise.
Looking back on my earlier comments,
I am thinking I watch too much television, but I have yet another comment on a
TV show. Last evening I was dozing in my favourite chair and woke up to hear a
talk show host say to his studio audience: “Choose a winner by casting your
ballast!” He said this twice. Of course we educated people know that ballast is
pretty grubby stuff and I laughed at this guy’s ignorance. Then I remembered
last November’s U.S. election during which voters clearly chose a winner by
casting their ballast.
There’s always somebody around who
is cheerful and optimistic and don’t you hate those guys? Watching the TV news
last evening, I was interested to see and hear an interview with a chap who had
survived the huge hurricanes Katrina and Harvey and was bracing for Hurricane
Irma that was bearing down on Florida and probably Louisiana. He lived on a
hill in the latter state and expected to survive yet another flood and
associated good stuff. “Your altitude determines your attitude,” he said with a
maddening grin.-end-
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