Boring, boring TCH (Nov 29)

Here’s my advice: don’t get a new car

                        by Robert LaFrance

            When the kids were growing up, we were pretty much in the poorhouse, and drove vehicles that should never have been allowed on any highway, anywhere.

            However, there is an ‘upside’ to driving ancient and decrepit vehicles: you never have to worry about scratches on them. About three weeks ago we acquired a new vehicle and then I lay awake nights worrying about someone brushing up against it or spitting on it. Three evenings ago I visited Wal-Mart and it must have been their slow time of the day, because there were only about one hundred vehicles in their parking lot.

            There was one area of that parking lot that was completely empty, so I parked right in the middle of it. “The car will be safe there,” I said, but when I came out of the store twenty minutes later there was a vehicle parked so close that I had to squeeze into my car. No scratches on the car door, but a vertical line of dust where the passenger’s side door of the 1989 Gremlin had hit it. There were 75 parking places, all empty, nearby, but the driver seemed to be lonely or something.

            “I had better quit fretting about this or I’m going to have an attack of Sickle Cell Anemia,” I told myself that evening as I sipped away at a lemonade while watching a show called ‘Canada’s Worst Drivers’. After finishing my drink I went out to the shed, got a pole-ax (so called because it was manufactured in Warsaw, Poland) and went out to my new car. “Whack!” No more worries about scratches.

            That story could have been true. It was close. My friend Flug’s nephew Roger did that very thing one time in Ottawa and for the same reason. Unfortunately though, he mistook some other guy’s car for his own 2016 Jetta. It didn’t turn out well.

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

            Last Tuesday I drove (in the new car) to Moncton and back and after that experience I have a warning for the reader. Like parking your new car somewhere on the ground, don’t do it!

            Is there still a Guinness Book of World Records? If so, and there’s a category for The Most Boring Stretch of Highway in the History of the World as We Know It, New Brunswick would win it hands down, as they say.

            Driving a Gremlin across the Kalahri Desert would be a titillating experience compared to going from Fredericton to Moncton on the Trans Canada Highway. At least there would be changing sand patterns instead of trees, trees, trees and the odd rock.

            It really isn’t too bad until one gets below Fredericton. Here and there, around Woodstock and other places, there is a glimpse of the St. John River, and twice I could see actual water and even a house. Quite a thrill. I am sure that whatever maverick engineer left those views in the plans was sent to Siberia at best, forced to drive that road every day at worst.

            The original ad: “Engineers, please reply to Box 13, the New Brunswick Gazette,  for a job engineering what we want to be a boring, boring, boring road. All replies that include a mention of scenery will be trashed.”

            I wouldn’t have thought it possible that a province as beautiful as New Brunswick could be made to look so totally boring and uninviting as along that particular stretch of highway. You top one hill with hope in your heart that SOMETHING, ANYTHING will appear but you are disappointed once again because in the foreseeable distance is nothing but trees and more trees with a rocky outcropping down by Young’s Cove and an empty beer can along the highway near the Sussex exit. Oh, the excitement!

            The next time I drive along the beautiful Tobique River or see a couple of deer standing along Highway 105 in Tilley or see a pontoon boat on the St. John or Aroostook Rivers, I will sing Hosanna in appreciation.

            I called an engineer who had worked on the 4-lane down below Lincoln. He had just finished a therapy session (trying to forget he had worked on that road) but was willing to talk.

            “Yes, Bob, I worked on it and I am able to finally discuss it. Old Billy Harper and I were the chief engineers. As soon as we finished the road and he drove on it once, he turned to me and said ‘What have we done?’. He immediately retired to his cabin in Wapske where he designs craft items and ties flies.

            “He says he has pretty much gotten over the shame now, but he still wakes up screaming in the night. “The truth is, Bob. The government wanted us to design a boring road so drivers wouldn’t get distracted by interesting sights.”

            “Well, you sure succeeded there,” I said. “I didn’t get my eyes unglazed until I got back to my lemonade.”
                                                          -end-

A Valentine's Day gift (Nov 22)

Bundles of $20 bills ‘offshore’

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Since this newspaper hits the stands (as they say) on November 22, it behooves me to mention John F. Kennedy, the dashed hope of a generation. Yes, I know he liked interfacing with women too much, but compared with what the Americans have now, really?

            On to the major and vital issues of the day, and you’ll notice I didn’t say “vitally important” because once something is vital it’s already important.

            Who can go an entire column without mentioning Donald Trump? Well, apparently I can’t, so we shall go on to mention someone else. How about Queen Elizabeth II who has been “raining over us” (Yes, I know I spelled the word ‘reign’ incorrectly) since the early 1950s when I was a towheaded kid wandering around Tilley and getting into trouble there.

            It is said that our beloved sovereign (soverain?) had been keeping some money – a few billion dollars of housekeeping money no doubt – in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. Let us try and picture that concept. Here is the titular head of the British ‘empire’ stashing money in the Cayman Islands or somewhere. Imagine, the queen ripping off the British treasury.

            I am just hoping that the journalists looking into those offshore accounts (as they say) do not find the nest egg that Flug took there last year. It would be rather embarrassing for my old friend. He was saving up for a new cricket bat and a vacation to England where he planned to use it.

            And what does that mean anyway, ‘offshore’ accounts? Whenever I hear that I think of bundles of twenty dollar bills sitting in a dory somewhere in the north Atlantic off Cape Spear lighthouse.

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

            Continuing my comments on the butchery of the English language, I just heard that a federal government agency had “tasked” a certain bureaucrat to learn all he could about social unrest in Bristol, New Brunswick. What if he were “asked” to do that?  Besides, there is no such place as Bristol, NB, now that it’s become part of Florenceville-Bristol. You can “reference” government records to find out for sure. Or you could “refer to” them.

            On another subject, we all love Political Correctness, don’t we? A pet-loving group in southern New Brunswick was recently in the news because its members were upset about the insulting language their dogs had to endure. When you think about it – but not too long – you can see that the word dog is insulting. Carol and Jon Fridloch, the leaders of this movement, have suggested that from now on we refer to Rover as a “canine equivalent”. For efficiency they now refer to their friend, the CE. Some people just don’t have enough to do.

A few years ago I wrote a column about killing a mouse and the mobs arrived in front of my house within an hour of that edition hitting the stands. Picket signs (although I didn’t see any Picketts in the group) were everywhere. Old Bob was everything from a murderer to a politician.

            During that confrontation my canine equivalent Belvedere made his mark, so to speak. One of the mob’s leaders came too close to Belvedere’s food dish and received a good bite on his anterior thorax, according to the nurse who treated him there in my driveway. He lived, and went on to become famous as the author of “Mice Are People Too”.

            Moving quickly and not very logically to the subject of phone messages, I came home from church early Tuesday morning (about 3:00) and found three messages on my land line phone. The first was from the bartender saying I’d left my Harris Tweed hat there in the church; the second was from a telemarketer who informed me I had won a cruise up the St. John River from Gagetown to Four Falls if the river happens to be open on February 14. A very romantic outing for St. Valentine’s Day. Skates not provided.

            The third message was one of those that burn my rear echelons every time I get one. Here it is in its entirety: “Hello, it’s me. Call me and keep me informed willya?” No clue as to who it was. What would be going through the ‘brain’ of a person who would leave such a message?

               I checked on Google and the population of this earth was 7.442 billion as of late 2016. Of course it may be up to 7.5 billion by now, but even that smaller figure presented me with quite a challenge in guessing who had left that phone message. I deleted the message and went out on the lawn for a game of croquet before the predicted snow arrived.
                                   -end-

Stay out of Iceland (Nov 15)

A midnight tour of Iceland for us all

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I am writing this column on my laptop in a small lounge in the small Pierpoint Hotel in the small city of Reykjavik in the small country of Iceland. (The noise taking place in our room makes it impossible for me to concentrate there.)

            There are five couples registered in this hotel – Flug and his present wife Magda, Gerry Plum and his brother Boyd, the Perfessor and his wife, also named Magda, Jimmy Caine and his wife Susan, and my wife Diane and I. We are having a time.

            “My name is Darlene, Bob,” said my long-suffering wife.

            Going back a few days – about a week really – I will try to explain why we are here. Last Tuesday Boyd Plum was looking in an old trunk in his attic and found one hundred shares of Microsoft stock bought in 1989. Neither he nor his brother remembered buying them, but their names were on them. I looked it up and the shares would have cost $2100. How could they forget? Of course they had inherited that money from their Uncle Jed.

            “I was going to throw them away because I didn’t think they were still any good,” Boyd told ‘the gang’ afterward. “Then we took them in to the bank manager. She took one look and turned a whiter shade of pale,” he said poetically. The manager bade them to sit down.

            “Do you know what you have here?” she asked the boys (as we call them). Although they didn’t, they soon found out. There are differing figures involved here, but the boys agreed that those pieces of paper turned out to be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $762,110, give or take a little pocket change.

            So here we are. The Plum brothers, generous to the end, paid for this whole trip, drinks and all. By the way, I am done trying to type because we’re all going on a ‘nightclub tour’. I used to call it ‘bar-hopping’ when I lived in Hamilton, Ontario. We’re going to a place called Laugavegur that allegedly has over fifty nightclubs. I’ll report later on how many of them we were able to visit.

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

            I am writing this two days later and I must report that we didn’t do well on our nightclub tour. Only 17 places. It is embarrassing for a Maritimer. I’ll write while the rest of them are in church. They certainly need it.

            Here in our room where I am typing away on my laptop there is a wonderful view of the street that goes by here and stops abruptly at some hot geysers. Good thing I would say, because that water is HOT. Here in Iceland they get almost all their electric power from hydro and geothermal sources.

            But that’s sounding too much like classroom teaching. The point I was about to make is that this city of Reykjavik contains what must be the record for distracted drivers. I couldn’t concentrate on my writing because I kept seeing those drivers, many of them behind the wheels of their cars.

            The reason I say that ‘many’ of them are behind the wheels of their cars is that in many other cases dogs, cats and other domestic animals appeared to be driving. I never saw anything like it. It’s possible in Perth-Andover, Plaster Rock or Grand Falls to see this, but it’s pretty much the norm over here.

            I made some notes. In the space of fifteen minutes I counted 16 dogs driving – one of them a Great Dane – and 9 cases of cats up in the drivers’ faces. Once, when traffic had slowed to a crawl, a middle-aged gent whipped out a cordless electric razor and started shaving his own face, then shaved a bit from the sides of a poodle that was perched on his lap. I hope neither of them had fleas.

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

            Back in Canada after that fascinating tour, I just got a phone call from Boyd Plum who said it had all been a mistake and the bank had finally realized that those Microsoft stock certificates had been photocopies of real ones and we each owed him $18,879. The copies had been used in a play performed at Southern Victoria High School gymnasium, as if it made a difference where the play had been put on.

            It was shocking to say the least, but as my wife Diane-

            “That’s Darlene,” she reminded me.

            As my wife Darlene and I were sitting there half-comatose and wondering where we were going to get $18,879 as well as $40 to buy that week’s groceries, the phone rang again. It was Gerry Plum.

            “Crisis over,” he said. “I found the real stock certificates and it turns out there are 150 genuine shares of Microsoft. They’re worth over a million dollars – WELL over a million dollars. What say we all take another trip? How about Indonesia?”

            With one voice, my wife Diane and I roared: “NO! A thousand times no!”
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I imported an outhouse (Nov 8)

Careful when you’re cutting down trees!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            As I write this column, people are mourning yesterday’s deaths in New York City where a religious fanatic with a pickup truck killed eight people and injured eleven. Since the terrotist was originally from Uzbekistan, U.S. President Trump immediately called for closing down more borders to terrorists, something he forgot to do after the Las Vegas shootings done by an American nut case. We all forget sometimes.

            Enough of that and on to another subject. Since it is now November, we are hearing that nasty 4-letter word more and more. I’m talking about wood.

            Every day dozens of cords of stovewood go by here on their way to heater stoves and furnaces across our land. I was sitting and sipping on the porch yesterday afternoon when three huge pickup loads of wood went by heading west. One after another the trucks, each followed by a large trailer also full of stovewood, headed that way. A while later I headed for town and, although it was 15ºC, still warm, chimneys poured out the blue smoke of wood fires.

            It all reminded me of the first time I cut my own firewood, or tried to. Moving back to Tilley from the Northwest Territories in 1976, I built a cabin at the edge of our family farm’s woods and stuck a stovepipe out through the roof after buying one of those grey coloured wood heaters whose walls were about as thick as a piece of paper. Very safe.

            Then, as fall approached, it came time to gather up some firewood for winter. My father casually mentioned that I could cut my own *&^#*%$ wood. He would buy his with money the government sent him – for some reason – every month since he turned 65.

            One Monday morning, after waking at the crack of noon, I had a gourmet breakfast of Froot Loops and boiled eggs, grabbed father’s old bucksaw and a pole-ax that John Diefenbaker might have used building his log cabin at Meech Lake, and headed for the woods. I was whistling a tune from a Mexican opera entitled “La Senorita hermosa chica” which I think refered to a beautiful girl, but I couldn’t think of the Spanish word for ‘woman’.

            I should have paid more attention to sawing than to singing, because on my very first tree, a small beech, I drew the bucksaw blade across my wrist and the blood flew three feet into the air. “Aieeeee!” I threw down the saw, used my other hand to grip my cut wrist and try not to bleed to death, and headed for father’s house, the old homestead. Would I make it?

            Walking briskly (no kidding!) I got back to the house in ten minutes. As I got closer, I could see my brother Lawrence there working on an engine in the garage. “He’ll save me,” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way of thinking) and as I got closer I took my hand off my wrist to show him how serious it was.

            Not a drop, not a dribble.

            “Why hello,” I said nonchalantly. “How are you doing? Indeed, what are you doing?”

            “You look like a canary that’s trying to swallow an anvil,” he said. “What’s wrong?” I told him about my brush with death. He snorted, if that’s not too impolite a way to phrase it.

            “You must have lost a lot of blood,” he said, and for a moment looked almost sympathetic, but no, I was asking too much. “It must have drained out of your head,” he finished. And he went back to working on the engine, which I later learned was out of a 1939 Ford truck  and he was going to put it into a 1928 Chevrolet car, something I would have thought impossible.

            Looking back on it now, I remember that car and my brush with death, as it were. It was that day that I decided I would obtain my stovewood from somebody other than myself, and who better than my brother?

            As I mentioned, this all happened in 1976 when I was setting up housekeeping in my 19 foot x 12 foot cabin. I stayed all winter in that cabin and it was warm as toast except when I had been away a while and the fire had burned itself out. Why the cabin never burned itself out – the stovepipe was about an inch from the roof boards – was a mystery I have never questioned. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

            The next summer one of my neighbours, my late cousin and friend Murray Paris, and I got together and jacked up the cabin, put two fir skids under it, and he hauled it with his skidder closer to Churchland Road. I imported an outhouse from the farm of my late grandfather Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) and, although using the toilet at 3:00 am  was brisk, it all worked out well. Thanks, grampy...and Lawrence.
                                                       -end-

Unhealthy food - the best (Nov. 1)

Does anybody ever watch Mike Holmes?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            As I am wondering if it really, truly can be November already, I am thinking about Mike Holmes.

            Nothing good. In case the reader doesn’t watch television, Mike Holmes is one of those television carpenters who know everything there is to know – on all subjects. He’s like an art ‘expert’ who curses at us for not seeing anything worthwhile in a painting that consists of one straight line.

            I must have been bored on Tuesday afternoon, because I tuned in on a show called ‘Holmes Makes it Right’ and it wasn’t about Sherlock. Mike Holmes was doing a home inspection and EVERYTHING he looked at had been done wrong. The tradesmen who had built the house were “wrong here, wrong there – everywhere a-wrongo”.

            It’s a little – no, a lot – incredible that EVERY electrician, every plumber, every drywall guy or gal, every roofer, every concrete worker and every painter in the world is incompetent, corrupt, crooked, unscrupulous, mercenary and dishonourable. All except Mike Holmes that is.

            With a terrible sneer, he looked at an electrical outlet in the bathroom and said: “This should never happen!” He looked at the dryer hookup, the toaster, a lamp – everything was wrong. He would make it right.

            It turned out that the outlet in the bathroom was one of those Ground Fault Interrupters (GFI) that are safe to use in a bathroom or near water flow, so good old Mike was wrong on that one. First time ever. I didn’t hear him apologize though.

            If I want to see and hear someone arrogant I can listen to Donald Trump. The bright side is that Mike Holmes, although obnoxious, is always right.  Except that one time. Trump is either wrong or lying or both.

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

            A short list of the things I miss from years ago: York’s Restaurant in Andover (Mrs. St. Thomas greeted one at the door. She was unique); Loring Air Force Base whose B-52s kept me remembering we were in a Cold War; westerns on TV. When I was a kid I used to enjoy The Lone Ranger, Maverick, Bonanza, Rawhide and others.

            Other things: those triangular windows that used to be part of the side windows of cars; the world without something called rap, whose practitioners call themselves ‘artists’ and their efforts ‘music’. If that often nasty poetry set to a drum is music, I’m a 3-toed aardvark.

            How about unhealthy food? It always tasted the best. Keep the home fries burning I say, and keep cooking deep-fried food with LOTS of saturated fats (although I wouldn’t have known what they were back in the old days). Heck, we don’t even own a deep fryer. There are lots of things I miss from the good old days but we must all remember the title of that song by the super-talented Dolly Parton “The Good Old Days – When Times Were Bad”.

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

            At last we are getting some rain – and how! – so I can stay inside and think about some of the notes I’ve made in the last few weeks and try to figure out what they mean.

            First, although I don’t watch many detective shows on TV, I do occasionally tune in at some point to hear the cop say something like: “You were the last person to see (the victim) alive. Do they really say that in real life? Obviously that can only be the murderer or perhaps the person who came along when the victim was about to cross over. The point is, it’s an accusation. Another thing is the use of the word ‘admit’. “You admit you were in Canada at the time, so you must be the murderer.”

            I have mentioned before that I am a terrible slob. I should not be allowed out in public. The cartoon character Pigpen is a dapper clotheshorse compared to me. Last week my daughter asked me to speak to her grade five class about my days as a weatherman in the Northwest Territories. As we were driving toward the school, my wife informed me that I had (1) mustard on my shirt, (2) catsup on my pants, (3) some kind of dust on the back of my pants, (4) mud on the cuffs of my pants, and (5) cobwebs in my hair and on my shirt. Now where did I get that?

            I don’t watch as much television as the reader would think, but I do watch my share, even though some of it is a little dubious. Thursday evening I watched a documentary about spiders in Bolivia and woke up Friday morning chewing my pillow. However, I usually watch shows that don’t keep me awake so much. I watch CBC news and CNN to see what stupid thing Donald Trump has said or done lately. Although he’s certainly an incompetent president, the news people don’t give him a break. If he went to the bathroom (and he may not) they would report that he had exploded.
                                                   -end-

Rebranding D.O.T. (Oct. 25 col)

Flug is seeking his Google medical degree

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I guess the time has come for those in medical school to abandon their efforts toward an ‘MD’ after their names and to just let Google take care of it.

            At least that’s the view of my friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation – I hope). The last time he visited the doctor, for a mouth ailment, he saved the physician a great deal of time by a neat self-diagnosis. “I think it’s Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever,” he told kindly old Doc Hardistry. “No need for you to conduct any kind of blood test or something and wasting our time. Just give me a prescription for Anemicogia and I’ll be on my way.

            “That’s what I found out on Google this morning,” he went on. “It’s amazing all the information that’s available now.”

            “But Mr. LaFrance,” the doctor protested, “I don’t think it’s Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever because you don’t show any of the symptoms – except confusion. Also, I don’t know whether you have noticed, but you appear to have scurvy.”

            Flug was telling me this the day after his diagnosis by a non-Google Dr. Emil Hardistry. “It just sounded like my symptoms,” he said. “I’ve been reading up on diseases and Google has been my main source of information.” And he was off to correct another doctor in his, Flug’s, search for a medical degree.

            I didn’t have the heart to tell Flug that I had spoken to Dr. Hardistry only hours earlier. He had stopped by for some apples, of which there aren’t many left now. “It’s getting so now that half my patients think they know more about medicine that I do,” he complained. “Before they come in, they check to see what Google says and then come armed to my office where they make their diagnoses. Yesterday I had a guy tell me that his shingles were caused by fleas and an allergy to watching Donald Trump on TV.”

            This all goes to show us why there is often signs around doctors’ offices and hospitals, signs that say: “Turn off your &%$#@* smartphones! No Google!”

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

            Before we go any farther with this column, I would like to enlist your aid in solving a mystery.

            Sometime in the last decade, our provincial Department of Transportation, known as D.O.T., underwent some kind of operation and became the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, known as D.T.I. My question is, what happened to the letter ‘O’ in D.T.I.?

            I fought the change for a long time because I (and you) knew that it was a simple matter of ‘rebranding’ that governments and other organizations get into now and then. Like painting all their trucks and other equipment. “They are catering to the optics of the situation,” commented Flug, who must have learned that phrase on Google. He also uses ‘impact’ as a verb.

            Back to my request, please send any comments or explanations to me at my Facebook page. We have to guard against that sort of thing, because the new name should really be D.O.T.I.

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

            Last week I was driving through Plaster Rock, Drummond or Upper Kent – one of those places – when I saw a dog driving a pickup truck.

            If you were into 17^th century English words you could say I was nonplussed when I saw this. As far as I know, that means: ‘Now I’ve seen everything!’ but that wasn’t even close to true. There’s more to come I’m sure.

            After the late model Ford F150 stopped a few hundred metres up the road, I pulled over to check whether I had seen what my alleged mind had told me. Sure enough, a late-model Newfoundland dog was perched in the driver’s seat. As I got closer I could see a male human sitting in the passenger’s side of the pickup. (Just as a side note, the dog’s massive feet resembled snowboards.)

            The human was my old friend Mateja Kezman, a former Serbian football (soccer) player whom I had known when I lived in Chelsea, which is a rich part of London, England. “I say, Kezman,” I hailed him. “Was the dog driving or what?” He strongly denied that such was the case because his dog, Azeryzan, was clearly drunk and wouldn’t drive in that condition. On the seat beside Mateja was an empty bottle of Screech. After a short conversation I went back to my Corolla.

            I couldn’t help thinking about it though, and two days later I happened to be looking through the local court news and sure enough, there was information that a certain Azeryzan Kezman had been pulled over by a police officer and had bitten that officer on the nose. It didn’t mention the driver’s species or the sentence, but the story indicated that the dog had pleaded guilty.

                                                         -end-