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-
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