Is a mandolin the same as Amanda Lynn? (March 14)

Il faut cultiver notre jardin

                        by Robert LaFrance

            The great philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) wasn’t even a gardener, but one of the many things he left behind and was famous for was this quote: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” which means “we should mind our own damn business”.

            The quote came from his novel Candide, a book I read a couple of times when I was in my early twenties when I took it to heart; I didn’t poke my nose in where it didn’t belong, and if you believe that you’ll believe that Donald Trump is a genius.

            I quit following Voltaire’s advice the day I found out that Voltaire wasn’t even his real name. It was a pen name, taking the place of the name he was born with – Francois-Marie Arouet. It must have been confusing to his pals down at the Paris Legion, Branch #5.

            So here we are, in March, not only that, but mid-March, and Voltaire comes to mind. I have my Vesey seed catalogue sitting at my elbow and I am getting suggestions from my son-in-law in Singapore. He hasn’t been near a Canadian garden for a year and a half and is eager for me to plant some of the vegetables that he and my daughter enjoy. I am looking forward to planting something different from what I have for ten years or more.

            After a while green peas, carrots, radish and all the other traditional garden crops have grown a little boring, so with Mike’s suggestion in mind, I want to try things a little more exotic, like qing choi, collards, garlic and scapes, kale, rocket, argula, and stir-fry greens. I am not even sure some of this stuff is legal.

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

            Turning to other subjects:

            It looks as if North and South Korea, while each not being overly trustful of the other, might be sitting down to talk soon, but there’s one big menacing beast that could ruin the whole détente thing.

            Its name is Donald J. Trump. All it needs is for that gent to write one of his stupid tweets – in other words any of his tweets – and that will be the end of warmer relations. He reminds me of a schoolyard bully who sees others having fun building something and then goes over to kick it apart.

            So here’s what we do, or what the American people should do: get a bunch of tough nuts to hold down Trump and take away his smartphone so North and South Korea can talk in a quiet room.

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

            On a musical note, no pun intended, my friend Flug just got married again and we  chipped in to buy him a new mandolin. My old friend has played his old Rogue since he was a barber on Parliament Hill way back there, a long time ago, and the Rogue has become a bit threadbare, if that’s not stretching the adjective too far.

            So we got together, six of us, and paid $17,540 for an A-Style Oscar Schmidt OM10E A-Style Spruce Top Acoustic-Electric Mandolin. My share was $25. It was a stroke of luck that we included Billy Lee Threnody in the group; he had just won four million dollars in the North Tilley Lottery. Anyway, Flug was thrilled and immediately dropped it on the concrete floor of his garage. It broke the neck; we almost did the same to him, but Billy Lee said he’d pay to have it repaired.

            That isn’t the end of this saga. That evening Flug’s new bride Ann happened to be listening when Flug answered the phone and somewhere in the conversation used the words “a mandolin”. Ann thought he was talking to an old girlfriend named ‘Amanda Lynn’ and whacked him upside the head with her hardwood rolling pin. He’s recovering.

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

            Not to lean too heavily in this Canadian column about Donald J. Trump, a blustering bibulous blowhard, but he has turned out to be the most disruptive president in my lifetime and in many lifetimes before mine.

            He’s an embarrassment to most Americans and even to me who, while knowing that Canada is the best country in the world, have always admired many things about the U.S. except their absolute worship of guns. “The sacred right to bear arms,” one bare-armed gun owner said yesterday.

            When I was between eight and ten years old, and Eisenhower was president, I spent my summers on my uncle’s  and aunt’s potato farm near New Sweden, Maine, and never had a problem (except her catching me smoking Marlboros one day) even though I didn’t carry an AR-15 or a Kalashnikov rifle while pulling mustard in the fields. Whew! Lucky.
                                                      -end-

Trump voters denied (March 7/18)

Sending an aardvark after a polar bear

                        by Robert LaFrance

            First thing this morning, just to make my day, my cousin in Florida sent me an email. I looked at the computer monitor where the email resided. “Having a great time in Port Charlotte, Florida,” my cousin wrote. “It’s 87ºF here.”

I looked at the thermometer hanging outside my office window. It read –21ºC. The pine trees along the road were bending over backwards in the wind and the drifting snow was filling every possible path to anywhere.   

            It took every bit of my will power not to fling that computer monitor straight through the triple-glazed window and show my cousin that I was not one to be impressed by 87ºF weather in February.

            Jeez, I hate her.

            I think we have this winter thing beaten now. Anybody agree? Here it is March, the month that comes in like a lamb, as they say, and goes out like a lion, or vice versa. Five or six more major snowstorms, freezing rain, and the despair of all of us after a long, long winter and it will be Spring, a word whose first letter I always capitalize. Officially, it is only three more weeks. Can’t wait. No flooding please.

            And, speaking of winter and weather generally, I see that Environment Canada has gone back to using the phrase “northern New Brunswick” in their forecasts without explaining what it means. Is it everywhere in the province north of Woodstock? North of Grand Falls? Or does it take in only Kedgwick to Caraquet to Baie de Chaleur? It’s a major problem.

            If you ever see someone who knows what this and other weather phrases mean, could you get him or her to define the phrase “wintry mix”? I tried Googling it, but all I got in reply was “a mix of winter precipitation”. About as helpful as sending an aardvark to bring down a polar bear.

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

            Watching television one recent evening, I was happy to see that the problem of ‘identity theft’ had evidently been solved by the simple method of persuasion.

            A company named “Condorex Unlimited” was advertising their service. The computer owner (that’s me and you) only has to send every data file on our computers to C.U. who would then guard it like a border collie guards a flock (gaggle, herd) of sheep. Problem solved.

            But then I thought about it. If I wanted to perform a seamless identity theft, I would buy some television commercial time and ask computer owners to send in ALL their files and I would protect them. Note: Condorex Unlimited is not the company’s real name.

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

            As one who reads voraciously – which means I have a better chance of knowing the meaning of ‘voraciously’ – I come across a lot of ideas in the space of a week. Recently reading a book of essays by E. B. White, I came across the information that when the Nazis conquered northern France in late 1940, they started ‘re-Germanizing’ the area called Alsace-Lorraine that had once belonged to Germany.

            One of the first things they did – and I did check a couple of other sources – was to take French names off tombstones. A name such as Henri Cheval would have been ground off the stone and replaced with Heinrich Norgler. I am not even lying this time. Those Nazi rascals were something, weren’t they? Not satisfied with changing tombstone inscriptions, they went on to add another 15 million or so in western Europe, plus at least that many in the USSR and around the world.

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

            Closer to home than north-eastern France in 1940, I am here to remind you that we New Brunswickers are facing a general election on Sept. 24 of this year. That is uncomfortably close to my (and, coincidentally, my wife’s) 36^th wedding anniversary that occurs the next day.

            Although I have suffered mightily these past decades, some New Brunswick voters probably feel they have suffered more than the occasional whack with a rolling pin atop the crown of the head.

            Don’t look for me to try and steer you toward one party or another, because I am truly apolitical; I suppose what concerns me most is that every eligible voter goes to the polls and that every eligible voter’s ballot is counted. Accordingly, let us look at what makes an ‘eligible voter’.

            We can find the list of qualifications on the NB government websites, but I cringe to think that Elections NB may look at the Irish qualifications’ main rule. “The voter, all other qualifications in place, must not have been declared legally insane within two days before the polling day”. Too bad that rule hadn’t been in place in the good old USA in November 2016.
                                                           -end-

Glued to the TV (Feb 28/18)

How to pasteurize milk correctly

                        by Robert LaFrance

            My cousin Clyde, who retired from dairy farming a year and a half ago, and I were sitting and watching a high school hockey game when the first period buzzer sounded. While Mister Zamboni and his rider were clearing the dust from the ice, Clyde and I talked about farming and why he had given up his dairy herd, one of the best in western New Brunswick.

            It turned out to have been an involuntary retirement, exacerbated by his hired hand’s lack of understanding of how governments (don’t) work.

            “It was government regulations,” he said. “I farmed for over thirty-five years and my stables and equipment were always spic-and-span, but not according that that nest of government regulators – provincial and federal. I could have eaten off the floor in my stables.” He didn’t explain why he would have considered such a thing.

            He went on to list some of the things he had been required to do and they included pasteurizing his own cows’ milk. “While I was away, my hired hand read the regulations. Each milk (or milch) cow had to be dipped in boiling water for three minutes,” Clyde explained. “He learned later that they meant the milk itself, not the cow. By the time I got home from Minto I didn’t have much of a herd left. He said he had always thought three minutes was a bit long.”

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

            In last week’s column I mentioned the Olympics and how some people find themselves glued to the television (sounds painful) for the two or three weeks that those sporting events are shown. Then of course there’s the suspense of watching to see which Russian athlete(s) will be banned for life (two months) for using “performance enhancing” drugs.

            A week before the competition began in early February I wrote to Sigrud Melanson, the head of the South Korean Olympic games committee to give him a suggestion. “Whenever a Russian athlete wins a gold medal, take it away and charge him or her with doping. Make it automatic. It will save a lot of trouble later on when those people hack an election somewhere because you can also include a travel ban.”

            I didn’t receive a reply. This shocked me. I included several other suggestions in my second letter, such as (1) Mike Duffy to be named Olympics Ethics Commissioner, and (2) Donald Trump be banned from competing in the Truth Games scheduled for late this spring. I needn’t have bothered with that second one, because some minor questioning determined that Donald Trump hasn’t even a vague idea what truth is.

Continuing on the theme of the Olympics, I think the whole thing should be banned anyway. It’s like watching a never-ending beer commercial in which dozens of  young men or women with perfect physiques and brilliant smiles are shown guzzling beer.

Tell me this: would these people, if they were habitual beer drinkers, look like this? In my nearly seventy years, I have met hundreds of beer drinkers, often including one in my own mirror, and have not seen it, especially on Saturday mornings. (I am referring to the Old Days.)

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

“If you don’t get down off that roof, I’m going to throttle you!” Mrs. Tuttle, our next door neighbour, said to her son Whiffletree one day. I was just thinking about those old days this morning between my bacon and eggs.

Of course Mrs. Tuttle didn’t throttle her son because it would have been illegal and she was very law-abiding in every way. However, she thought about it every day. Whiffletree was ‘a handful’ as people say about other people’s bratty kids, but to everyone’s surprise, he grew up to have a successful career as a dairy farmer. He sterilized the milk, not the cows.

The reason I brought up the subject really had nothing to do with Mrs. Tuttle, Whiffletree or cows. It is about the word ‘throttle’. A throttle was a pull-out switch that used to be on the old Model T Ford and other cars. Later on Ford moved it to the floor of the car and we called it a footfeed or gas pedal. I mentioned in a recent column that the first car I ever drove was a 1949 Monarch, a large gas-guzzling Ford, but the second car I drove (I was all of 12 years old) was a 1950 Meteor that had a throttle. Fun times in the Maritimes! I hope I added to your vocabulary.
                                                      -end-

Purchase a Cadillac (Feb 21/18)

I will pass on watching the Olympics

                        by Robert LaFrance

            As I write this column, the Olympics from South Korea are being shown on every TV channel. It is somewhat like when the Stanley Cup Playoffs used to be on CBC-TV. All the good shows, like soap operas and soccer, are pushed aside and all we saw was a bunch of overdeveloped athletes banging into each other and occasionally trying to punch each other in the helmets. I once had dreams of becoming an champion athlete too, until I was told that the 25-yard dash and tiddly-winks were not Olympic sports.

            “I don’t remember a winter like this!” I might as well get that out of the way, because that’s what we all say every week at this time of the year. I suppose it’s like snowflakes – no two are alike, but I have yet to see anyone offer proof of it.

            This winter is a little odd though. The Flat Earth Society that, strangely enough, think the earth is flat, had to cancel their 2018 annual general meeting; that’s the first time that happened since 1948, the year I was born. Up to this point it was quite a feather in my cap that I had never missed a meeting, but that’s all over now through no fault of my own. The feather has flown away in a blizzard anyway. Time of the meeting was 5:15 am Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2018, and no one was planning to attend as usual, but it’s an embarrassment.

            This winter, school days have been cancelled and delayed, church has been cancelled, 4x4s have gone into the ditch, government snowploughs have gone off the road, and Flug has gotten a cold. That’s a first. I don’t remember a winter like this.

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

            In other fabulous occurrences this winter, I notice that a little nest of potholes had appeared in Highway 105 just south of Perth lagoon.

            That road is probably no more than seven years old and should not have potholes, but perhaps no one told the road itself. The reason I bring up the subject is that about two weeks ago I took a photo of that nest when it was tiny and since then, sans repairs of any kind, it (they) is three times bigger. I will take a photo every few weeks and at the end of May – if I am still navigating around this earth – I will compare the size of the pothole nest to its size two weeks ago, and in August, just before there is a full-scale riot about the road, D.O.T. (DTI) will fix it, just in time for winter. That’s a prediction and it will come to pass.

            Moving a bit south, ever closer to Donald Trump’s real legal problems, I am impressed when politicians, talking about politicians on the other side, use the word ‘redacted’. Nobody but Flug and lawyers ever heard of that word until the media started using it over and over again. It means ‘censored’ and is used to confuse us, like government voicemail.

            My mailbox, my beloved group mailbox, is groaning these days with the 217 daily credit card offers, flyers, and various other kinds of junk mail, the equivalent of telemarketing. Somebody named Edwin Fitzgerald wants me to try out his Mastercard with no interest charges for the first two days. “Just think,” he gushed, “If you paid for a new Cadillac using my credit card you would save $235.03 in interest payments. Mind you, after those two days things might get a little brisk.”

            That poor mailbox of mine has yielded offers for hearing tests – as if they were disappointed that I hadn’t been in to see them since my doctor suggested I have a hearing test in 1987. I saw him at a hockey game last week. “How are things going?” he asked. I thought he was talking about Donald Trump and ignored him. There was a big roar from the crowd just then anyway and I had an excuse. I never did find out which side had scored, or which side won.

            For some reason – old age I assume – I got to thinking about the cars I learned to drive when I first sat behind the wheel. I mentioned that I had been born in 1948, but the first vehicle, other than a John Deere tractor, I ever drove was a 1949 Monarch, a large tank of a car. No truck or Greyhound bus had better get between me and the dairy bar or they would have been in deep trouble.

            I don’t want to imply and I don’t want you to infer that I was one year old when I started driving that tank; I was almost ten, so that’s all right.
                                    -end-

St. Valentine's cold (Feb 14/18)

My Super Bowl common cold adventure

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Although I am about as interested in the Super Bowl as a cat is in learning how to knit, I did watch the last five minutes of the Feb. 4 Super Bowl played in Minnesota. Could they not find anywhere colder? How about Barrow, Alaska?

            The reason I mention the game is to hang a label on the cold I had on Super Bowl weekend. On Thursday afternoon, Feb. 1, it struck me right between the eyes and I didn’t say a fond farewell to that cold until three days after the Super Bowl became history.

            There are many and fabulous ways to get rid of a common cold. I had friends, relatives, enemies and a plethora of others on the Internet tell me exactly what cures the common cold and at the end of the day there is only one answer to the problem.

            Nothing. Scientists have been looking for a cure for hundreds of years and it has long become obvious that nothing will get rid of the common cold except execution, which is a little drastic.

            Why is that? Because the CC is caused by a VIRUS. Therefore antibiotics are useless but try and tell that to Flug. The instant he gets a cold, he heads for the doctor and insists on get a prescription for an antibiotic. Of course that cures it instantly – within a week.

            Here’s a short list of the ‘cures’ that people advocated during my Super Bowl common cold weekend: drinking cider vinegar mixed with melted goat cheese;  several kinds of tea that had been hiding for years in the back of our kitchen cupboard and that should have been left where they were; cough drops including Fisherman’s Friend, Hall’s, Zinc lozenges, chaga tea, and fifty or sixty more. Desperate to stop coughing, I tried most of them (drawing the line at ground-up mole droppings mixed with molasses) until, after two days and still coughing, I wasn’t sure if my name was Bob or Attila the Hun.

            Finally I said to myself: “enough of this!” And then I waited to see if those words had any effect. They didn’t. My late brother-in-law Winston Morton had the right idea: “Don’t take any medicine and a cold will last a week, but if you eat a lot of cough and cold remedies it will last seven days.” I’m working on my seventh day right now and hoping that “the Great Scorer” doesn’t come to mark against my name before it’s over.

            All those who know best keep saying that a cold sufferer should lay off alcohol, but I can’t help but try a jar of lemonade now and then. I believe in fairness.

            My dog Minnie always seems bouncy and healthy, so I decided to try some of her canned food. Washed down with lemon gin, it wasn’t too bad, but on the way back up it tasted a bit iffy. She wagged her tail as this was happening, as in the old Kipling poem: “Dog is dog and Bob is Bob and never the twain shall meet…”

            Lying on the couch like a huge uncooked Russet Burbank potato, I saw a commercial for Buckley’s liquid cough medicine. “It tastes terrible, but it works!” It looked so convincing that I leapt off the couch and started putting on my parka for heading uptown.

            In hindsight, I probably should have put on my pants first, but I did remember them after all, and put them on over my parka. I would have been a strange sight under the Midnight Sun, but I didn’t care; I was headed for cough relief. They got quite a kick out of my attire at the pharmacy, but I did get my Buckley’s Cough Mixture. As I left the store, several tourists took my photo, no doubt to be shown later on Facebook.

            It did work – the Buckley’s relieved my cough. Between the pharmacy and my house I downed two quarts of that stuff and didn’t have a sign of a cough after that for two hours, mostly because I was sleeping. When I woke up the cough was still there, so, as we speak, I am preparing a lawsuit against Buckey’s. Cough, cough.

            And by the way, Happy St. Valentine’s Day! I wonder if he ever got colds?
                                           -end-

Privacy fanatics (Feb 7/18)

Canadian billionaires aren’t greedy enough

                        by Robert LaFrance

            One of those economic study groups – I never did catch the name – created a 10-second splash last week when they announced that of the ‘new wealth’ created in 2017, about 82% found its way into the wallets of the top one percent of Americans and about 54% slid quietly into the pockets of Canada’s richest one percent.

            What’s the matter, Canadians? Where’s our greed? We have let Americans trim our sails once again, when we should be leading them down the Yellow Greed Road. In fact, 100% of this so-called newly created wealth should be going to out to richest one-half percent. No more mister nice guy for us.

            While I am not quite among Canada’s top money ‘earners’ (as the rich like to see themselves) I still feel that we should be doing better in separating the lower income earners from their minimum wages. Tim Hortons, especially that Ontario one run by the real Tim Horton’s grand-daughter, have the right idea: when the workers get their minimum wage increase, find some way to take it back – by phone from the Cayman Islands if necessary.

            Which allows me to segue to the subject of a phrase I often hear: ‘the middle class’. Excuse me, but I thought the Class System was something we left behind in Europe. Correct me if you must, but Lord and Lady So-and-so were supposed to be absorbed into what the great writer H. L. Mencken called “the great unwashed”, but listen to this logic:

            If there is a middle class, there must be a lower class, right? And if there is a lower class and a middle class, there must be an upper class, right? And if those classes exist, then we must be back into the Class System, right?

            Let us rise up, like a piece of cork in a woodland pond, and demand our rights. We don’t care about money, do we? But we do care about being classed as upper, middle and lower.

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

            It is a bit ironic that ‘privacy concerns’ are so dominant, now that there is no possible way that a person can maintain his or her privacy. Of course, like most things nowadays, it’s a scam. (Man, am I ever cynical!)

            It seems as if every time anyone wants some information about another person, he runs up against the “Privacy” wall, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. As an example, Flug’s nephew Jerraldo fell down in front of the bank in Campbellton and was carted off to the hospital with a broken arm and a fractured skull. Flug heard about it, with full details including Jerraldo’s shoe size, on Facebook, but when he, Flug, went in to the hospital to see his favourite nephew he ran into that wall. They wouldn’t even admit that such a person as Jerraldo existed.

            He eventually did find his nephew happily strumming his sitar in a lounge. “How ya doing, Uncle Flug!” he said. “How did you get past the five layers of security to get here?” Flug said that he had looked in the window and there was Jerraldo doing his Ravi Shankar impression.

            Another example of this privacy fanaticism is the way governments and companies use the old scam “I can’t talk about that because it’s before the courts” so they don’t have to say a word on a certain case. They wouldn’t to jeopardize their pensions by actually saying something, would they?

            And then there’s the ‘voice mail scam’ where anyone trying to information (even their own) from an insurance company, bank or government finds himself facing an electronic wall of “Your call is important to us, leave your name and number and we will get back to you about the time that hell freezes over and pigs fly up to their nests”.

            On the other hand, when a male politician resigns because he’s accused of ‘sexual misconduct’, we immediately hear every detail about HIM but nothing about his accuser. The old concept of ‘innocent before proven guilty’ doesn’t seem to matter in those cases.

            Everywhere we go we are confronted by people who refuse to give us information on the grounds that I mentioned and there are dozens of other ways governments and other organizations keep us citizens from learning what they are up to. I would lead a charge against this but I’m too lazy and too much of a private person.

            Anyway, if we really want to learn secrets, we can always go to Facebook.
                                         -end-

Fredericton traffic circle (Jan 31/18)

Sneaking up on a pair of expensive shoes

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I have had enough of the phrase ‘or you can buy it online’. The message is that we old-fashioned types who would prefer to walk into a store and buy something are dinosaurs, worthy of snickers and sneers.

            Those stores we prefer to walk into are now only ‘bricks and mortar’ as if that’s a bad thing. Somebody said that, accompanied by a sneer, to me last week, and I pointed out that the only thing different these days is that companies like Amazon just have bigger ‘bricks and mortar’ buildings compared to Lila Goodine’s store that used to be located in Tilley. In fact, Amazon, as we speak, is entertaining bids from cities that want to house its second headquarters that will cost $5 BILLION and will provide 50,000 jobs.

            Now THAT’S bricks and mortar! I doubt if Tilley has put in a bid.

            All that’s really happening is that jobs are being moved, as usual, from smaller areas to the big cities. As Grampy would have said: “I can’t believe so many people would want to live so far away from everything here in  Tilley.”

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

            Speaking of cities, day before yesterday I got lost in Fredericton’s traffic circle. Really. I have gone around Halifax’s and Riverview’s circles without mishap except for taking an unexpected detour to Saskatoon in each case, but that Fredericton traffic circle is beyond even my sharp wit, canniness, perception and horse sense. I blundered into that Fredericton circle like a lamb going into a night club or Donald Trump attempting to make sense.

            Have you experienced the phenomenon? Picture yourself in an electric clothes dryer, then close your eyes, then have someone hit you behind the left ear with a rolling pin. I entered that traffic circle at 10:10 am and emerged at 3:06 PM. Behind me and ahead of me were seven police cars and an old guy pushing a shopping cart full of toilet paper. He kept yelling: “Follow the Charmin!”

            It was a scary experience, but I did finally get out and found myself at the corner of Smythe and Prospect Streets. Still unnerved, I turned left into the oncoming traffic and fetched up along a sidewalk where the old guy with the toilet paper gesticulated that I should back up and turn right, which put me right back into the traffic circle, except going the wrong direction.

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

            As one who is near the age of seventy, I have some advice for people my age if they want to buy a pair of sneakers.

            Don’t call them sneakers. After my traffic circle experience, I went into a big  store called SportChek. I looked EVERYWHERE for a sign showing me where I could look at some sneakers. It reminded me of shopping for shampoo in grocery stores and pharmacies and finding everything but.

            In SportChek I finally broke down and asked a clerk where I find some sneakers. He looked at me as if I were made of bricks and mortar. “Do you mean running shoes, walking shoes…” He listed another 12 kinds of shoes, none of them sneakers.

            All this has the effect of annoying me because, first of all, he was young, which meant I hated him right away. I looked around the 5-acre store for a clerk over thirty years of age and there was no such creature. I was stuck with this guy and his designer beard.

            “Look,” I said patiently, “I am just looking for a pair of sneakers so I can go on a walking trail--”

            “Aha!” he said, as if I had just revealed the secrets of fusion and how to win at Blackjack. “So it’s WALKING shoes you want!” All of his sentences from then on ended, I am sure, with exclamation points. Looking at my lemonade belly, he commented: “You don’t do much running do you?” I said I sometimes walked fast. “Then it’s Intermediate shoes you want!”

            Then he led me over to a dark corner of the store and pointed to a shoebox that was covered with dust and age. “Tell me that you wear size eleven and I’ll sell you those ones for half price!” How much was that, I asked timidly. He mentioned a figure that was roughly twice my monthly car payment, plus tax. I bought them, just to get out of that blasted city. By the way, I got caught once more in the traffic circle.

                                                      -end-

The singer named Prince (Jan 24/18)

Colour my world, just don’t use ‘Caliente’

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I have to say it: I’m all excited about a new colour that the paint company Pantone has come up with. In the company’s announcement it referred to ‘Ultra-Violet’ as its Colour of the Year pick for 2018.

            Of course they called it their ‘Color of the Year’ pick because they’re an American company and had to spell the word ‘colour’ incorrectly, but we all get the point. As I said, exciting news.

            Remember the singer Prince? Of course we all do, but I’ll be blessed if I can remember two songs he made famous. The reason I mention him is that purple or perhaps ultra violet was his ‘signature colour’, whatever that might mean.

            My purpose in mentioning this is to point out that there are now officially 2,344,722 paint colours in the world. Flug can prove this because his wife Zelda looked over every one of them because deciding on ‘peach’ for their living room walls.

            Here’s how Pantone described a group of several paint colours: “Collectively, the colours selected mostly run deep, with rich almost jewel-like tones, and skim through every mood, from energetic to meditative. While some feel classic, others channel minimalism and mystery.”

            My late grandfather Muff LaFrance (1881-1976) would have had something to say about the worship of interior house paint. “Bob, a lot of people don’t have enough to do.”

            The company Benjamin Moore has also decided on a new colour to lead us into the rest of 2018. Its choice is “a strong, charismatic shade of red called ‘Caliente’ that  feels akin to red velvet…‘Caliente’ is the ideal red for a room, as its warm, brown undertones make it a perfect choice for interiors; it’s seductive yet energetic.”

            Grampy, please come back and have a talk with these people.

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

            Changing the subject, don’t you just love it when there’s a big television news item about a new wonder drug that will almost certainly cure everything from hives to depression to broken bones? The story might go on about even more conditions that will be cured, and then at the end of the story the reporter/announcer says it won’t be available to the public until the year 2024 because now they have to actually test it.

            People have been clambering to try and understand the controversy here in New Brunswick about the ‘not-for-profit’ company called Medavie taking over the running of Extra-Mural Nursing. I have to say I am against it, mainly because former NB Premier Bernard Lord runs Medavie and anything he runs I would prefer to steer clear of. When he was premier for seven long years (1999-2006) we here on Manse Hill Road despaired of ever getting as much as two pails of chip-seal on our road. My friend the late Dennis Campbell, who was a Tory and knew the premier and his government well, told me that the chances of getting our road paved while Lord was premier were somewhere between zero and none because Lord perceived everyone out here as Tories (I don’t have any political affiliation.)

            And by the way, what’s the difference between a ‘not-for-profit’ company (Medavie) and a ‘non-profit’ company? It sounds as if they are identical, but because Bernard Lord is concerned I wonder.

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

            How many of the readers of this column have a computer? By this time I would say quite a few, like 90%. Isn’t it interesting how hardware companies like Windows and Apple still can’t get it right?

            In the past two weeks my computer has received out of the ether a total of 23 updates and ‘security fixes’. It didn’t used to be like that back when we drove our Chevvies to the levies in the 1950s, did it? When companies like Ford made a car like the Model T that came out before 1910, that was it, no updates or fixes, right? Totally reliable?

            Wrong. I just finished reading an essay by a man called E. B. White who had bought a Model T Ford in the early 1920s. He said that when you bought one, it was just the basic shell. Here are some of the things you had to add if you wanted it to keep running: “For nine cents you bought a fanbelt guide to keep the belt from slipping off the pulley; you bought a special oil to prevent chattering, a tire patching outfit, a sun visor, a steering wheel brace, a set of anti-rattling pieces to bolt here and there, shock absorbers (this is extra, remember) and more and more gadgets. You started the car with a crank, unless you were made of money and could afford a self-starter.

            Next time you sit down at your computer and curse because it needed another update, remember the Model T. And your computer is not likely to leave you sunk in a mudhole on the so-called highway.
                                             -end-

Feed some homeless instead (Jan. 17)

Let it snow, let it snow – NOT!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I was astonished – as I often am – by what I saw out my living room window yesterday afternoon, just as the aroma of highly spiced spaghetti sauce was wafting around inside this house.

Two persons rode by on bicycles. The road wasn’t quite glare ice, but it was on its way in that direction. Occasionally one bike would spin out and the rider would go flying. Were they crazy or what? I went down to the road, wanting to size them up before they started down the steep east side of Manse Hill.

“Hi ho,” I said intelligently. “None of my business, but why are you folks out riding your bicycles when the road is so slippery I have to be careful with my Corolla that has top-of-the-line snow tires?”

One of the cyclists took off his helmet and I recognized Barley Gibbers. “We went by here last summer and you came down to talk to us, don’t you remember?” I said I did. “Well, what we’re doing today is recycling.”

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

            One of last week’s snowstorms dropped about 40 centimetres of snow here at our estate; you may possibly have noticed this yourself, if you live in this county or in nearby Maine. Then two days later Environment Canada (my old crowd) predicted we would receive “5 to 10 centimetres” the next day.

            That doesn’t sound like much, if you say it fast, but the trouble is that Environment Canada has a kind of code known only to weather people, an entity that I used to be. When they say “5 to 10 centimetres” that is Codespeak for “30 centimetres or more, and probably more – you’re on your own”. If you don’t believe me, keep checking the EC website (https://weather.gc.ca) and if the forecast for here suggests we are about to get “5 to 10 centimetres”, reach for a plane ticket to somewhere far south, like Maugerville, or even Brazil. You might consider Singapore, where my second elder daughter lives. Average temperature there is 30ºC. That’s ABOVE zero Celsius.

            Back to the plight of us/we who live in New Brunswick, Canada, and wouldn’t want it any other way, it fell to me to clean off our porch roof with shovel and scoop. When I got out of bed about 7:30 I wondered why it was still dark out and the knowledge soon filtered into the old grey matter that a snowdrift covered almost the entire bedroom window. It behooved me to get up and shovel.

            I went onto the porch and got a small scoop and a small shovel, then brought them to the upstairs bathroom. (“Where else?” you are asking.) After shoveling my way out of that window and onto the porch roof, I was able to remove two-thirds of the snow before my get-up-and-go got up and went. At least the roof wasn’t likely to cave in. Truth to tell, something I try and avoid, there wasn’t much danger of that anyway because the snow was not of the super-heavy variety as it was after one storm about ten years ago, but that’s another story for another day.

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

            When I visited my friend Flug on Monday evening, he was watching a CBC-TV program called “The Outsiders Among Us”. It was about homeless people in various Canadian cities.

            The women who used to be called ‘bag ladies’ when I lived in cities (1967-1976) have a scary existence, if you can call that existing. The men, who were usually alone rather than hanging around with others in their situation, were no more inspiring. The camera followed several homeless people in Edmonton, Toronto and other places and it was amazing to see them crawling into their cardboard shelters for the night or picked up by the police and taken to homeless shelters for the night. The next morning they would be turned out again to fend for themselves, but at least they had had a meal at the shelter.

            Flug and I watched silently, sipping on water instead of our usual lemonade. The program pointed out that a few million dollars in donations from those lucky enough to have roofs over their heads could provide food and lodging for these people and get many of them some much needed medical care.

            Once the program was over, we just looked at each other and we were each thinking the same thing, I am sure: “Tomorrow I go up and donate food and money to the food bank.”

            I’m not sure if this was planned, but a TV program soon afterward described how pet owners lavished expensive food, shelter and medical care on their pets. One cat, found in the woods, had a $1500 operation before it died two days later. Not to pass judgment or anything, but that $1500 would have bought a lot of hot soup for homeless humans.
                                        -end-