Ramming through a truck sale (April 18)

Truck a trifle rich for my blood

                        by Robert LaFrance

            On Tuesday morning I went into the pickup truck dealer and asked how much he wanted for that big red Dodge Ram over by the waving flags.

            “I’ll take $71,430 plus tax right today,” he said with a big grin, a totally unjustified big grin because he must have noticed that I had fainted and was lying on the ground.

            I arose from that icy ground. “Excuse me, I didn’t make myself clear; I was referring to that truck only, not to your entire stock.” He guffawed (I always wondered what that word meant). “Haw haw! Don’t forget, we have rebates on all our vehicles, cash rebates - ”

            Always a stickler for details, I asked just how much lucre we were talking about. “Forty-five hundred dollars,” he said with yet another guffaw. I was getting a little tired of his guffaw. What’s wrong with a lop-sided grin, chortle, giggle, titter, chuckle or snicker?

            “So let me get this straight,” I pressed. “I give you $71,430--”

            “Plus tax,” he interrupted.

            “Okay, I give you $71,430, plus tax, and you immediately hand me back $4500 in cash…Why don’t you just drop the price $4500 in the first place? Then I’d only have to pay sales on $66,930, am I right?”

            I can only use the word ‘shocked’ to describe his expression at this point. “But-but-but what about amortization, calculated recompense, defrayal and outlay premium?” I was getting a bit shocked myself. And then he went on to shock me even more when he said this: “You will receive your $4500 cheque within two days of your purchase.”

            “What do you mean CHEQUE?” I roared. “It says right there on your own sign CASH rebate!”

            Skipping to the bottom of this narrative, I am reporting that the conversation went downhill from there, which wasn’t easy. I went home in my 1989 Gremlin as a wiser man and decided I shouldn’t be so upset just because the world had clearly been re-designed by somebody (I blame the Irish) so that I could never again own a pickup truck. Gremlin  it is.

            Reminiscing now, I will mention that the last pickup truck – a real pickup truck and not one of today’s tanks that guys keep buying – that I owned was about 1981 when I bought a 1974 GMC halfton (as they were called then) from Jim Dixon who gave me a 30-30 warranty, thirty minutes or thirty feet from his driveway. Contrary to his expectations and mine, the truck lasted for eight years and was still running when I gave it to my brother, who used it to haul stovewood from a woodlot near his house.

            That GMC was the last vehicle on which I could make my own repairs. One Sunday morning the starter wouldn’t start the beast and I removed it, got a friend to take me and it down to Walter Hurley’s garage in Perth-Andover where Walter worked on it for half an hour rewinding something-or-other. Then I took the starter back home, installed it, and spun off down the road from Birch Ridge, where I was living at the time, to Tilley, where my cabin still stood. After that day the most mechanical work I ever did on that truck was changing the oil, and after a while I even quit doing that because I kept spilling oil on my tuxedo.

            That pickup truck was pretty much a legend in its own time. In those days Ford halftons and other Ford vehicles tended to fall apart because of rust to the point where there was formed an organization called The Rusty Ford Association, but I had a General Motors product, so it wasn’t supposed to rust, right?

            Wrong. First, the box rusted so badly it was in danger off falling off, so I did take it off and built a wooden box. Then the right front door looked like Swiss cheese, so I replaced that with a light coloured green door I had bought from my friend, cousin and former neighbour Murray Paris. Since my truck was red, or had been, it looked a little odd. Then the driver’s side door had to be replaced with a white one, and a few months later the floorboards themselves. I was just starting to date my future and long-suffering wife at that time and she complained that when sitting in the truck she could see the road passing under her feet. Women do tend to complain about minor items, don’t they?

            Back to the original subject, that $71,430 Dodge Ram. The reason I am writing this is that I just heard of an Internet site called Crowdfunding, where one may ask for money for a project. So…here I am, asking.
                                                   -end-

Weiner dog the wrong breed (April11)

Do not eat hot dogs!

                        by Robert LaFrance

            One day about 1970 I was home from Toronto and visiting my grandfather Nelson “Muff” LaFrance. I had arrived just in time for an elegant dinner of boiled hot dogs and store-bought white bread. Yum!

            Even back in those historical days, scientists and other humans were questioning the wisdom of eating hot dogs, franks and wieners (all the same) because how they were made would knock a cat off a gut-cart as the old saying goes.

            “What else do you eat, Grampy?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

            “I had a potato last month, but generally I eat what you see – boiled hot dogs wrapped with white Karnes bread. I like Karnes bread. It’s made right in Woodstock, in that bakery that has the duck pond out front, or so they tell me. I never was past Florenceville.”

            It was true too. South from Tilley was a land that, if he had studied Latin as I had, he would call ‘terra incognito’, the unknown place. However, to the northeast he had travelled many times in his younger years when he went away in December to cut logs in the Riley Brook-Long Lake area. In March he would come home rich as a prince after collecting his $18 a month wages.

            Back to the subject of hot dogs, wieners etc., Grampy sure enjoyed his hot dogs and so did I enjoy mine. Back in school whenever I went to the spring in the woods up behind the Michaud house and brought him a couple of pails of water, I had timed it so I could arrive at his house at 5:00 pm, his supper time.

            One day we were munching down on hot dogs and the mailman (Gib Mowbray perhaps?) dropped off a letter for Grampy. Since I was there, he left my Popular Science magazine. Imagine my surprise when the lead story was entitled “Franks can kill you!” It referred of course, since it was an American magazine, to hot dogs. I learned that the hot dog and roll I was holding contained enough nitrates, nitrites, strontium 90, and bacteria to lay low Napoleon’s 7^th Cavalry.

            I went over and neatened the blankets on Grampy’s bed. “I guess you won’t make it until morning young man,” I said. “According to this magazine story, even eating five hot dogs a month was enough to lay low Louis Cyr, the famous Quebec giant, or Paul Bunyan. What chance do you have, Grampy? Better quit eating hot dogs.” He vowed he would, whenever he could sit on his porch chair and see pigs flying over. However, we made arrangements for me to call the priest when the time drew near.

            It is too bad he didn’t follow my advice and that of the brilliant American scientists; he could have ‘lived to a ripe old age’. As it was, he continued eating hot dogs to the end, and died in March of 1976, at the age of 94. Without hot dogs he probably would have made his 95^th birthday two weeks later.

            You’d better sit down, because in writing this column I actually did some research into the gourmet fare we call hot dogs. An Ottawa based health organization reported:  “The raw meat materials used for precooked-cooked products (hot dogs) are lower-grade muscle trimmings, fatty tissues, head meat, animal feet, animal skin, blood, liver and other edible slaughter by-products."

            Yum! I can’t think of anything I’d rather eat, according to that description. But seriously, I ate two hot dogs day before yesterday, and they were delicious. Cooked with onions and with the right amounts of the right kind of mustard and relish – and sometimes catsup – they remind me of the days when I watched baseball games in Toronto. This was long before the Blue Jays, but the Montréal Expos were doing well. I lived in Scarborough, and the Expos even came to Toronto one weekend for two exhibition games with the Scarborough Saints. After the game, members of both teams ended up in the Snooty Aardvark, a bar along St. Clair Avenue, not far from the Scarborough Bluffs area where I worked. Note: Those baseball players weren’t saints. The language!

            Along about midnight, there was a general call for food, something not served, other than Doritos, at the Snooty Aardvark, so the assistant bartender offered to go down the street and get what amounted to about 150 hot dogs in buns. Nobody got sick, even after he returned with the second lot of 150. So you see, this is the proof that hot dogs are ‘the Breakfast of Champions’ even when eaten by athletes at midnight in Toronto. Grampy was an unrecognized genius. Unrecognized by everyone but me anyway.

Now I think I’ll make some supper. All this typing has made me hungry for some meat, but since I’m out of meat I’ll settle for hot dogs.
                                                 -end-

Working like a dog (April 4/18)

Spring has sprung

                        by Robert LaFrance

            It’s now early April so we can now start planting things like tomatoes in little containers in the house. Yea! Working like a dog can begin; that is, digging for no apparent reason.

            Just this afternoon I received two seed envelopes from Vesey’s in PEI – Tavor artichokes, which are supposed to produce the first season, and Ring of Fire peppers. Do I have to mention that they’re hot peppers? I have to start both of these inside by this weekend. Working and slaving by a pensioner – not right.

            Changing the subject, or segueing as people say these days, I visited my club last weekend, and, once I had a glass of nice cool lemonade in my hand, I settled down to watch a bit of television before I started playing shuffleboard.

            Soon, very soon, the news disappeared and a commercial came on for some kind of medicine that had recently been developed to cure a disease that had recently been discovered and which no one but drug companies acknowledge. The list of side-effects and possible results of taking this medicine was staggering, and staggering is probably the least of what could happen. The pills were invented (no doubt by someone whose only qualification was imagination) to cure, for example, a condition called Xophinic Pettinism that the drug company had only invented last year.

            “Feel nervous before speaking in front of a crowd? Ever had diarrhea? Fingernails have to be trimmed more often than before?” might have been a few of the symptoms. The pill to cure this was readily available from the XXXX Drug Company and would make one a great public speaker in hours, if he happened to last that long.

            Possible side effects include memory loss, gout, hair loss, fever, teeth falling out, hip itching, hearing gain and fifteen or twenty more minor ones like stroke, heart attack and venereal disease. At the end, the commercial announcer suggested that if the user were to experience any of these symptoms, including death, he or she should see his or her physician. Good luck on that.

            NOTE: Somewhere in every one of these commercials is the phrase “Doctor recommended”. Last Tuesday I had the day off from being picked on by my wife (she was away buying a broom) and I did some research. After an extended period of time in front of my Internet, I learned that, in the case of Xophinic Pettinism, the alleged physician was in fact a Doctor of Philosophy, specializing in Crowd Pleasing.

            Another change of subject: I find that Canadian comedians tend to have only a few politicians they pick on regularly, and of course Céline Dion. I am getting tired of it. I have heard Céline sing many times and she seems rather competent in spite of being drowned twice when they were filming the movie ‘Titanic’. Of course this was only a rumour.

            The one person who gets the most razzing is federal Tory leader Andrew Scheer, whose dimples seem to be an unending source of mirth to comedians. With those cheek caverns, he looks less like a vicious hard-nosed politician (remember Rona Ambrose?) and more like a guest on Sesame Street. I have written to Mr. Scheer and have given him my suggestion on how to overcome this problem. As the phrase goes, it’s simplicity itself.

            Grow a beard. I remember the old days (I really don’t) when I was clean-shaven and people tended to ignore or laugh off anything I said. Then I grew a beard and found that when I talked, people listened. I believe Joe Clark was prime minister in those days and, although he had his own problems with credibility because of his three chins, he would listen when I suggested something. “Bomb Moscow, Bob? Good idea.”

            There’s no way I can write a whole column without mentioning Donald Trump. Yesterday I was watching a YouTube program featuring a talk by Noam Chomsky, a long time political commentator, or as my friend Flug says: common tater.

            Chomsky explained one reason that Trump continues to make almost daily outrageous statements. It’s all part of the plan put forward by his backer group of billionaires – keep all the news organizations abuzz with ‘foolishment’ so that CNN, the Washington Post and other members of the media are busy with this and not looking into how the government is now allowing oil drilling in national parks, is now cutting funding to public schools, and deregulating banking. Climate change is ‘fake news’ of course.

            Trump’s election came about because of Russian help and with the help of the general political and public nastiness that began with TV shows like ‘Amercian Idol’ and the show Trump thinks he is still hosting, ‘The Apprentice’.

            I will sure miss him once he’s impeached and found guilty. He sure is entertaining although corrupt and possibly the biggest liar in U.S. history, and that’s saying something.
                                               -end-

No gardening this month (March 28)

A good head on his shoulders

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Somebody said to me yesterday that my cousin Vinnie (short for vinyard) had “a good head on his shoulders”. I am not sure that a human should be described in this way although it might be accurate and more appropriate to say that a glass of beer has a good head on it. Note: Vinnie is not the sharpest axe in the shed but he fools people.

            Speaking of someone on the opposite end of the intelligence scale, I recently read a story about Albert Einstein. In 1952, Hungarian poet named George Faludy and he were walking along a New York City street when Faludy pulled out a notebook and wrote something in it. Seeing the quizzical look on Einstein’s face, he explained that whenever he had a good idea, he wrote it down, and asked if Einstein carried a notebook. “No,” said probably the greatest physicist who ever lived, “I hardly ever have a good idea.”

            Although I have known about it for some time, this morning was the first time I strode through the walking trail located inside the River Valley Civic Centre. It took me about two and a quarter minutes to make one circle and I felt that was enough exercise for one day. Just kidding; I walked for 21 minutes and was very pleased to be able to do that on level ground. Here in Kincardine there is a total of 76 metres of level ground but I am as lazy as a cut cat, as the old saying goes. Kudos to the Perth-Andover Recreation Department for setting this up.

            Now to a different kind of exercise: snowmobiling. All the skidooers (as people say, even though Skidoo is a specific trade name) I know have been very pleased about this past (yes, past) winter’s snow cover. Those who could afford to buy a $49,000 snow machine, who could afford to hire a full-time mechanic to take along with them and who could afford all the gasoline, permits and licences, had a great time going through the woods. A former skidoo owner, I know the pleasure of the sport, but, contrary to what I said earlier, there’s not much exercise involved. By the way, a snowmobile doesn’t cost $49,000. The Yamaha 292 I bought in 1979 only cost me $300 and I doubt if they’re much more expensive now.

            I write this immortal prose on Tuesday, March 20, the first day of Spring. Where did the winter go? It was only about two weeks ago that I was putting away my gardening tools after knocking the dust off them. I planted garlic and some winter rye to be tilled under in May and just generally polished off the gardening summer of 2017. This spring I have already received my interesting envelopes from Vesey’s Seeds and am ready to plant. Looking out my living room window though, there seems to be a problem (It’s ‘problematic’ as politicians and others say although it means the same thing) with something covering my gardens – about one metre of crusty snow with another 15-20 centimetres expected on Thursday. I suppose I will have to wait; I was going to call my neighbour Ricky to plough all the snow off my gardens and then we could pour on hot water; my wife dismissed that as impractical, but not in those words. “You’re an idiot, Bob!”

            In my shirt pocket I almost always, except in the shower, carry around a notebook, and in that notebook, on the back page, is a list of jobs I plan to do as soon as I get a chance. One is to clean up and clean out my workshop located at the back of the garage and I have been progressing well on that. I’ve almost started. Number two on my list is ‘clean my office’ which deserves a thorough going-over. If I could back a tractor-trailer right up to the window (a little ‘problematic’ on the second storey) and fill it with junk collected over the years, that might help, a bit. That’s another job that I have almost begun, although I did empty the wastebasket in February.

            Some other jobs on the list: gather up all income tax papers and take them to our accountant, to see him cry; clean and vacuum both cars (we are wealthy) but don’t bother washing them because they are filthy again before we even get home; delete some of the 2572 emails in my inbox and some of the 2294 letters in my ‘sent items’ box, and finally, make a new list. Two jobs I have actually started are “Make a list of jobs you want to do” and the other is “Buy a new notebook to copy this list to the back page of that”. I try to be neat at all times. Spring cleaning, I love it.
                                                -end-

Time shifting for some (March 21)

It is NOT time for a change

                        by Robert LaFrance

            This spring the time change went all right here, not like last year when I was late for a job interview with the prime minister.

            Just kidding about the job interview, but last year was a bucketful of havoc and chaos. Certain family members were late for church, my dog’s appointment with the vet was early and I had to wait two hours, and I pretty much ruined my cars’ main computer systems as I changed their clock’s time.

            On Google, I found that a guy named Sanford Fleming, though blamed by many for being the father of the particular brainchild known as Daylight Savings Time, is not guilty although he did invent worldwide standard time in 1879 and received a knighthood in 1897 from Queen Victoria.

Who came up with the idea of ‘spring ahead, fall back’ anyway? I found that DST  itself came to Canada about a century ago. Earlier this month, when we were about to set all our clocks ahead, I was ready. Remembering last year’s catastrophe, I began at supper time on Saturday, March 10, to change all the clocks inside and outside our house. It was, as they say, a daunting task that took me until 1:45 am.

            (It’s not only ‘they’ who say it was a daunting task; I say it too.)

            I began with the easy one, the microwave clock. I just had to press the button marked ‘clock’ then put in the time, then press ‘clock’ again. Nothing to that; I only had 47 clocks left to change. My wife said: “Are you sure it’s this weekend and not next weekend?” She was ‘pulling my chain’. I continued on my quest to change those other 46 clocks.

            Many years ago I learned that some clocks strenuously object when you manually change their time backward, but I forgot. This Spring shouldn’t have been a problem because the time was going ahead and not back, unless I really messed things up.

I did. I’m not sure what I was thinking about (probably nothing), but I tried to turn BACK the time on our big grandfather clock in the hall and heard all sorts of objections from inside when I took my finger and tried to move the minute hand backward past the Roman numerals XII at the top.

            That problem eventually straightened out, I moved on to my office computer and sprang it ahead one hour, forgetting that modern technology doesn’t like human interference. The next morning I found that my computer, my two laptops and my wife’s computer had all automatically moved ahead an hour, thanks to the Internet taking care of its own. So I had to turn all those back an hour.

            Even so, I hadn’t encountered any serious problems like the ones last year, but it was still a tiresome exercise for anyone as lazy as I am. Once I got out of the downstairs hall and over the grandfather clock miscue, I still had over 40 clocks to move ahead. Everywhere I looked there was a clock or a watch to change. I was getting exhausted.

            The clocks in the two cars seemed to be no problem. I found the manuals for the 2017 Corolla and the 2009 Yaris (don’t tell Red Green I used a manual) and it was a cinch – until the next morning when I learned that the Corolla, but not the Yaris, had automatically moved its clock ahead an hour. The Yaris, bought in Newfoundland, had moved its clock ahead only half an hour.

            (That was humour, inserted into this column to ease the tension.)

            One thing I have prided myself on over the years is having my wristwatch show the precise time. Twice every year, once I deal with this ‘spring ahead, fall back’ nonsense, I set my watch using the atomic clock which is located deep in a Colorado  mountain. This is part of a project administered by the U.S. and Canada as part of our mutual respect and cooperation, notwithstanding the occasional softwood lumber, steel and aluminum tariffs, and is called Coordinated Universal Time. It’s supposed to take its cue from the rotation of the earth along with the sun’s position. It’s accurate to within a second, I think.

            Hey, don’t expect me to know what I’m talking about; do I look like a rocket scientist?

            The point of all this blithering is that I finally got all clocks changed to their proper times, although I may someday decide to use my late father’s and Nancy Reagan’s approach - just say no. Saskatchewan keeps the same time all year. I’m thinking about it; now if I could just persuade my computers and cars that this is a good idea.
                                                      -end-