Friday 28 December 2018

Mary-ja-wanna now legal (Nov 28)


NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Legalizing marijuana – good idea?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            As I write these immortal words, it’s nearing the end of November but I see a gaggle of Canada Geese who were supposed to have gone south a month ago. The funny thing is, they were heading north.
            It was then that I, at the age of seventy, finally realized that Nature’s creatures sometimes rebel against their own mother. The bigger the bird, the more likely he or she is to be a renegade.
            At this point I should tell a story about seeing an ostrich building a campfire in my apple orchard, but I will shock even myself and tell the truth.
            Walking down Manse Hill Road during one of our cold cold days, I heard a thump-thumping noise coming from the top of a hydro pole. I looked up to see a pileated woodpecker, one of those BIG ones who could haul farm equipment if they wanted to, and he (or she or LGBT) was a-pounding away with his beak on a fairly new hydro pole. If he expected to find bugs in there, he must have stopped at Cannabis NB on the way to Kincardine.
            Anyway, he was pounding away and wasn’t the least bit bothered by my walking by and then stopping to fumble for my alleged smartphone. He was even making progress on the pole. I had thought at first it was sort of a mating call he was making, but it wasn’t the right time of year. I recalled some days of my youth when I did similar things, but I certainly wouldn’t have climbed a hydro pole to make my call. Or would I?
                                                *****************
            Donald Trump, a combination of Machiavelli and Bozo the Clown, must be shaking in his boots right about now, because the Special Counsel’s Report of Russia’s helping him, Trump, get elected in 2016, is just about to drop with a huge splat right on the top of Trump’s head.
I am not sure if there is a less likeable person in the world but surely there must be? He seems to automatically do the wrong thing or fail to do the right thing, like not visiting American soldiers in war zones. He should realize that he would be perfectly safe there; the last thing other countries would want to do is get rid of someone who sides with dictators. I’m sure if he were asked what he thought about troop movements he would think the subject was what Americans call latrines.
            But enough about Donald Trump; as they say, he is his own worst enemy and will soon get taken down, somehow. It’s kind of scary though, that this weird guy can start a war anytime he wants to, maybe with us. At least Loring Air Force base, over near Caribou, Maine is no longer with us. Back when I was growing up in the 1950s, the B-52s from Loring used to fly right over our house in Tilley and scare everyone, every time. I often dashed to the ‘latrine’ when I thought one of those monsters was going to crash on our house. That would have been the biggest rebel bird of all.
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            I haven’t made a comprehensive study on this matter, but I must say that I am surprised that there is so much stovewood left in western New Brunswick – much of it even legally cut.
            Day after day pickup truck and trailer loads of stovewood go by our estate and it is amazing that there’s so much wood available for the cutting by people who wouldn’t know a chainsaw from a kiwi. It’s pretty scary in some cases.
            Two days ago the dog Minnie and I were walking around Bon Accord – where the public dump used to be – and we heard the sound of a chainsaw. Eddie Crenshaw and his Husqvarna were clear-cutting Bon Accord, one poplar at a time. While I would have expected him to be cutting maple or beech trees – since poplar is about like kissing your sister for ‘last’ – he was having a good time.
            That is, until he discovered that he had parked his Rav 4 and trailer just a mite too close to where he was cutting. Oh well, that’s why God made insurance.
                                                ******************
            Eddie never was the sharpest knife in the drawer, the biggest mouse in the barn, or the hardiest snow snake in the drift, but he does his best. His daughter Zelda started attending university in September and learned some new words that she proudly showed off to her parents at Thanksgiving dinner last month.
            She said that she had learned a lot about ‘geopolitics’ and both Eddie and Zelda’s mother Gwen were baffled at that one. She went on to say that Canada’s legalizing marijuana had been a good idea, an opinion that didn’t sit well with her parents. They both asked her – at the same time – if she had ever drunk any of that ‘mary-juana pot stuff’ and she said she hadn’t but her friends had.
            Then the conversation went on to politics and Zelda declared that she was ‘pragmatic’. Shocked, her parents said she had to have an abortion right away.
                                                    -end-

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