Clipboard is
overrun with teenage daughters
by Robert LaFrance
My friend Ralph – nicknamed Clipboard
because he always seems to be carrying one – has teenage daughters. Therefore
he drinks.
“It's
interesting, but noisy, having teenage daughters,” he said at the club last
evening. You learn a lot. I had no idea a stereo could go THAT LOUD.
“That's
what I recently discovered - that having teenagers in the house is what they
call a learning experience.” He didn’t say who they was or is. “A
bathroom, like that gymnasium size one in our house, is not big enough to hold
even TWO persons if they are teenage sisters. Indeed, our whole house, floor
space roughly 1600 square feet, is not quite big enough to hold both. Sir Isaac
Newton who came up with the laws of motion and space, was a newt and a
charlatan.” (Which I thought was the capital of PEI).
On
the subject of teenagers and kids in general, I recently heard the story about
a young fellow who went to Kincardine one-room school in the late 1960s. By
that time I was causing trouble on Vancouver Island.
Every
morning the kids back in NB were given a cod-liver oil capsule to swallow and
every morning this kid would go outside to clean the erasers, part of his
school duties as was getting the firewood for the heater. No doubt he would
also take that time to visit the outdoor facilities.
One day as the weather was getting cooler,
the teacher decided to go out and get an extra stick of wood. Maybe the kid in
question was absent that day, maybe he stayed overlong in the outhouse, I don't
know. I just know that when the teacher picked up a stick of stovewood she
knocked down another stick behind which were about 75 cod-liver oil capsules.
What happened to the young scholar after that was not recorded. I’ve heard the
word ‘Dorchester’ mentioned.
Having been forced to take those cod liver
oil capsules (“poisonous venomous missiles of putrid beastly hateful disgust” I
called them) when I attended Block X School in Tilley in the 1950s, I can
understand. I hope the young fellow got a medal but I suspect he didn't unless
it was a metal ruler on his gluteus maximum.
**********************
Some questions from readers: “Why are so many
people driving white vehicles these days?" asked a young man from Aroostook.
“Why do people in a land where it snows as much as it does here want to drive a
car the same colour as the ground all winter?"
"How come," querried a couple from
Kintore, "when you lose something,
a piano for example, the most absolutely certain way to find it is to buy
another one?"
In a letter from Quebec, a Lucien LaKinnee
wrote to ask the rhetorical question: "Why is it that in the Province of
Quebec people go out and buy brand new cars which appear to be equiped with
neither signal lights nor brakes?" It's a mystery, Lucien. Get
over it.
"What
is the difference," wrote an R. Levesque of Quebec City, "between a
sovereignist, sovereigntist, a separatist, and an oil-soaked river rat?" I
replied: "Gee, I don't know, R, what is the difference?" I haven't
received his reply yet; I'll let you know when I do.
Finally,
a letter from Florida, where the pre-election turmoil has been nonstop these
days. A person signing the name J. Bush wrote asking this question:
"What's the difference between a sore winner and a cat on a hot tin roof?
And besides, Trump is an idiot and a crook.” Nasty.
******************
People aren't
screaming as much about gasoline prices these days.
Gee, we're so
lucky, the oil companies dropped the price by several cents a litre, after
raising it twenty or thirty cents. I guess we're supposed to be grateful.
Somewhere,
probably in the bowels of a Manhattan skyscraper, a group of oil executives
meet once in a while to decide from what angle our next rip-off is going to
come.
Will it be the old Arab wellhead
price scam, in which the OPEC countries double the price for a few months so
the gas pump price can double, even though the actual price of crude is a small
percentage of the cost?
(You'll notice the price of farm
products doesn't quite follow that same scenario; when the price paid to the
farmer for pork drops fifty percent you'll never see a similar drop in the
stores.)
Or
will it be any one of a dozen other methods to rip us off? We await the next
scam with bated breath (or maybe baited breath since fishing season is upon us)
even as we continue with this one. Our federal government is looking after us
as usual; it leapt into action and commissioned a study by the Conference Board
of Canada. I await its conclusions with
barrels and barrels of bated breath.-end-
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