Bye to Blackfly Gazette? (April 15)

Oh, what a lovely spring!

                                    by Robert LaFrance

 (Note: This column did not appear in the Blackfly Gazette, our Perth-Andover based newspaper that had to cease publication because of border issues during Covid-19. The paper had been printed in Maine. Chances are it won't be back. I will continue to write the occasional column and post it here.)

            As I write this column, it is Good Friday, except that last night about 25 centimetres of snow fell on my driveway, and, as look out some other windows, I see that it also fell in my orchard, on the roof of the garage, etc. Everywhere I look except inside the house.

            The first robins showed up here on Tuesday, April 7^th. Did they ever look happy! This morning as I look toward the Kerr crabapple tree (the middle one of three) on our  front lawn I see four robins perched on its branches. They look bewildered and appear to be glaring at me as if the storm were my fault. Note: It wasn’t.

            Scanning over to the left, on my Honeygold apple tree, I see a murder of crows. Isn’t that a weird collective noun? Recently I looked it up on Uncle Google and found that the term came from Europe in the 15^th century. After a big blitzkreig the dead soldiers lay on the battlefield as thousands of crows had lunch and turned the field black.

            Back to 21^st century Kincardine, NB, while the robins and crows sulked in apple trees, chickadees, junkos (junkoes?), and purple finches empty the bird feeder on the porch. It just goes to show you that brain trumps brawn every time.

            Sorry about using that verb, but I have already typed it now.

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

            As we all try and dodge this Corona Virus, we are seeing that ‘first responders’, doctors, nurses and other brave people are on the front lines and are to be much admired; we all must do our part, maintaining that 2-metre distance and doing all the things we should be doing.

            One thing I would like to see happen is that the health professionals decide once and for all whether we should wear face masks. One day it’s yes, and the next day it’s no, even in Canada, but in the States it’s a total mishmash with each of the fifty states doing their own thing. And every day that bloated demagogue with the red tie is up there in front of a bank of microphones and giving people his opinion gleaned from his vast knowledge of medicine.

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

            Changing the subject for a while, I have been collecting euphemisms for quite a few years as I have heard or saw them in various media.

            I was at the grocery story yesterday and as I was going through the cash (in more ways than one except they only take plastic cards) and remembered a euphemism from long ago. That cashier behind the glass was a ‘financial trust administrator’. That could also apply to a bank teller.

            When I lived in Vancouver many years ago, in the St. Francis Hotel on Seymour Street, I was whisked up to and back from my floor by an elevator operator. He was a ‘vertical transportation engineer’.

            Many decades ago I might have found myself in bars, where there was usually a big hairy guy who threw out those who caused trouble. He was a ‘security appraiser’ but that name didn’t fool me. He was the bouncer.

            A few months ago, pre-Covid-19, I went with my wife and two of my kids to a movie in Woodstock. The person taking our tickets was a ‘cinematographic administrative executive’. After the movie a guy carrying a broom appeared. He was the ‘miniscule particle surveillance engineer’ (janitor).

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

            I might as well get to the subject of this Corona virus. That’s the only thing on the news these days, for good reason. Any of us could disappear at any moment.

            Cabin Fever seems to be the biggest effect of the days and weeks of isolation in some cases, quarantine in others. For the past several years I have been used to having restaurant meals two or three times a week and now that number has sunk to…zero. I would have breakfast on Monday at Two Rivers Restaurant, maybe lunch on Wednesday at Mary’s Bake Shop, supper on Saturday at Larlee Creek Eatery or at Mister B’s, and so on. Now I have breakfast, lunch and supper at Bob’s Diner.

            Speaking of food, one of the many things that have changed during this pandemic (which, until this year, I thought was a cooking utensil made of cast iron) is that people who had never so much as boiled an egg now consider themselves gourmet chefs. My neighbour Clyde Barrow has been telling everybody and his dog – especially the dogs! – that he now has developed four recipes for boiled eggs. Clyde and his wife Bonnie are both now established chefs down at the dog pound.

            And what is this business about hoarding toilet paper? I saw on TV that a couple from Brampton, ON, bought a tractor-trailer load of Delsey from a Costco in Toronto and were trying to unload (so to speak) it at twice the price they paid for it. It worked well until the police stepped in and confiscated it.

            Gasoline use is down because we don’t go anywhere so that huge source of  provincial sales tax is down. People are grinding their molars down to the gums because in normal times with gas prices down forty cents a litre, they would normally be running the tires off their cars.

            Have you been to the house of someone who is in isolation or quarantine? Those people (I look in my mirror) are fat. Nothing else to do. Also, here’s a prediction: nine months from now the obstetric wards will be full of crying babies because the pharmacies can’t get a certain kind of pill. Good luck!
                                             -end-

Pinky and the Brain (April 1)

The Perfessor’s great grandson

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I just spoke to the Perfessor in his front yard. Since it was a nice sunny day (it’s spring after all) we talked in his front yard where he and his dog Pinky were taking a stroll. We three have been self-isolating because of Covid-19, the Trump virus.

            He, Trump, insists on calling it the Chinese virus (is there another kind, other than the common cold, and that probably came from Shanghai?) so I will call it the Trump virus. He was warned in early January about its seriousness but chose to call that warning a Democratic hoax.

            Back to the Perfessor’s yard, he was quite pleased that his great grandson, who has finished his own quarantine, will be visiting him on Friday. “You wait until he sees the cartoon Pinky and the Brain, that I just found on a VHS tape.” commented the Perfessor.

            Little Gladstone is eight years old and lives in Plaster Rock; the Perfessor is 87. “There’s one cartoon where Pinky who, for some reason, has an English accent, is listening to his sidekick The Brain, who says: “Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?

            Pinky, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, says: “I think so Brain, but how are we going to get Katy Perry and the Dixie Chicks to come here in a helicopter?”

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

            That more or less describes how things are up the road, where the Perfessor’s son Elbert lives with his family and three kids, all of whom take piano lessons from Prius, the bartender at the Kincardine Legion. I had just come from visiting Prius, who had just come from giving the kids – Wanda, Claris and Earp – a piano lesson in cyberspace.

            Prius insists that the kids come to the Legion for their lessons, but he hardly sees them. Each of them has a room to himself or herself and they each have a laptop where they can see Prius and play the licks he directs them to.

            Those kids are a little scattered, to say the least. One day I – who was watching from my own living room – heard Prius say: “Wanda, have you practised The Viennese Waltz?”

            She replied: “The capital of Denmark is Prague.” Because they also take geography classes online, it’s hard to get them to concentrate.

            Prius said to Claris, who is a girl: “Claris, would you play the first four bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?”

            “About two and a half metres,” Claris told Prius. She’s into math.

            Later Prius said to Earp, who had been named after an American criminal from the 19^th century: “How is your day going so far?” Earp said he thought it was Saturday afternoon as far as he knew. It was Tuesday morning.

            Is it television, computers, our diets, nuclear testing, or is it

just me when I say people rarely LISTEN to one another any more? I have heard

whole conversations whose participants appear to have only one common

characteristic - total hearing loss. Planet Neptune meets Chuck Norris. And if

you think yours truly is excluded from this lineup of non-listeners and short

attention spanners, you had better...

            What? What am I doing here?

            I know of a person - and it's not necessary to mention her gender - who paid so little attention to her 1981 Gremlin that she put 35,000 miles on one oil change. It could be that there's so much information out there that every last one of us is suffering from overload. If we could just re-format our hard drives (clear out the old brain to you non-computer types) back to a point where we could start learning again it would help our general well- being. Or not.

My friend Oscar says ‘lying fallow’ like this sounds like a good idea. (I’m good at the lying part.) "You're halfway there already," he told me last night at the Legion as we sat on the porch sipping lemonade we’d brought ourselves.

            One day a few decades ago I stopped in to visit a chap who lived alone in a cabin near Tilley. He had a pain in his stomach and was thinking about going to Los Angeles to see Dr. Marcus Welby about it. Dr. Welby was a television doctor who did wondrous things onscreen.

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

Here is a question I would like someone to answer: Why is there a government employee called the Chief Medical Officer of Health? Why should the powers that be add the words “of Health” at the end?

As you know, I think a lot, but I could not come up with a reason for this, other than the automatic redundancy of humans, as in ‘hot water heater’? Why should we need to heat water that is already hot? As I have said before, we hear over and over again about someone who ‘first started’. How many times did they start?

How about this: “Chief Medical Officer of Secondhand Pianos”? “Chief Medical Officer of Highways and Infrastructure”. I guess I will once again have to gather up a 400,000 person signature petition to try and persuade the government to quit being redundant.

My friend, acquaintance really, Clivemore from Downsview, part of Toronto, stopped by the other day to see how we were weathering the Covid-19 pandemic, and I told him it was overcast some days and other days it was sunny.

         Smiling broadly, he had just finished fourteen days of self-quarantine spent with someone named JellyAnne, a 29-year old stripper who, through a bureaucratic mistake, was forced to stay there with Clivemore. One of the workers assumed she was his, Clivemore’s, wife, and said she couldn’t leave for a fortnight. Old Clive said she was some kind of coarse for the first few days, until she learned he could cook and he learned she could wash walls.  Nuptials are planned for the day this pandemic is declared over.
                                                       -end-

Remote control (March 18)

The things I want to do

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            The weather today is relatively spring-like and I have a list of jobs to do when it  improves even more. This list was written gradually over the winter months.

             First, patch my gum-rubber boots so I can go out and prune some apple trees without getting wet feet. The only trouble with that is, I would have to do the patching in the house and wouldn’t get to enjoy the nice day. I had better look on my list again and find an outside job.

Second, prune some apple trees. I would do that very thing but the snow is still deep in the orchard and I have holes in my gum-rubber boots, holes big enough to give me wet feet once I go inside.

Third, I think that at the age of 71 (I know, I don’t look a day older than 70) it is time I wrote another book after the success of my first, The Fishladder Gazette. I told that to my old friend The Perfessor and he commented: “Did you ever do anything interesting?” I found this a bit insulting, coming from a man whose greatest accomplishment was delivering a pie into the face of the late Richard Hatfield – while he was sleeping on a park bench in Boston. The Perfessor wasn’t protesting anything; he just tripped. Yeah, I may start that novel in May if I don’t find something else I want to do more. What name should I give it? How about Wine, Women and Thongs?

            Fourth, deal with a bunch of trash that needs to be cut up to make it fit in my black garbage bag. The only problem there is that my chopping tools are all located in my old henpen which itself is located 75 metres out in my orchard. Wet feet I don’t need.

            Fifth, I should make plans to put a roof on my former root cellar and make it into a tool shed, except that my riding lawn mower is too wide to fit through the doorway and it’s in the orchard anyway. Anyway, there’s two feet of snow and a bunch of frozen gravel in that building because it hasn’t had a roof all winter. So I’ll leave that until May if I don’t get Covid-19.

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

            I think I will pause in listing all those jobs I intend to do someday – the day I see pigs flying over on their way to Ernfold, Sask. – and move on to the subject that is on everyone’s lips these days – that Covid-19, or New Corona Virus.

            This is supposed to be a humour column so if I want to continue earning my big fat paycheque I had better leave the subject of jobs to do and go on to the hilarious subject of a virus that can kill us all.

            Well, maybe not that hilarious. We all know someone, usually an older person, with “a compromised immune system”. There’s one of those right here in my house and I know it’s very scary to her, even more than it is to me. This house is ‘self-quarantined’ as the phrase goes. Although neither of us has that flu, we take all kinds of precautions including washing our hands 1000 times a day and trying to avoid germs like the plaque, no pun intended.

            One thing I would like to see happen – once this crisis is over – is for China to start implementing a massive effort to stop its citizens from coming up with a new kind of flu every few years and when it does happen anyway to control it without trying to cover it up.

            When something like SARS, H1N1, or Swine Flu happens it gets old real fast when half the friggin’ world suffers from quarantines and millions die. I have done a bit of research on the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu (so-called) that killed 60 million people worldwide and was astonished to learn that it almost certainly originated in China.

            I hope we emerge from this pandemic without meeting the Grim Reaper, but if we do, we will not be able to thank China and certainly not Donald (“It will be okay”) Trump who cares only for his re-election chances rather than how many people Covid-19 will take.

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

            Changing the subject to something a little less lethal, I want to recount some of the difficult days I have had to endure. People don’t realize how violent and he-man a past I have had and at my present advanced age I continue the brutal pace.

            A lot of husbands don’t believe this, but about ten days ago something happened that caused me to nearly injure myself not once but four or five times.

            The batteries in my TV remote control went dead.

            I do not lie. I was watching a rerun of Murdoch Mysteries from about 2010 when it happened. The volume wasn’t quite high enough, so I grabbed the remote to remedy that serious situation. No response, no reaction, no remote that worked.

            I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead as I took out the four AAA batteries and cleaned them, first by rubbing them on my flannel shirt and then using rubbing alcohol. Nothing, Nothing!

            I searched high and low as the saying goes, but I wasn’t really high. I was definitely low when I was unable to find any more than two AAA batteries in the basement behind the axe, one of them dead according to my tester.

            This all occurred in the late evening and there was still the M.A.S.H. rerun at 11:00. What could I do? At 10:55 I walked over to the satellite receiver and changed the channel. I barely made it back to my chair.

            Next morning I was uptown at 8:00 o’clock to buy batteries. I hope I never have to repeat that ordeal.
                                          -end-

Send McGarry to Mongolia (March 4)

Ideas to take back our own health care system

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Ever since the government announced a few weeks ago that it intended to close six rural NB Emergency Rooms, we have learned quite a lot, among them that John McGarry, who as CEO of Horizon Health, tried for years to get Perth’s hospital closed, was certainly influential in that recent proposal.

            I thought we had seen the last of that guy when he retired as CEO in January 2017, but like a virus (or Vladimar Putin), he’s back under another position, appointed in January of this year as Chairman of the Board of Horizon Health.

            What a coincidence that a couple of weeks after this accountant (no medical training) was appointed board chair that Horizon Health and the NB government came up with this plan – attempted in 2014 but thwarted by public and other outcries – to close rural emergency rooms. (Another coincidence: five of those six emergency rooms were in Liberal ridings, with the sixth in a very safe Tory seat.)

            So now it’s up to us to suggest ways to retain our health care system. My first suggestion would be to get rid of John McGarry – send him on a fact-finding mission to Outer Mongolia – and about six layers of vice-presidents and other deadwood bureaucrats in Horizon Health and Vitalité Health Network NB. Every few months that crowd announces that New Brunswick’s health system is “unsustainable”, so watch out for that. It is a code word for “Let’s close down as many rural hospitals as we can, while we can”.

            I have talked to several (many) people about Premier Higgs’s about-face (now identified as a pause) on the latest attempt to gut rural hospitals and they seem oddly complacent. Big mistake. While we are whistling in the dark, those bureaucrats in Fredericton are working on other ways to reduce rural health care. Count on it. We are the mice and they are the cats, quietly awaiting their chance.

            After the premier postponed making these significant changes, Perth-Andover Mayor Marianne Bell hosted a rally near the front door of Hotel Dieu Hospital. The people who attended that – well over 200 – were not complacent; they knew those Fredericton based folks were not going to give up.

            “Make no mistake, closing ERs at night will compromise health outcomes,” ER doctor Josh O’Hagan told the crowd. “The numbers may not be huge, but a rural life is as important as an urban life.” Now there’s a statement that should be put up on the walls of all Horizon Health and government employees, deadwood included. He went on to say that driving to Waterville or Edmundston to visit family members would affect the patient’s recovery time.

            “Horizon Health needs to focus its efforts on these matters, not closing services due to a perceived staffing crisis they helped create by constantly threatening closures for essential services.”

            So let’s get to work and come up with ideas that will help us rural citizens maintain the good level of health care we enjoy. Horizon Health and the government keep insisting it’s not money-saving that is driving these “reforms”, but a genuine desire to improve health care. And my Aunt Fanny is a rocket scientist.

They say they can’t get the staff. Well, here are a couple of ways to increase the number of staffers:

Increase the number of nurses’ spots open at universities and when they graduate, actually hire them instead of acting like bean-counters and hiring them only part-time because that looks good on a balance sheet. Of course what happens is that the young, trained nurses can’t make a living here and head for Ontario, Maine or some other full-time job site.

We often hear on news reports about a fully qualified physician, a refugee from Syria or some other war-torn area of the world, who has been deluged with red tape for two or three years while trying to get accredited in Canada. Of course they have to be trained for Canada, but this is not a medical bottleneck; it’s our old friend Bureaucracy.

Surely our overworked doctors would be happy if some of their work could be done by another level of medical staff. It doesn’t require an MD to renew most prescriptions, and in fact this province and other provinces have now allowed pharmacists to do that very thing once only done by doctors.

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

I should mention at this point that in my column two weeks ago I blamed Horizon Health (and do they ever deserve it!) and the Tories for the effort to damage rural health care while lying about improving it, but the Liberals deserve their fair share of blame.

Frank McKenna and his governments went on a frenzy of centralization in the 1990s, and among the victims were rural hospitals. Plaster Rock and Perth-Andover hospitals lost their local hospital boards and therefore local control over health. Heaven forfend that rural people should decide what company should choose the supper menu for patients!

There have been other baffling decisions made by the Liberals over the years and there’s another one being done right now. The NB Liberal leader, Kevin Vickers, seems  to be totally focussed on bringing down the Tory government rather than helping to improve our health care system – you know, the one that should treat us all equally, Liberal or Tory.

Let’s start writing letters of suggestions to the editors of Fredericton newspapers  and to Horizon Health (Horizon@HorizonNB.ca 506-623-5500). Surely in this province of bright people we can come up with some good ideas.
                                              -end-

Gutting rural health care (Feb. 19)

Let’s redefine 'emergency'

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I know it was an unfair – though accurate – thing to say, but on the evening of the last provincial election in which the Tories won a minority government I said to my wife: “There goes Perth hospital”.

            And so it may come to pass. Tory governments and Horizon Health have been wanting to close Hotel Dieu for many many years. Are they going to succeed this time?

            First of all, their idea that medical emergencies only occur in the daytime is a logical way of looking at the whole thing I suppose, if you live in the shadow of a city hospital, but common sense (I do not refer to government) says that quite a few people go out on these things called snowmobiles which tend to become embedded in fir trees at 4:00 am. It is rarely a fair fight.

            Horizon Health managed quite a few years ago to close Perth hospital’s two state-of-the-art operating rooms and quickly whisked all their high-tech equipment down south where another Tory government had built a large hospital out in a potato field. At that point Bath Hospital bit the dust but Perth-Andover voices were quickly raised in support of our hospital.

            How I remember the Horizon Health executive who, after the 2012 flood, gleefully reported that Perth hospital would never recover from the devastation and would almost certainly be closed now. “It’s only a 40-minute drive to Waterville hospital” she said, thereby breaking Commandment #11B: “Thou shalt not lie like a cheap rug when people’s lives are at stake”.

            But it wasn’t yet the time for the greatly exaggerated demise. Hotel Dieu would be back. Horizon Health was frustrated once again. If they had had their way the ER would be gone forever, replaced, perhaps, by a custodian standing by the front door and handing out Band-Aids to repair broken legs and knife wounds such as those suffered by the bus driver who is alive today because Perth ER was only four minutes away.

            We all know someone who would be pushing up daisies if not for that ER. Someone very near and dear to my own heart had to be taken from this house at 1:00 am on Dec. 23. He had suffered a broken back and I doubt if he preferred to ride to Waterville (45-55 minutes from here) instead of Perth (15-20 minutes).

            The government’s first phase would have seen Perth ER and five more around the province close from midnight to 8:00 am, but that was just to soften us up for the next phases. ERs would, soon after, close for the night at 10:00 pm. Meanwhile the ambulance system can hardly deal with the way things are now.

            We know the reason for much of this, don’t we? It’s yet another hit on rural New Brunswick. Government and other bureaucrats sit around big curved tables and ponder how they can sock it to us yet again. This particular ‘reform’ must have taken them several minutes, because we know that Horizon Health had the plans all made months – perhaps years ago. Every year as flood season approaches they are saying: “Now? Now?” But with this government plan they won’t have to ask that question, or so they think.

            And what about the premier’s role in this? He sounds eager to call an election on the issue, but in the end sounds like Donald Trump bragging that he’s done nothing wrong. And speaking of Donald Trump (the only president who could possible have made George W. Bush look good), this whole ‘reform’ plan (they always call it ‘reform’ rather than what it is), looks like something he would do. Make it sound innocuous at first, then pile on the bad news.

            “An old-fashioned winter” with lots of snow is what we’re having at the moment, and it seems like a good time for an old-fashioned brawl. It’s time this government learned that people who live in rural areas deserve health care too. It is true that our province’s health care system does need a good close look, but they are looking at the wrong send of the boa constrictor.

            I would recommend the first step be to execute all the Horizon Health upper crust as well as those civil servants who seem to have their brains scrambled when they talk about health care. Wait! I didn’t mean stand them up against a wall and blast them because, as Nixon said he said: “That would be wrong.” (He didn’t actually say that.)

            Talking recently to a friend who spent two weeks in Edmundston hospital (not one to be cut), I was interested to hear that during his fortnight stay there, he hardly encountered a person who spoke English to him. Rather than taking this opportunity to rail against the other –lingual of bilingual, he said he had received excellent care and the staff had been second to none. Perhaps those who froth and drool and want every ambulance worker to be Jean-Paul Sartre or Alice Munroe in their use of both languages should consider this.

            NOTE: As of Sunday evening, I have heard that the government has cancelled the health care ‘reforms’. Did the government fall, or did their faces fall when they saw the public reaction? Now how about if we and they all get to work and come up with ideas to actually reform the health care system instead of hammering the rural hospitals?
                                                 -end-

Watch those shrikes! (Feb 5/20)

Birdbrain conversing with birdbrain

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            I think I will have to have a talk with the birds around this neck of the woods. They can’t seem to make up their minds whether they want to chow down at my bird feeder or somebody else’s.

            A few minutes ago I was in the kitchen and looked out to see half a dozen purple finches and not another bird in the big wide area in front of our house. The finches were happily filling their bills with sunflower seeds from the same bird feeder where yesterday chickadees and American goldfinches where crowding and elbowing each other for a turn at the table.

            The day before that, it was chickadees, true, but they had been joined by slate-coloured juncos and a couple of California Condors. Just kidding, testing to see if you were paying attention.

            I wouldn’t mind hearing from any of my readers who know a thing or two about birds, because this birding (it used to be called bird-watching) is a mystery to me, but I do know that hummingbirds and ruffed grouse (partridges) are not likely to be seen at my bird feeder and I sure hope that shrike stays clear away.

            It was probably about a dozen years ago when I looked out our living room window and saw an unknown bird sitting on one of my metal fenceposts. I took a telephoto picture of it and emailed it to Murray Watters in Perth. He knows everything about birds except perhaps the mating habits of the Mombassa Canary.

            Within minutes my phone was ringing. `Bob, get rid of that bird as fast as you can, preferably with an elephant gun. That’s a shrike! They will rip apart a small bird, like a chickadee, and hang it on a bush or stake to eat later. Blast it!”

            I couldn’t find my elephant gun but at that time I had the wildest border collie known to the human race. I called her into the house and into the living room where I lifted her up to the window. She stiffened into a piece of steel and when I let her out the porch door she zoomed toward that killer creature and actually caught one of the bird’s claws in her mouth.

            Not quite enough though. The bird let out one Mother-Mary of a screech and headed west toward Mars Hill Mountain. Within minutes that shrike was an American.

            I should add that this is a true story. Look up the name shrike on Google. I even have my picture of the grey and black bird somewhere among the 300 gigbytes of photos that adorn my computer’s hard drive.

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

            I often take long walks among the hills of the Scotch Colony and often notice the detritus people fling out of their vehicle windows as they gently drive along on sight-seeing jaunts. It was only recently that I started taking plastic bags along with to pretend I care about the environment.

            This morning I took six grocery bags and was nonplussed to find that all six were full of trash before I got to the foot of Manse Hill. This is less than one kilometre; keep in mind that this is winter and much of the trash was hidden under snow and snowbanks. I called my wife to see if she would drive down and pick me up and bring more bags. She said she was washing her hair and couldn’t possibly go outside for four hours. “Just kidding,” she said.

            I continued on my journey with four black garbage bags in tow. A lot of people are thinking right now     that I must have gone crazy in the night, but I am merely doing my bit to replace the late Richard Elliott who, every day though stricken with terminal cancer, used to walk these roads starting any time after 5:00 am to pick up trash and a few returnables.

            What do people throw into the ditch and why, when there are garbage cans and dumpsters all over the place? Trucks come every week to pick up trash right at the ends of our driveways, yet people still throw trash out their vehicle windows.

            I suppose the first words that come to the readers’ minds are “Tim Hortons”, but I know from experience that only a tiny percentage of paper cups, paper plates and cardboard food containers are from Tim Hortons. It’s more of a mixture so we must be fair.

            Beer cans are popular, but at least there is a 5-cent gift waiting for us when we take the empties back. We take ours to the food bank in Andover and are happy to contribute to the cost of paying the building’s hydro bill.

            I don’t find many wine bottles and I can truthfully say that I have never found, in any ditch from here to Campbell River, BC, an empty Dom Perignon bottle. That particular beverage costs about $500 an ounce. The rest of the trash I find is just trash.

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

            In this last item, I should explain that my acquaintance Elroy Favore is no longer late. In my mid-January column I referred to “the late Elroy Favore” and mentioned that I missed him severely because he used to deliver my organic potatoes right to my door.

            Well folks, he’s not late. I was misinformed. At least he’s not late in the sense that he’s “passed” as people say now. Indeed, he is quite early. Ironically I just saw him at Tim Hortons and he took a lot of trouble to correct my incorrect assumption. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, he said: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

            However, he said it in such a snarky and rude way that I rather wished the reports had not been quite so exaggerated.
                                              -end-

Burning my truck (Jan 22/20)

Put down that fire extinguisher!

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            As a journalist for about 35 years, I know what a slow news day is. You look desperately for a story, and in the end can only find one about a family of groundhogs who built a nest in an abandoned tractor tire.

            No wars to speak of, no mass killings in Texas, no big tax announcements, no huge scandals – just that pitiful group of rodents huddling in their frozen tire.

            That’s about what it’s like today and has been for the past week. Only in this case the groundhogs are people named Harry, Meghan and Archie – ordinary enough names for ordinary people who have decided they might want to move from England to Canada.

            I never figured out, in my 71.5 years, what the word ‘Royal’ means and probably never will, but I suppose it mostly means ‘rich’ and living on money doled out by governments. In years past this family, based in Britain not far from the biggest welfare office in the country, the family members attend opening ceremonies of hospitals and bowling alleys and are fawned over as if they had recently accomplished something. Then the crowds disperse and everyone goes home.

            So the Duke and Duchess of Sussex want to bring little Archie to Canada because the British tabloid newspapers (they never have a slow news day because they simply make it up) have been picking on the duchess, whose former identity was actress Meghan Markle.

            What did they expect?

            The television and radio news networks interviewed people who worked for the Canadian immigration departments and they said that Harry and Meghan had to go through the same channels as every other immigrants. Nobody popped up to tell the story about Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The mayor of Sussex, NB, showed up to welcome them to his town, because of its name. Imagine, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex occupying a farm only a few kilometres from downtown. Not to mention Archie.

            Best of luck to the family; I am happy for them, that they’re not trying to enter the U.S.A. via the southern border. Trump would be calling them rapists and murderers, or worse, in his “mind” – Democrats. God, he’s an odious man, as are the Republicans supporting him.

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

            This coming weekend will be Robbie Burns Night in Kincardine and, once again, I will not be wearing a kilt. Every year I feel I should warn people.

            However, I will be singing with various groups during the program although I have no idea what ‘Auld Lang Syne’ means. Something to do with Scotland no doubt.

            You have been warned.

            Moving on, my neighbour Edd Sprang stopped by to visit last evening and I could hear his cursing from the time he emerged from his 1976 Gremlin at the end of our driveway.

            “Edd,” I said, “I have never heard you swear like that since your favourite cow got her udder caught in your ringer washing machine. What’s the problem?”

            “Christians,” he roared and quaffed the beer I gave him within half a minute. “Today they cost me almost $700. I was driving my decrepit 1976 GMC pickup home from Riley Brook when it caught fire around Two Brooks. The smoke was rolling out from under the hood and also from my left rear tire. I was laughing like a hyena as I came to a stop and just before an idiot appeared on the road behind me.

            “Obviously he was a Christian because he wanted to help. He had a fire extinguisher in his cab and I will be damned if he didn’t haul it out with the idea of putting out the fires. I grabbed it out of his hand and threw it in the ditch, but he told me I was in shock and out of my head and got it back from the ditch.

            “I grabbed it from him one more time and threw it once more in the ditch, then tramped it into the little stream. He got it out again and damned if he didn’t put out those fires.”

            I was baffled of course, but then I often am when dealing with Edd. “Why didn’t you want him to put out the fire?”

            “Remember I said it was a 1976 GMC pickup? Resale value in the vicinity of zero and nil. My insurance would have come good for about $2500, and I would have got rid of that piece of-”.

            I interrupted: “But Edd, you would have gotten some money from your insurance. Wouldn’t you?”

            “I got my pickup towed to Plaster Rock where the garage replaced the burned out wires and the tire. The towing came to $80, the garage work came to $587 for a grand – not so grand – total of $667. The deductible on my insurance was $500. I didn’t apply to my insurance company because, according to my neighbour Blurb McGann, they would have put up my payments another $25 a month for five years.”

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            Changing the subject, I have recently completed a task I have been working on for what seems like years. I changed all my computer, banking and other passwords. For months, even years, I have been warned every hour it seems to change my passwords every month or so. The last time I changed mine was October 1994.

            Following instructions, I saved a different password for each of the 15 programs I use. The next day I was informed that I had been SPAMed, PHISHED, etc in 11 of those programs. Remind me to never listen to anyone again.
                                           -end-

NB's front licence plates (Jan 8/20)

Sneaking around North America

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            A guy recently told me this story: His neighbours were on a vacation in Manitoba and stopped for a roadside picnic during which they tied their dog to their car’s front bumper. You can guess the rest. After about a five hundred metres, the driver, whose name was Igor, noticed the dog’s rear end and stopped. The canine wasn’t even winded. It was a greyhound.

            You learn something every day. (Notice that I wrote “YOU learn something every day”). I refer to the plethora of names people use for what I call ‘sneakers’ and have been called sneakers since I was a kid. But there are many names for sneakers.

            I asked a friend who calls me regularly (once a decade) from Tupelo, Mississippi, and he said everyone he knows calls them ‘tennis shoes’ and it should be made into a law. “And furthermore I hope Donald Trump wins his battle with the forces of evil,” he concluded. “Happy new year!”

            I decided to actually conduct some research on the matter. My uncle, Sid Google, told me that sneakers are called tennis shoes everywhere in the U.S. (except the south side of Chicago) and in Canada they are also called ‘running shoes’ – as if I ever run – basketball shoes, gym shoes and, believe it or not – sneakers. Sounds as if the forces of evil are busy on this side of that border for which I am very thankful.

            Next subject: My mobile phone server-operator called me on Thursday morning  and started a spiel. I interrupted: “Sorry, due to high call volumes this customer is unable to deal with your call at the moment. Your call is important to me; please stay on the line. Meanwhile, go to hell.”

            That felt good. New Year’s Resolution #1 down and dusted.

            People keep asking me if I had had a happy and cheerful Christmas/New Years holiday and did Santa find my credit card. My answers are succinct: No and Yes. Now go away.

            One thing I did see a lot of during the holidays was the phenomenon of able-bodied people parking in clearly marked handicapped zones. Wherever I went I saw these people park their Volvos, dash into store and emerge carrying a lot of stuff certainly not destined for the space under my Christmas tree. Items marked ‘natural’ but not made of anything Mother Nature would recognize – things like that.

            Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter where I went, these pirates where there and parking in handicapped zones while the truly handicapped people struggled over the ice and snow. My friend the Perfessor suggested that we place little nail filled boards behind the tires of the illegally parked cars but I said we should go over to my house and get rid of some Christmas 2018 surplus alcohol. He agreed. I never had the heart to tell him that his nephew’s car was the one he was about to ‘board-nail’.

            Just reviewing some of the major events of 2019: I think that biggest one occurred sometime during the summer when our New Brunswick government, no doubt acting on the advice of American or Toronto consultants, decided that none of us needed front licence plates on our cars. Well, I agree, but we also don’t need licence plate lights, mascara and skunks in order to live a good life in New Brunswick. Stop signs are not strictly necessary, or Coca Cola, traffic lights or insulin, but in many cases things go better with Coke.

            I could see that in order to get to the bottom of the licence plate question I would have to do more research. I started looking for the NB government websites with no luck of course, then miraculously found a Google page headed: “Why New Brunswick got rid of front licence plates”. Here is the information fully explaining the reasoning: “Due to the high volume of requests we are unable…please try again.” I think it was just to save money, to be fair. The paperwork and computer hours involved were high it is true, but according to my information from other sources, the government saved us over a hundred dollars, quickly absorbed into the Cannabis NB deficit. Ya gotta start somewhere.

            9:04 am the next day: Today I expect to accomplish something because I have made a list. As soon as I finish my delicious breakfast of stewed pomegranates and boiled mussels with green tea from Malasia I plan to go outside and spread road salt on the driveway just in case we get freezing rain in that storm predicted for next Tuesday; first I have to go uptown and buy road salt because I just remembered I’m all out; while I’m uptown I should get a book or two and then sit and relax for a while after I get home. Maybe I will park at the bottom of the driveway and read in the sunshine but I do have to get some lunch before I spread that road salt, if I haven’t forgotten to buy it.

            All this time of talking about what I’m going to accomplish and I forgot I have to feed the dog that guards and protects us. Then I suppose by the time I finish that job I have to fill the kitchen woodbox with dry seasoned wood, but before I do that I should bring wood from my outside pile to the shed.

            By that time it will be mid-afternoon and I will have to finish this column or the editor will start calling and nagging; you know what she’s like. After that I have to start making supper I guess, my turn, or maybe we should go to a restaurant. I could use some roast squab and fries.

                                          -end-

            By the time we get home it should be early enough to spread that road salt