Corona. May 27/20

 Who is that masked man?

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            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, yet 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.

            Since the Blackfly Gazette hasn’t been seen in public for a while, I have grown lazy and indolent, but there’s good news. I looked on my computer and found that I had written part of a column, so I can use that today:

            “As I write this column, it is Good Friday, except that last night about 25 centimetres of snow fell on my driveway, and, as I 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.”

           

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            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’. 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).

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            I might as well get back to the Covid-19. 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, even though some restaurants have re-opened, it’s still breakfast, lunch and supper at Bob’s Diner.

            Speaking of food, I am finding 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 now considered 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 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-

The Trump Virus - April 25/20

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?”

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            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.

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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-