Drag out the old bitcoins (Feb 17/21)

 

Will sudden wealth spoil Bob?

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            I was sitting in an uptown restaurant day before yesterday when my allegedly smart phone rang.

            It was my wife. Although I hadn’t finished my breakfast muffin, tea and home fries I answered, as I tend to. They’re tired of seeing me come in to the ER with contusions and lacerations from various arguments.

            “Bob, are you sitting down?” I allowed as to how I was indeed sitting down. “You know what I just found in the attic?”

            Since the attic contains approximately three tractor-trailer loads of assorted junk, I gave the obvious answer: “A green coffee mug full of bat sign.”

            She said it was not a green coffee mug full of bat stuff, but a small briefcase I had put into the attic in 1984 when we moved here to Manse Hill Road from our Birch Ridge estate near Maggie’s Falls, or Robinson’s Fall which I am told is the original and proper name.

            I tried again: “A deflated summer tire from the 1960 Impala I owned when I lived in Tilley.” Surprisingly, I was wrong.

            She had a blockbuster: “In a brown briefcase, in a little side pocket, was one stock certificate – ten shares of Microsoft, dated June 17, 1984.” I remembered buying that in Perth-Andover from a stockbroker who had been practising there before 1990 when he had moved into government housing at Dorchester. We had bet during a footrace across the river and he lost, or more correctly I had won, but he didn’t have the $15 to pay me. With a little financial maneuvering I was the proud owner of ten Microsoft shares worth over $12. I put the certificate in that briefcase, put the briefcase in the attic and forgot about it. Now it looked as if I were a wealthy man indeed, possibly a millionaire.

            Still, I finished my breakfast and left my usual 15-cent tip. Ignoring the waitress’s glare, I headed for home and my newly recognized millions. I, Robert LaFrance, was worth (as the expression goes) ‘mucho dinero’. It wouldn’t be long before I was hobnobbing with Bill and Melinda Gates at their estate out near Seattle.

            Trembling with excitement, I headed north to consult with my accountant. I would be the greatest millionaire in Canadian history, I would feed the hungry, I would buy expensive vehicles, give my family financial independence and donate hundreds of millions for research into the worst diseases like scurvy, mumps and sickle cell anemia. No more homeless people along the streets of Kincardine.

            By my calculation, after checking Microsoft’s share value on Google, my stock certificate nestled on my front seat was worth something in the range of $887 million  dollars. I doubt if Bill and Melinda Gates had that much in cash. If I ever visited them at their $800 million bungalow out there in Washington State, they would have to move aside, away from their indoor swimming pool, and make room for me and my antique Falcon to be parked by the diving board.

            At this moment when I’m typing away on my word processor, I know exactly what you, the reader, are thinking. You think that on my way to town, I will open my passenger side window and the stock certificate would fly out and land under the wheels of a tractor-trailer that would demolish it. Back to poverty for old Bob.

            Au contraire, that did not happen. I arrived safely at my accountant’s house near Arthurette, but he wasn’t home. His wife Gretchen came to the door and said Clyde was out tapping trees. Which I thought was a trifle early in the year.

            “Oh no, he’s not tapping maple trees,” she said. “This time of the year is perfect for tapping alders. Their sap is delicious and their syrup is out of this world.” At this point I looked at Gretchen and thought: “Alder sap is not the only thing out of this world.” I thought for a few seconds about showing her my $887 million stock certificate but decided to leave it in my pocket. She said that Clyde was out on the old Morales Farm above Four falls and I could go there to see him.

            I got just above Aroostook when I remembered that Covid rules prevented me from going there because the area just above Four Falls was in either the red, white or blue zone (coulda been chartreuse) or lockdown and I couldn’t go there until 2023 – or maybe tomorrow morning.

            But wait! The Morales Farm was in the Edmundston Zone and that meant that Clyde was liable to be (a) arrested, (b) fined, (c) shot, or all of the above, or any combination. Just then, as I came to the road that could take me across the bridge spanning the Aroostook River, a Covid Police car came flying down the road and there, in the back seat and looking as if he had just been arrested by the Covid Police, was Clyde. He waved out the window at me and in his hand were two or three tiny sap pails. That was Clyde all right; he wouldn’t waste alder sap, or anything else.

            I quick rammed the old Falcon into gear and took off after the Covid Police car that was still merrily flashing its lights as it zoomed (88 k/hr) down the Trans Canada Highway. It was an odd looking vehicle, a 1995 Red Lumina, rusty as a 1981 Ford.

            Well, I see I am out of time and space for this column; I hope the editor’s not mad, but I will be back in two weeks with the rest of the story. Let’s just say it involves Bitcoins.

                                        -end-

Covid-19 confusions (Feb 3/21)

 

A school to teach Covid-19 rules

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            People are saying that spring is on the way. I am not one of those deluded fools who say this. I’m a deluded fool who says we will get out of this pandemic before fall.

            There are a lot of deluded fools like me, and possibly you - if you are a resident of the planet Earth. There are people who think the Earth is flat and those who think Covid-19 is a hoax, thanks to a bloated orange demagogue now residing in Florida.

            Treasure hunters are deluded. I read about a team of them who found about $3 million worth of pirate gold and then had to give it all up to the government of Peru. Or was it the government of Tilley?

            I had a cousin – no, I HAVE a cousin since he’s still kicking – who thought that Turkish government jail cells couldn’t be that bad, but they are.

            Last week my neighbour the Perfessor and I happened to meet at the bottle redemption centre last week and enjoyed a 2-metre separated conversation. The thing is, neither of us was there to get money from empty bottles because I give all my empties to the food bank and so does he. He was there for metaphysical reasons.

            Driving along the street, he saw the big sign that read “REDEMPTION CENTRE” and thought he saw his chance to atone for various mistakes over the years. The man who ran the centre used words and phrases like: “crazier than a cut cat” and “nut job, probably from Tilley”. The Tilley part wasn’t an insult, but ‘nut job’ couldn’t be counted as a compliment.

            I mentioned the concept of 2-metre distancing and earlier I mentioned Covid-19; the government has its hands full there, partly because of the weird array of conflicting information we are hearing every day. In my 72.7 years I haven’t seen anything like it except from a girl I used to know in Orillia, Ontario. I never knew where I was with here, probably because I never got anywhere.

            But that’s another story for another day.

            Referring to Covid-19 rules, I notice that many signs in many stores and establishments have signs that ask customers to maintain a “6-foot” social distance, and other signs order a “2-metre” distance. They’re not the same thing. A metre is 39.37 inches, and a yard is 36 inches. Whosoever keeps a distance of only two yards (6 feet) from the person to whom he is speaking is too close, according to government rules. Six and two-thirds inches too close.

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

            The point I am slowly getting to is that the whole gamut of Covid-19 rules and restrictions are…I’m going to use the word confusing.

            On Saturday, January 30, New Brunswickers were introduced to the concept of a 10-person bubble, which sounded to me a lot like: “Well, we can’t persuade you to follow all the rules, so we’ll just loosen them until you’re comfortable.” There followed a long list of revisions to the rules of orange zones (which we are in as of today).

            Even the phrase “10-person bubble” is baffling. Whereas on Friday anyone who skated or jogged within two metres (NOT six feet) of another human being would be shot on the spot and fined $800, now we can attend an orgy as long as no one has a birthday in a month whose name contains an ‘s’, and there are ten or fewer at the orgy.

            Last week if two persons who lived in separate residences were in the same car, they would both be summarily shot, but now there’s no problem. What changed? We’re still in orange zone. It’s all a mystery to me, as well as to my neighbour Claxton Fenety. I know this because Thursday he had said to me: “Hey it’s all a mystery to me.”

            It is said that the pandemic has resulted in a lot of depression and other mental problems, leading to more enthusiastic drinking and partaking of ‘nose candy’ as well as  legal drugs, but I can’t agree.

            Oh, wait, I do agree. I had forgotten those two tractor-trailers that backed into my driveway yesterday morning. The same thing happened a day later at Claxton’s place, leading me to believe that perhaps we may be on the verge of dependency. Well, why not? As long as no one drinks and drives, especially those truck drivers.

            I should quickly insert a sentence here to say that the foregoing was all lies. The only thing I know about the price of liquor and beer is what it used to be, back in the days when I used to over-indulge.

            I am so much out of the loop (as they say) that I don’t even know where the regular spots are that people can return their empties, other than the food bank where I take mine twice a year. (Four beer cans, found in a ditch; it’s embarrassing.)

            On Sunday morning I was driving by a place that boasted a big sign that read Redemption Centre (as I mentioned above) and I screeched to a halt, assisted by a slippy (as my cousin says) road. I almost went into the ditch where I might have needed serious redemption, but stopped in time so I could warn the Perfessor.

            The little establishment was indeed a redemption centre but the proprietor, a wizened man of about 99, soon explained to the Perfessor that he saved bottles and cans, not souls.

            After all my complaining, I just turned on the radio in time to hear a government announcement. The 10-person bubble is still in place, but the government has decided that the main problem is that people just don’t understand it. No kidding. Therefore the province will be setting up a school in Miramichi “because of its central location”. A 2-week course and Bob’s Your Uncle.     

                                                          -end-

The frosty Miss Sara Williams (Jan 20/21)

 

Bob was the Teacher’s Pet

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            It just so happens that my column falls on the same day that Donald Trump slinks out of town and off to Florida – the ultimate Snowbird. May he go to jail by next Tuesday afternoon, about four.

            Enough about that.

            Sitting in front of my computer keyboard and watching it snow, I am thinking of the frosty Miss Sara Hilda Williams, my high school English teacher. Some people, students and teachers alike, really hated her but she was my favourite.

            How many Blackfly Gazette readers remember Miss Williams? (Even now I do not dare to call her Sara.) I graduated from what was then SVRHS – the letter R stands for Regional – in 1965 and I remember Miss Williams congratulating me and slipping me an envelope bulging with ten-dollar bills to help my further education.

            I became her Teacher’s Pet in 1961 when I was twelve. My mother died in May of that year and when I returned to school after the funeral in Lerwick I found myself the envy (or object of hate) of my classmates because I was a TP. She gave me extra help in her English class and even drove me home to Tilley a few times, usually because she kept me in for extra help.

Her first school in Victoria County was at South Tilley. From that beginning in this area, Miss Sara Williams went on to teach at several other small schools, including Block X School in North Tilley (I attended there from grade one to five) and the South Tilley School. A look at some Block X records from 1939 shows that Sara Williams was designated a 'Class II' teacher at a salary of $280 per annum for teaching 33 students ages six to 15. (What could she possibly have done with all that money?)

            After teaching at various schools she took a job in September 1953 that was to

last the rest of her career, until she retired in 1966. The newly built Southern Victoria Regional High School in Andover had opened its doors for the first time with G.E. Malcolm MacLeod as its principal and Mrs. Maybelle Titus, who was to become one of Sara Williams's lifelong friends, as vice principal.

In the morning Miss Williams would always ask how I was and if I answered "good" or "fine" she would say: "No, Robert, you are neither GOOD nor FINE. You are WELL!"

Everyone had a story or an anecdote about her. The late Vaughan DeMerchant had three stories that he said were not printable, and they weren't, about things students had said to her in class.

"She used to sing - or try to sing," said my late cousin James LaFrance of North

Tilley. "What I remember most was that my seat was right in front of her desk and when she got mad at someone behind me she'd push her desk back hard and push mine right into my stomach every time."

My sister Joan (LaFrance) Laverdiere, of Welland, Ontario, said: "I liked Sara. The funny things she used to do like throwing the books. You just had to duck in

time. She'd get so mad, but it might be for just a few seconds. I think most of the kids liked her."

            Turning the clock forward to the late 1970s after I had built a cabin in Tilley: I had spent years saving money for an early retirement after working in Ontario, BC, and the Northwest Territories and was settled down to my savings bonds and garden.

            One summer morning my phone rang just as the sun was peeping over the hill by the Murray and Minnie Paris house. It was 5:35 am and I immediately recognized the voice on the line. It was the voice of Miss Sara Williams, whom I hadn’t heard from for a dozen years. She wanted to talk about figures of speech and sentence structure, namely subject and predicate. In four minutes she had said what she wanted to say and abruptly hung up.

            Next morning, and for many mornings afterward, this 75-year old lady and I, a 28-year-old bachelor (same as my son is today) and I discussed the English language and every possible ramification and nuance until I moved to Birch Ridge where I still had the same phone number, but she didn’t call any more. I guess I was a foreigner.

            The next thing I heard about her was that she was a resident in the Victoria Glen Manor when it was still in Perth. I resolved to go and visit her there. She didn’t know me. Not a glimmer. I talked to Betty and Jane at the nurses’ desk for that wing and they said she was back teaching English spelling to her students at SVHS. Whenever one of the staff went near her she might start explaining the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs or describing what a gerund was.

            Miss Sara Williams lived to be 99.95 years old. I mentioned one day to one of the staff that it was a shame that Miss Williams wouldn’t realize it when she became a century old and that (unnamed) staff member said: “She knows how old she is and said she refused to become that old.” Sure enough, Miss Williams died in early July 2003, five days short of that century.

                                      -end-

New Year's non-resolutions (Jan 6/21)

 

How to (easily) quit smoking

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            So now we are faced with the impossible task of arranging our 2021 New Years Resolutions, with the thought always in the back of our minds that a year from now we could be in some other plane of existence.

            My first one always has to be to quit smoking. I choose that one because it’s an unqualified success, as the phrase goes, because I smoked my last cigarette on February 10, 1973. I refer to tobacco of course. Anything else is none of your business.

            That year I was living in the St. Francis Hotel at the foot of Seymour Street in Vancouver. No one in the world is going to believe this, but it’s true; I was paying $15 a week to live in room 218, bathroom down the hall. It was a clean, well-kept hotel right across the road from the CPR station and on the edge of Gastown.

            The way prices go in 2021, that same room today would cost roughly $5000 a minute. It’s long gone of course.

            Here is the story of how I quit smoking. I got up that morning and had a coffee with my first cigarette of the day. It all tasted like the bottom of a farmer’s boot combined with a tablespoon of campfire ash stirred in with Sunlight soap, carefully mixed with dried dog excrement.

            It was time to quit smoking but I didn’t have the will power or strength of character. (Still don’t.) Then I went downstairs to the hotel lobby where my old friend – and I do mean old – Oscar Evoy, 90, was sitting there and puffing on his pipe while watching Sesame Street. Big Bird was his favourite. He grunted at me and at another denizen of the lobby, Cliff Gordon, age 80, who was just sitting there looking grumpy. He preferred Fred Penner.

            The first thing I noticed was that Cliff wasn’t smoking his usual Export A cigarette. I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before, so I’ll make it short. Cliff had quit smoking that morning, he said, so I decided to quit as well. Four days later Cliff, who had smoked since he was fifteen, started up again but I never did.

            Cold turkey. That’s how I did it after smoking nine years. I had gotten in with bad smoking company in grade 12 at what was then Southern Victoria Regional High School and couldn’t quit until 1973, in spite of numerous attempts. The bizarre thing is that today many physicians will advise smokers not to quit cold turkey because it’s too had on the system. Apparently, like another weekend when I went to Las Vegas, I didn’t have a system.

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

            My second resolution – and I knew that wouldn’t be a problem because I had quit serious drinking 32 years ago – was to get rid of alcohol. I lived in the Hamilton, Ontario, area from 1967 to 1972 and broke a few minor records in imbibing Labatt’s 50 and Labatt’s Blue. Take note that I was not behind the wheel of my car at any point during the day during which I drank a total of 22 bottles of beer before supper. I was still able to navigate as long as I walked on my feet.

            Some years after this personal record, I quit drinking. That is, I quit drinking Labatt’s products because I had moved to Vancouver (see above) and later the Northwest Territories. Silver Spring was my favourite in Vancouver, and Nitchequon Sharp Ale while I lived in NWT.

            Another long story shoot, I quit drinking beer for good when I turned thirty and was infected with being broke. I had all I could do to pay my car insurance.

            (NOTE FROM MY FRIEND THE PERFESSER, OF KINTORE): “Bob, quit lying. I saw you drink half a dozen Alpine on New Year’s Eve.”

            Oh yeah, I forgot that.

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

            More on New Years resolutions: I checked and I checked and found that I am so close to perfect that I don’t need to make any more New Years resolutions. If I have any kind of character flaw, nobody tells me. On the other hand, I see more people at the grocery store than anywhere else and because of the masks we all have to (and should) wear and my diminishing hearing I can’t hear a damn thing and they can’t hear me. They could be praising me to the sky or calling me the lowest skunk in Christendon.

            “I’ll go along with the skunk,” commented the Perfessor. With friends like that…

            To be serious for a minute, I suppose there are a couple of areas in which I could improve, although I can’t imagine what they might be.

            Every morning I get up and thank whosoever is in charge for Donald Trump. I, and just about anyone I know, compare favourably with that despicable swamp rat, if that’s not being too nasty and harsh. Well over seventy million Americans voted for that particular swamp rat, but I think a lot of people forget that probably forty million of those were just voting Republican as they must. After this paper comes out though, there’s two more weeks of Trump and his crowd. Will he declare war on Iran in an effort to stay in power?

I wouldn’t put it past him.

                                     -end-

A long, long oil change (Dec 23/20)

 

A Cavalier attitude toward my 1983 car

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Believe it or not, there are still people who spend whole portions of their lives in being Politically Correct, so I will begin this column with my non-PC wish of a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all.

            I know, it’s insensitive to the Yodi ethnic dervishes of Kazachstan, and the Aberdeen Presbyterian Outlanders of San Marino, but there it is. We can’t please everyone.

            There was a time, fifteen or twenty years ago, when saying ‘Merry Christmas!’  was considered almost as bad as the worst racial slur, but we seem to have gone past that, so here I am, saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to one and all. And I sure hope the year 2021 is a lot better than its predecessor. At least it will be, or should be, Trump-less.

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

            My high point of the year 2020 occurred on Monday, December 7, when my wife laughed at one of my jokes – an original joke at that. No plagiarism allowed here.

            She was standing over by the microwave when I said: “I have just coined a new definition for an already existing word. Look at me.” I blessed her with a VERY quick hand wave, like instantaneous.

            “That was a microwave,” I said.

            She opined that apparently, because of the date, that was her Pearl Harbour. She never laughed again.

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

            I can’t get through a column without mentioning New Corona Virus COVID-19, so here it is: All through our lives we were told that being positive is a good thing; “be positive throughout your time on this green orb. So what if you just lost $12 billion in the stock market, be positive. Yes, somebody dragged a coin along the side of your Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and shot your favourite dog Rover, so what, be positive.”

            You took a test to get your pilot’s licence and came out with a positive result. Yahoo. Your carpentry work drew positive comments from the homeowner and your proposal of marriage to your favourite girl drew a positive response. “YES!”

            You go in for a COVID test that gets a positive result. Not the answer you wanted. Funny how words work.

            Changing the subject a bit to buying a used car (that is quite a radical change, isn’t it?), I am remembering the time I bought a 1983 Chev Cavalier station wagon from Lenny Barnes of Tinker.

            I don’t know why I absolutely had to have a station wagon, but I was positive. We had one child at the time, in the late 1980s, and we had a baby’s car seat from Hell that we used in our 1978 Plymouth Horizon so it was time we started trying to avoid killing all of us. New car seat.

            It was a good looking car, that Chev Cavalier, but there was one minor problem: its toxicity level was 9.7 on the Menier-Sockwer Scale. It was the car that Lenny used for his own errands and he smoked cigars, and I mean he smoked cigars. Remember that smokestack/furnace that used to be in Stickney? The one that would knock a cat off a gut-cart? Compare Lenny’s cigar smoke with that Stickney smoke and the latter would be like a small birthday candle.

            I happened to be driving in the Tinker area, near the dam, one day when I saw Lenny’s sign and saw that station wagon that I just had to have. I turned around and stopped in to see the car and Lenny, who urged me to take the car out for a spin. I got in, started the car and rolled up the windows. It was a cool day.

            It was a near thing. I coughed, hacked and nearly passed out from the cigar smoke that was clinging to every inch of the car. Rolling down the windows, I managed to take it for a spin over to the dam and back. Except for that slight problem that affected the olfactory senses (my nose and associated cilia and sinus cavities) it was a good car, and Lenny wanted to get rid of it – badly.

            He was asking $2800 and I am not kidding, he finally relented and sold it to me for $1950, cigar smoke free. I gave him a cheque from one of my many accounts and was on my way home to Kincardine. My wife could come up the next day and bring home the Horizon.

            “Find a way to get up there,” I said, “because I refuse to drive that Cavalier until it gets a good airing.” With the baby in her arms, she started hitch-hiking. I parked the Cavalier in the back yard, lowered all the windows, and let it sit there for three days. Luckily, it didn’t rain and there was lots of wind all that time. At the end of three days it was almost driveable.

            A prologue to that story: That car was one of the best secondhand vehicles I have ever owned. We kept it until our third baby arrived and we had very few misadventures with it except that about 1990 it needed a paint job and my elder daughter and I painted it (with a brush) a fiery crimson colour.

            Oh, and one other thing: due to a crossing of signals between my wife and me, we put 17,776 kilometres on one oil change. Like the faithful Model T Ford of the 1920s and 1930s, it just kept purring. I sold it for $400 in 1992 to an older gent (as I remember him; he was five years younger than I am right now) who soon drove it into a concrete abutment near the Johnville Roman Catholic Church.

                                             -end-

Hand me that piano (Dec 10/20)

 

My call is important to them

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            As I write these beautifully crafted words on December 9^th, snow is gently falling on my orchard, the orchard whose 175 trees yielded about twenty apples last summer. The bears, who counted on my windfalls for September/October snacks (leaving the digested meals on the ground) were not impressed with me I’ll tell you.

            New Corona Virus Covid 19 can be blamed for many things, but not this dearth of apples. No, it was two nights of deep frost in late May. It froze the apple blossoms and sometimes even the bees who were attempting to take some nectar back to their hives.

            Why am I talking about all this? I am just pointing out to myself that I – and all of us humans – are as helpless as babies when Mother Nature decides to be a bitch.

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

            Speaking of that virus, I have now come up with a new profession for those who want or have law degrees and much, much patience. The Study of Covid Law could be part of our university curricula, assuming students would be allowed to attend university,

            The downside would be that by the time the student attained this law degree, the pandemic would be over. We would all be vaccinated and waiting expectantly for the next pandemic. Yes, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?

            The reason I think such a course of study should be started is that no one I know has much of a clue as to what the rules are now. They change every day. Where is “the Fredericton Zone” anyway?

            Our zone, that Fredericton zone, is now an orange one, recently changed from yellow. Or is it that the orange zone has changed to yellow? I know when I go into a store I am obliged to wear a face mask and I do, but what else do I have to do? Wash my hands 27 times a day, and I do, and don’t sneeze even into my own elbow?

            And that’s another thing. I can’t sneeze into my elbow either because I am heavily muscled (not likely!) or because my arm is too short. So do I sneeze into a handkerchief, into my face mask, or into a nearby hydro pole and take a chance on slivers in my nose?

            I just looked up the latest Covid information for New Brunswick and I will report it to you. This is not a joke. “There are 111 Covid cases in New Brunswick,” shrieked one headline, and I almost fell off my barstool. There was no information as to whether this referred to new cases today (as I had first thought) or it was the total number of cases in Bangladesh or what.

            I scrolled down the page to find the next report that said there were eight new cases in New Brunswick. This was the same number as yesterday. Then, farther down the page, was the information that there were only two new cases today, and it said “Saturday”. It actually gave me some specific information.

            Continuing to hope, I peruse every piece of information, but have decided to stay home and eat Kraft Dinner (I have 27 cases of the stuff.) until this is over. Lots of water in the brook, but I will wear my mask when I go to collect it.

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

            Changing the subject and not mentioning the ever-despicable Donald Trump, I was recently pondering the vast number of changes we have welcomed (and sometimes merely endured) over the past few decades.

            This line of thought derives from a 1960s comedy routine by the late George Carlin, who in one of his routines mentioned that there are words and clauses that cannot go together. An example was “Hand me that piano” which couldn’t happen back then because a piano weighed hundreds of pounds. Nowadays we can carry a piano under our arms.

            Note: I would sign an affidavit that no one could hand someone else a piano back then, because when we bought an upright piano in the early 1980s, it took two of us muscular brutes to move it from my pickup truck to our living room, meanwhile gouging the softwood floor in places. My wife’s nephew Curtis and I used every bit of our strength to move it. If someone had set a toothpick or a straw on that piano we would have had to admit defeat.

            More on the things that have changed over the years: I remember conversations with my late Aunt Ella Adams, who was born in 1905, the same year that Albert Einstein published his first papers on the Theory of Relativity.

            I doubt if Auntie thought much about this at that time in Tilley, but there have been a few inventions or developments since then that might have affected the rest of us.

            Car seat warmers – when I get into my Corolla, a little switch turns on a heater underneath my rear end. On a cold day, and we’ll soon see lots of them, it is a great thing. On the other hand, that same car’s windshield doesn’t get its ice melted until I drive about five kilometres. So which would I prefer? A warm bum or a clear windshield so I can see a vehicle driving along Kintore Road, perhaps a transport with a load of logs?

            Voice mail – It is rather frustrating to call, or try to call, a government department, a bank, an insurance company, NB Power, a drugstore or anything else with voice mail and be told that, although my call is important to them (vital in fact), they refuse to talk to me until it’s convenient to them, if ever. 

                                           -end-

Trump really gone? Not a chance (Nov 25/20)

 

We deserve a pat on the back

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            People are being very diligent these days in wearing anti-Covid masks, using hand sanitizers and taking a lot of precautions. I salute them and me.

            It’s no fun walking through stores while wearing a bunch of hardware on one’s face and trying to talk to people and be heard, but it has to be done.

            “Do you have any Kraft crunchy peanut butter?” I might say.

            “Low-salt bacon you say?”

            “No, Kraft crunchy peanut butter,” I might say.

            “This is a grocery store. We don’t carry copper pipe. Try the hardware store.”

            Meanwhile I thought he/she was directing me toward the dairy case. After a while, I found Kraft crunchy peanut butter. I think I did anyway. Is there such a thing as a peanut butter and dill pickle sandwich?

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

            Let’s not get through a column without mentioning the Great Canadian Subject – the weather. I worked for quite a few years at weather stations in what is now Nunavut and what remained Northwest Territories, and always looked back fondly on those years. When I resigned I held $25,000 in bonds and have often kicked myself for walking away from a job that paid well and was so far out in the back of beyond that there was nowhere to spend all that.

            Back to the present, I am baffled about the weather we share today. It was toasty warm for quite a few days in early November, then a cold snap took what remained of my root vegetables, and then we were back in toasty weather. Who’s in charge?

            Last Tuesday morning I arose about 8:00 am to a bright and shining day. A glance at the outside thermometer showed me that I wouldn’t be needing long johns (not to get too personal). I would even be able to rake some leaves and till them into my hopeful 2021 gardens.

            Twenty-four hours later I awoke about the same time and dressed cheerfully. Another nice-looking day! I went outside with the plan to rake some more leaves and work in my orchard. Wrong!

            It was –5º C with a brisk – very brisk – southeast wind. Brass monkey weather. I quickly went inside and put on fourteen layers of long johns, a thick undershirt and whatever clothes I could find including wool socks quarter of an inch thick. Brrrrr!

            Next morning it was +9º C but I didn’t trust the thermometer. Long johns it was. I won’t go on with this, but the point is whoever is in charge of the climate and weather around here is obvious batting above his/her abilities.

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

            In local news, I am quite pleased with the job done on the Perth walkway, formerly known as The Boardwalk.

            When that sidewalk was made mostly of wooden boards and planks and at a cost of $300,000 or so, it was a pleasure to walk on, but after a while, like the rest of us, it started to rot. Now, starting in mid-November, the scenery will once again be great, and the concrete sidewalk probably won’t rot any time soon.

            On some of those warm days I mentioned above, dozens of people have been trying out the new boardwalk. Or should I say “board”walk? Something to do with Covid I think. Get some exercise and maintain social distancing.

            Our province is fighting the good fight in trying to keep down the numbers of people diagnosed with New Corona Virus (one of the alternate names for Covid-19) but I get the sinking feeling that some of their methods are a little weird. We are in the “Fredericton Zone” which extends from Fredericton to Plaster Rock and possibly to Edmundston, depending on which bureaucrat you are listening to at the time.

            A show of hands – what possible use is the information that there is one case in the Fredericton Zone when it could be in Fredericton, Nackawic, Woodstock, Aroostook, St. Andre, St. Leonard or any point in between those places? Seems to me that it would be better to narrow down the locale a lot more so we can be extra protective of ourselves.

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

            Do we get tired of hearing a difficulty described as ‘problematic’? I think I am. Although I am a retired journalist, I blame reporters and others of the so-called Fourth Estate for foisting words and usages on us, the unsuspecting public. We hear “it is symptomatic of” instead of ‘a symptom of’ as if they weren’t the same thing. Something like ‘hot water heater’.

            And then of course this allegedly English phrase ‘he referenced…’ instead of ‘he referred to’. It’s all a bit distressing to someone who had devoted decades to the effort of writing properly constructed English.

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

            I cannot complete this column with some mention of Donald Trump. For almost four years I and other reporters and comedians have made a living reporting on this man’s tweets, blithering, speeches and just general bafflegab and I want to say I will miss him. If the world can reach January 20 without being plunged into a war by this psychotic individual, it will be a miracle.

            Donald Trump is not going to ever admit that he lost the November 3 election by the largest margin ever recorded. In 2016 Hillary Clinton beat him by 3 million votes and this year Joe Biden beat him by six million votes and yet Trump has no intention of stepping down until he is dragged out by his orange ears. What’s scariest of it all is that he received 71 million votes in the recent election and a good many of them are skating across thin mental ice. Let’s wish all Americans and their neighbour – us – the best of luck.

                                      -end-

Trump continued to lie? No! (Nov 11/20)

 

A brand new president of the U.S.A.???

                                    By Robert LaFrance 

NOTE: Trump lied. He lost by 7 million votes.

            I woke up Wednesday morning, Nov. 4, expecting to hear that the United States of America had turfed out Donald Trump and had replaced him with a rather bland (but relatively honest) chap named Joe Biden, but, for the first time in my life, I was wrong.

            Well, maybe not the first time, but there haven’t been many.

            It was several hours earlier that Donald Trump had declared himself the new president, though at least eight important states hadn’t been decided yet. “Sounds like Trump all right,” I said to myself, since no one else was paying any attention to me.

            Here’s a prediction: Over the next few years Trump, if it turns out he was re-elected, will do everything undemocratic and anti-democratic he can to make himself a dictator. Nobody better argue with him either, or they will find themselves digging ditches in Montana.

            I am writing these cheerless words on Saturday, Nov. 7^th, and the election still hasn’t been decided. At 3:00 am on Nov. 4, seven hours or fewer after the polls closed, Trump, since he was leading at that moment, declared himself the winner and order vote-counting to stop. I didn’t think at the time that it worked like that, but Trump did.

            It didn’t work of course. For some reason the Democrats were of the opinion that everyone who cast a vote should have that vote counted. A bit silly, but there you go, and now, today on Nov. 7, Joe Biden has the lead and looks to be the next president unless Trump’s army of lawyers finds a giant loophole somewhere.

            1:30 pm Saturday: A news bulletin came to me on Google that the US television networks had all declared Joe Biden the winner of the Presidential race. We only need to await Donald Trump’s gracious and gentlemanly concession speech. The possibility of that’s happening is about in the same range as my being hired as Brad Pitt’s stunt man. No, Trump will try every sleazy trick his lawyers can come up with.

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

            Enough of that for now, let’s go to a different Hallowe’en.

            A few days before Hallowe’en took place, I went to the grocery store, the Dollar Store, the hardware store and (by all means) the liquor store to buy treats for all the little tykes who would be trick-or-treating on October 31. I didn’t go to Cannabis NB because I had run out of money.

            My wife and I put a little table out of the porch and on that table we put two big silver bowls. Inside the bowls, all Covid-scrubbed, were approximately 67 bags of chips and a variety of healthy snacks like chocolate bars and other sugar-laden treats. I think we also slipped in a couple of unhealthy ones, like small juice boxes. (I’m not sure what ‘small juice’ is). Then we put cheerful signs around the bowls. “Happy Hallowe’en” and “Help Yourself”.

            After all that, we sat down on the porch and waited for the deluge of social distancing kids who would be crowding around and snaffling up the goodies. And we waited, and waited. Finally, about 5:30 pm, a little girl from down the road, halfway between here and Bon Accord, came by with her grandmother, or maybe it was her mother, and took a small bag of chips and a small chocolate bar. We did have a sign that read “Help Yourself”, but this little girl was being very polite.

            Too polite as it turned out. After the girl left we had a grand total of zero. We even tried to persuade the dog Minnie to stop killing squirrels and have some Doritos (‘dirty toes’ my son calls them) but she looked at us as if they and we were made of melting candle wax. No sale there.

            So there we were, with a plethora of Hallowe’en treats and a dearth of customers. What could we do? Answer: We started eating chips, bars etc. and broke out the scotch. By midnight, as far as I know, Hallowe’en 2020 was a huge success.

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

            A few comments on our world:

            The pronunciation of the planet Uranus has always baffled me, and most other people, except perhaps rocket scientists, and maybe even them too. Is it “your anus” or is it “urine-us”? I would like to hear from my many thousands of readers. If you are wondering why I think this is important, the answer is that I don’t have the faintest idea. I don’t think there’s a winner or a loser here.

            Not to belabour the U.S. election as an event, it probably needs said that the election of the next president is among the least important decisions to be made on November 3 and in the days that followed.

            “Election day results were a major rejection of the war on drugs” was one headline I saw on an online news channel. After quite a struggle in the early years, the advocates of drug legalization have finally been successful in several states, like 15-plus.

            Oregon decriminalized (not legalized) ALL drugs, including magic mushrooms  and in every state where a ballot measure asked Americans to reconsider the drug war, voters sided with reformers. In Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota, voters legalized marijuana for recreational purposes. In Mississippi and South Dakota voters legalized medical marijuana.

            Just think of the billions of dollars taxpayers in the U.S. and Canada have spent chasing grass growers while white-collar and political criminals sat back and laughed. Oh, it is to giggle.

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

            One final comment in this column that will hit the streets, as it were, on Remembrance Day week: thanks to all the men and women who have died while wearing Canadian uniforms. If you watch TV or movies at all, you might be under the impression that the U.S. had won World War II single-handed, but Canada’s contribution (that began in September 1939 and not Dec. 7, 1941) was HUGE. Thank you.     

                                 -end-

Put on headlights in fog (Oct 28/20

 

Non-elevator music driving me around the bend

                                    By Robert LaFrance           

            It’s been several decades since somebody coined the phrase ‘elevator music’ for that senseless melody-less sound that appeared in (where else?) elevators. It was bland and was just about the quintessential definition of boring.

            These days I almost wish it would come back.

            This morning I was grocery shopping and was assaulted by overhead speakers that spewed out the worst mixture of rap (not to be confused with real music), calypso, punk rock and sewerage that I have heard since the last time I was in a store. Then the entertainment paused and the American country music began. At least it wasn’t rap.

            However…modern American country music is now “of a sameness” as somebody recently said on WWVA, the station where the Grand Old Opry used to appear (radio version) every Saturday evening on our old radio in Tilley.

            Now that was country music, not to be confused with that drawling drivel we hear today. It used to be that country music songwriters made their songs all about truck driving, horses and hitch-hiking to Nashville but now it’s all about love which I am sure Donald Trump has made illegal by this time.

            The point of the previous paragraphs is that those who run grocery stores, garages and other such enterprises should try a little harder to put on some decent music for customers. Failing that, there is the option of silence. It’s a little hard to concentrate on buying olive oil and cheddar when some southern hick is whining about his shattered heart and liver.

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

            Speaking of Donald Trump, as I unfortunately did two paragraphs back, it is less than a week now before he may possibly be defeated by his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. What happens then?

            In that country with the weirdest political and electoral laws on earth, Donald Trump will still be president after November 3^rd even if he gets defeated 50 states to zero. He will have the full powers of the presidency until January 20 and just think of all the evil pranks he can get up to in that nearly three months.

            He can pardon every rapist, bank robber, sidewalk spitter-oner, political pal and general criminal in the U.S. and no one can do a thing about it. What a weird country! And I used to admire the U.S.A.

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

            Back home here, I have been wondering which hornets to believe. “The old fellers” used to say that if hornets built their nests high in the trees or high in one of the local structures, then it was going to be a Winter of the Deep Snow such as happened in the Riley Brook area in 1932, but if the nests were low there would only a bit of snow.

            Around our estate, old Mother Nature is clearly bipolar this year. Just at the west edge of my orchard is one nest that must be close to eight metres off the ground in a Viking apple tree and a short distance away is a nest of the same kind of hornets and it is hidden in some bushes half a metre off the ground.

            (For those who are sticking with the Imperial system of measure, a metre is the equivalent of the Imperial measure that corresponds to 100 centimetres, or something like that.)

            Now that I have that explanation out of the way, I must continue to describe the locations of other hornets’ nests around our house. There is one nestled in behind a lilac bush, as high as my left knee, and there is another one nearly at the top of our closed-in porch.

            So what is going to happen to the snow depth this coming winter? If I listened to “the old fellers#1” we would be in for a mighty snow-filled winter, but on the other hand, if I were to listen to “The old fellers #2” there would be barely a skiff of snow all winter. It makes one cringe before looking out the window first thing in the morning.

            NOTE: Just as I was writing this column, the weather report came on the radio. It’s supposed to snow tonight – 5 to 10 centimetres. That is code for 15 to 25 centimetres. Or it may rain. Or be sunny.

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

            I know I talk quite a bit about the weather and about the scandalous number of poor drivers on the roads, but here we go again:

            I wonder how many people realize that their car’s headlights come on automatically when they start their cars? These are called ‘running lights’ and they aren’t technically called headlights because they’re not as bright as the real headlights and quite often the drivers aren’t anywhere nearly as bright as they should be.

            You see, when those running lights come on, the car’s tail lights do not. Therefore when one is driving through fog cars they meet can see those running lights, but cars coming up behind them can’t see them until they are in their trunks.

            Last week I was driving to Bath in the fog, a thick fog. I slowed down considerably but even so I almost ran into a grey Nissan car with no tail lights showing. In other words the driver didn’t have her regular headlights on. A grey car in a thick fog. I put on my 4-way flashers so any drivers behind me would at least have a chance to see me.

            Long story short(er), I made it to Bath and back home in one piece, but with the resolution that I would tell people to put on their blasted headlights when driving in the fog! Quite a contradiction – put on your headlights so your tail lights will come on and save your life.

                                                         -end-

A danger flight in rural Quebec Oct 14/20

 

Moving to the USA where it’s safe

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Somebody told me the other day that Internet companies in the U.S.A. sell their wares at a much lower price than companies in Canada and I believed her. She worked for Verizon so she should have known the truth (a hard commodity to find nowadays, especially in that country I just mentioned.)

            My bill last month was the equivalent of a monthly Rolls Royce payment. The company stung me for close to $150 for just normal service. I called them and the woman who answered (in a totally unintelligible Mumbai accent) listed a bunch of things they were charging me for.

            If I understood correctly, I must pay a portion of the prime minister’s golf fees – and I didn’t even know he played golf – and repairs to some hydro lines in Ernfold, Saskatchewan. I owed either $29.23 or $45.10 to Rogers Communications for the use of some WiFi equipment (although my service carrier is Bell Aliant) and for repairs to a tractor owned by the village of Aroostook.

            Then at the end she said that she had missed an item – something to do with Donald Trump’s golf fees – that came to $634.22. It sounded like that anyway, so now my total monthly Internet fee is about $680.

            Later that day my cousin Vinnie in Presque Isle, Maine called to say hello and compare Covid data. The subject of  Internet came up. I told him that I was paying $680 a month and he said: “That seems a trifle excessive. I pay $30 a month for the highest speed package.”

            So I guess we’ll be moving across the border where the Internet fees are reasonable and it’s safe and sensible.

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

            It’s been a windy fall after that blistering hot summer. Some readers may have noticed. No sooner did the leaves turn very beautiful than I said to my dog: “Fang, get ready for heavy rains and strong winds in less than two weeks. It happens every fall, but at least while we’re waiting for the S-word and the W-word we can enjoy the leaves.”

            No sooner did the word ‘leaves’ come out of my mouth than the wind came up and up and up and the rain started pelting down and down. All those beautiful leaves were flung to the ground in a matter of hours – no minutes, no seconds. I looked out our southern kitchen window and the fall colours were there; I walked over to the fridge to get some cream for my coffee and looked out the eastern window to see that all the maple and apple tree leaves had fled the scene. It was February already.

            Oh well, there has to be some kind of reason for my being depressed. The next step is when the S-word starts falling in gentle 2-foot drifts. (I just noticed that if one takes away the hyphen of ‘S-word’ it spells SWORD. Can’t argue with that.)

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

            Have we harvested everything out of our gardens yet? I sure have, except for potatoes, carrots, herbs, second lettuce crop, Daikon radish, and several other crops. I’ve been busy with other things, like eating, sleeping and watching TV. I’ve been so lazy that I hired a carpenter to shingle the small roof of my new equipment shed. I was kind of embarrassed about that, but then I spoke to the Perfessor’s sister Joleen. A healthy woman of about 55 who doesn’t work outside the home, she hired a woman to clean her house once a week. “It just got to be too much to think about,” Joleen told me. I was going to make fun of her until I remembered the equipment shed that is only slightly smaller than Joleen’s house.

            Every year at this time I send out greetings to the people now serving at Alert, Nunavut, both military and civilian, because they will not be seeing the sun again until early March.

            I worked for Environment Canada, the weather service, in the 1970s and reported on whether it was cold in Alert as February ground its way to a balmy spring. I worked there 54 weeks in a row, but I’m not so sure what I did during that last week, since it was a big surprise. I had expected to be gone the week before and, in my disappointment at not seeing my name on the Hercules C-130 passenger list, I walked to the Junior Ranks Mess (bar) and stayed there. The next Thursday morning I was somehow on the scheduled flight to Trenton, Ontario via Thule, Greenland. I think. After 54 weeks working 450 nautical miles from the North Pole, I was rather tired.

            Mentioning those Arctic Heroes at Alert, Nunavut reminded me of an airplane flight I took to a little weather station at Nitcheqon, which is located about 300 miles due north of Trois Rivieres. I had been vacationing in Tilley, NB, in the house where I was born, and went from there to a 5-week relief job in Nitcheqon. What I remembered most was the trip itself. I took the train to Quebec City where I hopped on a QuebecAir DC-3 to Baie Comeau, Mont Joli and then Trois Rivieres.

            After an overnight stay, I climbed on another DC-3 and couldn’t help but notice that there was a hole in the passenger door, a hole surely big enough to put my size 11 boots through. Oh well, I thought, it’s not a pressurized plane anyway and my seatbelt will hold me in.

            Another minor detail: just before be locked that alleged door, the co-pilot carried on an outboard motor and put it behind the seat of the only passenger – me. He didn’t tie it down or secure it in any way.

            Halfway to Nitcheqon it suddenly got dark and the plane started bouncing around. My fingernails were blue, and as a bona fide weatherman I knew that pilot had steered us into a cumulonimbus, with its tremendous up and downdrafts.

            That lasted five or six minutes until my fingernails turned flesh-coloured again. The co-pilot opened the door to the front and asked if I was all right. He explained that we had gotten caught in a thundercloud and an updraft had taken us to twelve thousand feet from our regular altitude of three thousand.

            We landed without further mishap about twenty minutes later and just before supper one of the met techs (weathermen) and I went fishing on Lake Nitcheqon. I caught a 3-pound trout that the chef poached for supper. It turned out to be a good summer.

        -end-

Women dance backwards Sept 30/20

 

Transferred to Timmins, Ontario

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            I was surprised – no, astonished – to learn that the Perfessor got a moose licence this year. He was the inspiration of the original expression “he wouldn’t hurt a fly”. It didn’t take long for me to learn that I needn’t have been surprised – or astonished.

            “That’s one moose that will live another year,” he told me last evening as we were driving to Plaster Rock for the beautiful scenery and people. I only get up that way about once a month these days but always enjoy it.

            Enough pandering and back to the Perfessor’s moose licence: “It makes no sense anyway,” he said as we drove by Linton Corner on our way to Goodine Corner. “All the information (as if a government would hand out information!) refers to a ‘moose licence’ but what are we licensing a moose to do? Get shot that’s what.

            “It cost me a lot of money to get my so-called moose licence but maybe somewhere around Riley Brook or Wapske or Victoria Corner or Lerwick a moose will still be walking around come October.”

            “Unless he walks in front of a logging truck,” I commented. To which he mumbled “barbarian”.

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

            Speaking of hunting, I have been getting some compliments lately. Last spring my wife bought me a vivid Hunter’s Orange jacket, one that is so bright it hurts the eyes. I was in the grocery store when Meyer Lansky of Portage said to me: “No question, you are certainly bright in spite of what everyone says.”

            As to my everyday activities, I have been watching a lot of YouTube, even though much of the content is about Donald Trump, and am enjoying some of the old dance numbers from the 1930s and 1940s. I wasn’t even born until 1948!

            Fred Astaire is the one on the screen more than anyone (for good reason), and I am sure people think of Ginger Rogers as his best and favourite dance partner, but I have been surprised to learn that he said in at least three major interviews that his favourite was Rita Hayworth. I didn’t know until this past spring that she had been a dancer since age three, and not just an actress. She was Mexican, not American, in spite of the fact that her movie studios tried to say the opposite.

            (Note: One dance critic said that female dancers have to be much more skilful than male ones because they have to dance backward and in high heels.)

            I recommend that you check out some of the dance numbers that Miss Hayworth and Mr. Astaire perform. Search for “Shorty George” and “Sway With Me”. Fabulous.

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

            Lazy as I am, I have been putting in some time converting the root cellar I built in the late 1980s to an equipment shed for garden tools and a safe place for mice, rats, porcupines, ground hogs and squirrels. It’s been going well, if you look at it from their point of view.

            I went out there early one recent morning (about 11:00 o’clock) and apparently roused them all from a sound sleep or their breakfast, because it was like Toronto’s Union Station as they rushed out in a mob and headed for the woods.

            The only thing I can figure out is that some of those rodents and small mammals must have long memories and were still remembering the 1990s when I kept apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots and other foodstuffs in there. Surely there’s nothing edible in there now unless the gas companies have been putting actual corn in their ethanol.

          Besides the constant turmoil in the U.S.A. because of their distorted leadership – if it can be called that – there are street demonstrations in many countries, most of which I can neither pronounce or spell. I can spell Hong Kong though, and I can pronounce Azerbayzan. All the street marching and rioting – often instigated by the police – reminds me of some words by the great essayist E. B. White in a piece called Unity: “Marching is futile unless there is a destination”.

          This was written in the 1950s, during the Cold War when everywhere in the world people were hitting the streets with no particular goal in mind except getting rid of the present government and replacing it with a worse one. He referred to those places generally as being ‘At sixes and sevens’, meaning confused or in chaotic disarray.

          My third cousin Glenna Hilroy recently took her driver’s test and was successful. By that I mean SHE was successful and can now legally drive her 2100-pound Gremlin. Which means that it’s time for the rest of us to watch out because Glenna is probably the worst driver ever to (sort of) get behind the wheel of a car.

          When I say ‘sort of’ I mean she doesn’t technically get behind the wheel because she is four foot six tall, with ‘tall’ being a wildly inaccurate adjective. She has two choices – sit on her car’s seat so she reach the brake pedal, or sit on half a dozen cushions and be unable to reach the foot controls. It’s quite a sight when one meets her on the road, either way. When she sits on cushions she will be speeding and without her cushions she can’t be seen. A driverless car. Get away!

          I won’t say how I happened to do this, but last evening I was hard up for reading material and found a 2017 hiring manual for federal government civil servants. As one who spent a few years working for the federal government, I was surprised (but not astonished, see above) to find several of my suspicions being proven accurate.

            Chapter one, page 23, subsection 12: “As an office manager, if you see someone doing something good, make a regulation against it and apply severe discipline to the ‘worker’ involved. Drop his or her pay grade and send him to Timmins, Ontario, for at least six months. Then he’s off to Nain, Labrador, but only for a week in the summer (flies) because it’s a pretty spot.”

        -end-