Is it hiccups or hiccoughs? (July 24 column)

Oh, the joy of hiccoughs/hiccups

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            Hiccoughing is bad enough without this unending debate about how the word is spelled. Most people get hiccoughs at one time or another in their careers, but it’s surprising how many people also suffer from bouts of hiccups. Often it’s the same people. For clarity I shall use both spellings in random order.

            I was talking to Flug the other day and, as an experiment, I asked him what he knew about rocket science. “Well, nothing, not a blamed thing,” he said.

“What do you know about how an iPad works?” I continued, and again not a blamed thing, he had to admit. “How about fixing chainsaws?” I persisted. “Or the right grub to feed a canary? How to find your way around Montreal? What makes a baseball curve? How do you make a profit on the stock market?” He didn’t know any of that stuff; but wait: what about this question:  “How do you cure hiccoughs?”

            “Of course I know how to cure them,” he said. EVERYBODY knows how to cure hiccups. “You just have someone sneak up behind you and set off a firecracker, or you lean over and drink from a water glass while it’s tilting over. Or take a big drink of warm ginger ale and hold your breath for fifteen seconds. Never fails.”

            “Flug, you are exceptionally full of male cow manure. You know very well there’s no cure for hiccoughs – or hiccups if you prefer – but you, like everybody else, swear you know a foolproof method.”

            It’s true. My Uncle Ernie would swear on three bibles and a Popular Mechanics book that all you have to do is hold your breath for a minute and when you regained consciousness your hiccups etc. would be gone. A man in Saskatoon said the cure was to put your head underwater and breathe deeply. Have friends nearby.

            It’s like the common cold. Ever met anyone who didn’t have a sure-fire method of beating it? Few profess to be able to PREVENT the common cold, but some people will swear that once you get it, zinc lozenges dissolved in battery acid and Gillett’s Lye will take away the symptoms. I hasten to add, this is not for drinking but for rubbing on the feet once it stops fizzing. If your feet fizz later, you’re on your own.

            People rub camomile lotion on their throats, drink 28 glasses of water in an hour, sniff camphor, put mustard plasters on their chests, and pray to Zeus while eating horseradish, but they’re only kidding themselves. I happen to know that drinking large amounts of lemonade over a period of a week usually cures the common cold, but then I always get hiccoughs afterward.

            Sort of on the same subject, I should go up a few paragraphs and refer to the phrase ‘rocket science’. I have used it before, and one week that I did have it in my column, My Aunt Rutherford (Ruth for short although she’s 6’2”) phoned to say that her daughter who owned a textile factory near Dollard Des Ormeaux, PQ, had invented a new way to stitch triangles of cloth onto men’s pants, or trousers if you wish. What did this have to do with my column, you wonder?

            “I guess you could call her a pocket scientist,” said Aunt Ruth. You can see where I get it.

Getting quickly back to hiccups, the reason I brought up (no pun intended) the subject was that I was recently reading about a guy from Iowa who had hiccoughed for 68 years. How could one go through 430 million hiccoughs – that’s what the encyclopedia says – and not have it damage some of life’s experiences? I know what you’re thinking about, but my mind was considering the acts of threading a needle, putting one of those little pins in a watch bracelet, or brain surgery. “There, got the medulla almost in place behind the earlobe, and – HIC! Ooops. Don’t step in that, nurse Smith.”

The next time you hear someone say he or she knows a sure-fire cure for hiccups, call for the paddy wagon and send that person away, because there ain’t no cure short of a bullet between the eyes. By the way, as if ‘hiccough’ and ‘hiccup’ are not enough, the medical name for hiccups is ‘synchronous diaphragmatic flutter (SDF)’, or ‘singultus’.

As I was reading all about the subject, I noticed that there was another phrase that seemed to fit those who swore up, down, and crosswise that they knew a cure for hiccups. It’s ‘myoclonic jerk’, which turns out to be hiccoughs, or, as they say in the explanation, ‘an involuntary contraction of the diaphram’.

So there you have it, there ain’t no cure for hiccups and certainly not for hiccoughs, but it helps to stay away from  myoclonic jerks.

                                             -end-

Flatulence is a good thing (July 17 column)

Imitation is the sincerest form of flatulence

 

                                                           by Robert LaFrance

 

            My friend Flug attended a barbecue last Saturday evening, uptown, and could not resist the baked beans – four large plateloads. The next morning, he got up and went to church.

            All right so far. Nothing wrong with going to a barbecue, and nothing wrong with going to church. However, the problem was that Flug had just sat down on his pew (a fateful word) when the previous evening’s supper started bubbling and gurgling inside him; it was then he knew trouble was coming. Fracking is controversial at the best of times, but in church it assumes a greater influence, by far.

            “If I only hadn’t had that fourth plateful of beans,” he said, as the people on either side of him edged away. Apparently they had also noted that the word ‘pew’ was an unfortunate name for a church seat.

            The minister, a gentleman who hailed from Tabusintac or Black’s Harbour – one a them places – was getting on in years and had learned diplomacy over those years. As much as he wanted to wrinkle his nose every time he heard an eruption from the west side of the congregation, he did not. He was turning the other cheek, as was Flug.

            Rev. Samuales got through Hymn # 287 – “Harvesting the beans” and even #401 - “Open the windows of God’s House” but when he came to #49 - “My senses tell of past trials” he had to wrinkle said nose, just a little bit. His olfactory senses were in good working order, and Flug’s digestion was too. By this time Flug was sitting all by himself in the exact centre of the centre pew. The rest of the congregation were jammed at the front and sides; it was as if Flug had set out to prove the poet wrong, the one who said “No man is an island”. I think it was John Donne, but it could have been Alan Ginsburg or Ogden Nash for all I know.

            The sermon that day was about gluttony, and Flug, who by this time was bright red from embarrassment and also from  his attempts to suppress his flatulence, was the island in the stream, but generally speaking he was refraining from any audible emissions. That is, until Rev. Samuales got to the point where he admonished everyone that it was better to lie down with a cobra than to overeat. Although he didn’t mention beans, we all – and especially Flug – got the message. At that point Flug seemed to relax – bad move, so to speak - it was as if a 1967 Camaro with double overhead cams and two Thrush mufflers suddenly came to life in a closed room.

            There followed a veritable stampede for the door, and it was led by Rev. Samuales, cursing like a longshoreman.  Although he was 76 and had had two hip replacments since 2011, he ran like a young deer, a gazelle ready to trample the younger members of the flock should they get between him and fresh air. Mrs. Gandon with her walker was right behind him, followed by the Eerteex sisters and their chauffeur. Although in his leisure time that chauffeur was a star striker on the Perth United soccer team, he didn’t stand a chance against the determined efforts of those pensioners.

            Meanwhile Flug, relieved of much pressure, was just sitting there in and on his pew. In support of my old friend, I hadn’t joined the rush to the door and the resulting carnage when they all reached the narrow cement step at the same time. My nostrils had been pretty well ruined back in 1969 anyway, when I had stopped my motorcycle at a place in upstate New York to see what all the fuss was about. It was a very smoky farm near a town called Woodstock where a rock happening was…well, happening. Three days later, the haze of acrid smoke had ruined the cilia, trillia and flesh of my nostrils so that Flug’s little emanations were barely noticed.

            “I guess I was over-served in the beans department,” he said as we walked home through the fumes. “I mustn’t be such a glutton next time. Three platefuls will be enough. I hope no one tries to imitate me next time there’s a barbecue.”

            “Flug, Flug, Flug,” I said, repeating his name so he was fairly certain that it was he being addressed. “Flug, you weren’t over-served. You over-served yourself – transitive verb. You’re a glutton, the same as I am. You imitated me. However, I feel certain that sometime in the next week you will be getting an envelope in the mail. It will contain a bill. Not a good kind of bill, like currency, but a bill for fumigating that poor church. It was built in 1878 and has had a quiet life, but it doesn’t deserve what it went through today.”  

                                  -end-

Pity the poor razour blade (July 10)

The Perfessor chooses cowardice over valour 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Cleaning up the attic one day last week, I came across a collection of books from my childhood – ‘War and Peace’ – that sort of thing. It felt good to reminisce about the days when I was literate.

            I may have been lying about the ‘War and Peace’, but there was quite a variety of books that I brought from Tilley in the 1990s when my father Fred LaFrance moved out of the home estate and into a nursing home. There were many Lone Ranger books, and a whole whack of Hardy Boys novels.

            Of course, in lieu of actually doing some work up there in the attic, I sat down on an old chesterfield and started reading one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, “The Clue in the Rooster’s Ear”. It was the first time in years that I had read one of those and it reminded me that there were more characters than just Frank and Joe Hardy, the teenage detectives.

            Of course there was their dumb friend Chet or Chump (something like that) and the Hardy Boys’ father Fenton Hardy who actually was a detective. Meaning he got paid.

            Then about page 498 or so I came across yet another Hardy whom I had forgotten about. We only remember Frank and Joe, but there was another brother who worked at McDonald’s – Harvey McDonald’s grocery store down the street. He had tried to be a detective too, but no one would take him seriously.

            You see Fenton and Mrs. Fenton had named their first child Foole as a kind of cute joke. Try getting a job as a detective – or an accountant or truck driver for that matter - when your name is Foole Hardy.

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            Would you believe I STILL haven’t got brook fishing this year?

            I, who would murder a canary for an hour’s fishing in Bubie Brook just down from our house, have been no closer to a brook in 2013 than crossing one over a culvert, or as the old Romans used to say, a viaduct. I prefer to say culvert however, because viaducts are so rare that one is reduced to duct hunting if he wants to see one.

            Ah, last summer, now that was a great one for fishing. I would be at the brook before 8:00 am and come home with a whole ‘mess’ of fish as mother used to say. One day I caught one that was ‘as long as my leg and big around as any stovepipe’ in Grampy’s words, and it was quite a job getting that in the frying pan. We had to invite the neighbours and cook it in stages.

            “That’s quite a lie,” said Flug who had been sitting behind me and sipping on a lemonade as I had been typing. “The biggest one you ever caught was that haddock you bought uptown. If I recall, you dropped it on the porch and the dog Belvedere pounced on it.”

            “I’ll have you know I caught a good many sturgeon in that stream,” I remonstrated, whatever that might mean. I think it means I was calling him a horse’s patoot. In any case, the point is, I want to get fishing or you’ll see me standing alongside the fish display in the grocery store and shedding a dozen tears on the packaged trout.

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            Now I’ll just mention some things we were talking about at the club last evening. One was about Eb Starling, who has been a club member since just before the Crimean War. It seems his doctor got him to take one of those ‘stool tests’ and Eb, not a bright light, put his dog’s stool on the little cards they gave him. Now he has to be treated for Canine Distemper.

            Those ‘keyless entry’ things sometimes cause a little problem. The Perfessor, who recently got a new Chev Flicker (cheaper version of the Blazer), was at a Wal-Mart parking lot and lost his vehicle in the crowd. He pushed the red button which is supposed to locate your own car and, for some reason, the alarms of about 25 vehicles started braying. He took a walk over to East Side Mario’s until the hubbub died down. The linguini was good, he said.

            My wife what’s-her-name, my son and I were out on the lawn chasing fireflies one evening last week when a carload of Ontario tourists who were staying nearby happened to pass on the road. So there we were, three alleged grownups with hands cupped running around on the lawn and trying to catch fireflies. Of course they didn’t know what we were doing. I noticed after that that those people drove much faster on later tours of this road.

            As Canadians living close to the U.S. border, we are inundated with American ‘culture’ to the point that many people pronounce the last letter of the alphabet as ‘zee’ and pronounce the word ‘Lieutenant’ as Loo-tenant. Can you imagine? It’s clearly to be pronounced LEFT-tenant. Oops. Poor example, but some people do get carried away with the U.S. vs. Canadian spelling. Ed the bartender put on his shopping list: ‘razour blades’.  

                                         -end-

A Laurier story from 1899 (July 3)

Do pigs need air traffic controllers? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            There’s an old French expression (from 1849) “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”. It means, as we all know by  now, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

            At this point it would be easy to descend into politics (attack ads, $90,000 secret payments, etc.), but I think it would be better to keep this discussion on a higher level – trash.

            On many, many occasions on the mornings following the pickup of trash, I have noticed that certain driveways ALWAYS have loose garbage spread all over them. It’s true - always the sames ones. That’s the kicker: every week and I mean EVERY week, the same people must go out onto their driveways after they come home from wherever they’ve been and pick up the trash that has obviously been spread there by large birds and small animals.

            What is astounding, even though it shouldn’t be, is that it never seems to occur to these people that they should really give a thought to doing something about it. Here are a few suggestions.

            Never, never put food into your trash; put it into your compost pile or take it out into the woods for Johnny Wolverine. If you put food wrappers into the garbage, wash them so there’s no scent of food. If you are going to put a half-eaten rack of lamb in there, you can expect the little carnivores to tear open your garbage bag. That’s their job – staying alive, as John Travolta would say.

            Put your garbage in a container, preferably a metal one with large metal electrified jaws and an ultrasonic alarm if any creature should come near. I put my garbage in a steel barrel that has the bottom out. The creatures don’t like metal, just as I don’t like heavy metal, and don’t touch it.

            There was my advice. I am sure that next week I will not see any more driveways littered with trash. Wait! What’s that flying over? Somebody’s going to be missing a few pigs. They’re migrating north to Eureka, Nunavut, their summer nesting grounds.

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

            And people thought federal cabinet ministers didn’t want to take any initiative, that they were just keeping out of sight until they get their pensions or that expense account cheque comes in. Hah! There was a time (pre-Stephen Harper) when they were extremely active and I’m going to give you a recent example from the book ‘Right Honourable Men’ by Michael Bliss.

            In the year 1899 – okay, not THAT recent – Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier, who just plain could not understand economics, had just given a speech to a group of businessmen near Toronto. He had made just about every mistaken assumption there was, and was on his way to deliver another similar speech somewhere else.

            Finance Minister W. S. Fielding, who was travelling with Laurier, couldn’t allow that to happen. He instructed an aide to get rid of the speech. The aide took the speech out of Laurier’s luggage and threw it – the speech, not the luggage – into the Teeswater River as they crossed on the Paisley, Ontario bridge. Laurier never knew what happened to his papers, but after that he stuck to speeches written by people who knew what they were talking about.

            Picture that being done to one of Harper’s speeches. The culprit would find his head impaled on a pikestaff in front of the War Museum.

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

            Shortly after I had tripled the amount of her life insurance, my wife and I were walking along the edge of a high riverbank along the Tobique River when I spotted a bottle floating downstream, which, when you think about it, is the logical direction for it to float.

            Since she wouldn’t go down the vertical bank to the rocks below and try to retrieve it, it was up to me. After all, it could have been from somebody shipwrecked and needing help. Maybe they were stranded without food or water on Reed’s Island or somewhere up that way.

            It was a Diet Coke bottle, and inside really was a note. It said: “Help, I need $90,000! Send cash to M. Duffy, Ottawa, and definitely not Cavendish, PEI!” I didn’t know what that was all about, but my wife looked at it and said it looked as if it were a hoax. That was before she accidently pushed me into the river. I did manage to get out – barely.

            When we got home, the phone rang. It was the insurance company. “Mr. LaFrance, would tell your wife that her request to quadruple your life insurance coverage went through yesterday as requested?”

Boy, you can’t trust anybody nowadays!                    

                                             -end-