Lies, damned lies, and Mark Twain (Aug 21)

Does ANYONE know what’s going on? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Trying to find a certain snippet of information, I was looking over my 1995 columns and came across this item: A total of 182 countries had met in Sweden with the aim of finally doing away with child poverty by the year 2000. I am sure that countries like Lesotho would have had a great influence on eliminating world poverty back then and it turns out they did – by adding thousands more to the bulging list.

            Although it goes against my grain to do research, I held my nose and did some. This ringing declaration of 1995 was about as useless as a Canadian Senator who never shows up in the Red Chamber and who over-claims on his or her expense account.

            If one is to believe the statistics available, child poverty has increased by fifty percent during that time. Part of that is because there are now seven billion people in the world compared to 5.7 billion back in 1995. Would you believe there were fewer than 3 billion in 1950?

            Anyway, those are mere statistics which is one category of untruths (lies, damn lies, and statistics according to Mark Twain). The point is, those turkeys who met in Sweden 18 years ago were there to sample fine cuisine and soft beds and they didn’t care any more for child poverty than a hedgehog cares about chess.

            That wasn’t a bad rant, was it? I’m no competition for Rick Mercer, but I can fume and bluster with the best.

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            Along the same line of cynical thought, I have often wondered if ANYONE knows how things work today. Every once in a while, through no fault of my own, I get to thinking about how things work (or don’t work) in 2013. I’m talking about things like the Global Economy. I don’t think anybody really knows how it all works.

            That’s the way ‘they’ want it, isn’t it? If you bought a computer back in the early 1990s, it was a fairly straightforward piece of equipment, wasn’t it? Your word processor processed words, your printer printed, and there were a few dozen computer games that didn’t require the brain of an Einstein to play. Today I am sure that Albert Einstein would be as baffled as the rest of us at the garbage he and we see on our monitors.

            When I bought my first computer in 1994 – with advice from the late Bob Inman – I could write a sentence in my word processor and I could trust that it remained the same as I wrote it. Nowadays (an old person’s word) the sentence is just as likely to have been changed to the wording that Microsoft Word prefers and any spelling is changed to the American one. I labour hard to get the word changed from ‘labor’. Every few months I have to go into Microsoft Word’s ‘preferences’ file and say: DON’T EDIT MY WORK! I CAN SPELL, AND MISS SARA WILLIAMS WAS MY ENGLISH TEACHER!!

            Does ANYONE really understand the so-called Global Economy? I’ve met quite a few people who say they do, but a few searching questions reveal they don’t know squat. When a fire in Bangladesh can force down the price of Nike stock in Tokyo, and a train accident in Quebec can raise the price of oil, and a poor canola crop in Ontario can cause palpitations in Belgium, something’s wrong.

And then there are the global crooks who steal $460 zillion in France end up in comfortable retirement at age 29 in Cannes, Costa Rica or Crete. Those bad apples should be weeded out before they get in a position to steal all that bread. They obviously went bananas, but I suppose every outfit has some lemons.

“Bob, are there any more fruits to add to that basket?” said Flug was had been reading over my shoulder while sipping on a jar of 7% lemonade from Indonesia. “I was afraid for a moment you were going to mention spoiled pomegranates and crushed grapes.”

“Flug, I know you were the apple of your mother’s eye, but you ain’t the apple of mine, so why don’t you sip your lemonade on the porch while I finish this column?” He said he guessed the main reason was that the bottle was empty, so he got another, went out on the porch, and turned on the radio to a hip-hop (as opposed to music) station to annoy me further.

Back to the subject, I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that sometimes these rich people do get caught with their hands so far into the cookie jar that even they can’t talk their way out of it. We won’t hold our breath though, waiting for the next one. It costs too much to prosecute them. Remember all those Wall Street banks and bankers who brought international economies to their knees? Noticed any of them going to jail?

Rant Number Two complete. 

                                       -end-

Classical music lover (not) Rock Maninoff (Aug. 14)

When I ‘first started’ to celebrate anniversaries

                                                        by Robert LaFrance

 

            Some things seem so obvious once you know them; for all of my six and a half decades I thought people celebrated (or dreaded) their birthdays every year, but it turns out I have been wrong.

            I won’t embarrass him by mentioning his name, but a few months ago I heard Dr. Martin MacCauley telling someone that, contrary to what they had been thinking, they were not celebrating their birthday, but the ANNIVERSARY of their birthday. We only have one birthday, right? After that the only thing we can ‘celebrate’ is the anniversary of that joyous event.

            So as one who makes much of accuracy in speech, I and others who care about such things as that accuracy must now change the name of our annual ‘celebration’.

            I have another suggestion for those who do care about accuracy in speech. When you say, out loud, that you ‘first started’ something, perhaps you could ask yourself: “How many times did I start?”

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            My friend Flug was pleased to have a visitor last week. His nephew Rock Maninoff, who is a professional baseball player in Alabama, was waiting out a hamstring injury and decided to visit his uncle (and my old friend) Flug. They had a grand time while Rock was here in the Scotch Colony, but they were busy.

            Here’s why: Rock made the mistake of telling someone on a committee that he had time to spare. The committee to which I refer is the Scotch Colony 140^th Anniversary Committee which is having a celebration in about nine days to mark the time 140 years ago when all those Scottish settlers arrived here looking for their destinies. They expected log houses already built for them, at least some cleared land, a Tim Horton’s maybe, but you know the old story – they found trees, rocks, and hills.

            Back to the point. All the while Rock Maninoff was here with his MP3 player ear buds glued to the side of his head, he was forced - by those dragons on that committee - to work. Oops! I forgot my wife is one of those dragons…er…I mean…PUT DOWN THAT ROLLING PIN!

            Rock may have headed back to Alabama a little early because he has never been in favour of work, you know, the kind of thing where you get up in the morning and go to. He would play guitar from supper time until 4:00 am and then the next afternoon complain because those dear ladies asked him to move some chairs in Burns Hall. And then move them again because they didn’t fit the ‘ambience’. And then once more back where they were because the ambience had apparently shifted in the meantime.

            The bottom line, as they say – and I have actually heard them say it – is that Rock Maninoff has headed back to Alabama -  and headed back a wiser man. I should say a Wiser’s man, because while he was here he certainly went through a lot of his own particular lemonade.

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            In the remaining portion of my column (you might say ‘the remains’) I will write down a few observations I’ve made in the past month or so.

            The first is, of course, about the weather, or rather we humans’ reaction to the weather. During that wicked hot spell, while everyone with a brain was seeking out an air conditioner and complaining about the heat, Flug was being a Stoic which can be defined as ‘toughing it out’. I asked him why he wasn’t complaining like the rest of us. “Listen,” he began, which was  redundant since I was standing there looking him in the eye. “Listen, remember how I complained so much when it seemed to be raining every day and I couldn’t go fishing? I couldn’t do anything but watch TV. I’m afraid if I complain the sun will stop shining and we’ll get the rain back.”

            “Flug, I hate to say this, but ‘cum hoc propter ergo hoc’ ain’t true.” He looked baffled for some reason. “Those of us blessed with a classical education,” I continued, “know that the phrase I used is Latin and means ‘B follows A, therefore A caused B’. It ain’t true. So you go ahead and complain about the hot weather; it won’t make a difference.”

            And so he did, breaking forth with what in bad novels they call ‘a stream of invective’. I went home to finish my Georges Simenon book, and before I’d finished a page it was raining. It’s still raining. Once in a while I look over at Flug’s house. He continues to stand by the window and stare over at my house as if he were having evil thoughts.

                                          -end-

Our house is older than the city of Calgary (Aug. 7/13 column)

Some facts, or, at worst, ideas

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

             My daughter was recently visiting us from Calgary and was reading a book about all the things there are to see and do when she returns to that Alberta metropolis - if she can scrape together some money. As you know, there’s not much of that in Alberta. Looking at Chapter 4, she suddenly stopped reading and asked me when our own house here in Kincardine was built.

According to the information I have (from two history books of the Scotch Colony) our estate was started in 1886 and completed in 1991. I guess they had trouble installing some of the high-tech electronic equipment. She looked back at the book and said: “Hmmmm…you know this house is actually older than the City of Calgary? It was incorporated in 1893.” It’s a young province all right. It doesn’t seem long ago that it was just a prairie cow town where I lived in the Salvation Army hostel for two weeks, but it was 1967. Centuries ago.

            Speaking of deer, I visited Fredericton on July 27 and when I got home I walked around this estate, a wander that included my back garden that is located 91.4 metres from the house, out in the orchard. The first thing I noticed was that the string beans looked a little weird.

            “The beans really grew fast while I was gone a whole nine hours,” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way to think). Then I looked for the four beet plants I had been looking forward to devouring sometime in the next month. Three of them were gone and one was suffering Post Traumatic Quivering (PTQ). The thick row of head lettuce was also damaged. I had been deered.

            It’s just a small garden, so the deer that had visited had tramped pretty well everywhere. Anybody with half an eye and an elbow (I cleaned up that phrase for the paper) would have seen that first thing. What to do, what to do so that I could save what was left? Then I remembered the time back in the 1980s when I had a problem with deer coming in my orchard on a path from the next property. The answer then, as it was on July 27, was to hang a small net bag containing human hair. Deer won’t go near that.

            The only problem is, when my neighbour, Louee Witson, wakes up from his deep sleep, what is he going to think when he finds his shoulder-length hair is a little more jagged than it was when he sat down? Serves him right for falling asleep in a lawn chair right out in the open like that.

            People occasionally tell me that I think too much, and I think I agree. However, once in a while I come up with an original idea that arrived because my lines of thought are on a completely different plane (higher or lower?) from everybody else’s. Here’s my latest revelation: while I was sipping on a lemonade at the club’s outdoor lounge, someone mentioned that it was starting to cloud over.

            Have you thought about what you’re saying?” I said. “You’re saying the sky is clouding over, when in fact the sky is clouding UNDER, right? When it’s all cloudy we can’t see the sky, which is ABOVE the clouds.” This will shock you, but no one seemed that concerned about this. In fact, they seemed militantly unconcerned.

            A federal cabinet minister was on television yesterday afternoon and going over the fabulous accomplishments of his government since one S. Harper had formed that government a few decades ago. Or perhaps it just seems that way. So last evening – this was just after my cloud revelations – when we were all watching this performance on the club’s ancient TV, the Perfessor cleared his throat and said ponderously: “ You know, memory is closer to imagination than reality.” There was a silence while we drank this in, so to speak, and then someone got up and turned the TV over to the soccer game from Brazil.

            While the average stoat has more Scottish blood in his or her veins than I do, I still am looking forward to this month’s 140^th anniversary of the Scotch Colony celebrations here in Kincardine. The Fitzgerald Family music show on July 16 was the first event of the celebrations and it was just about the best show I’ve ever seen in Burns Hall, and there will be lots of things going on Aug. 23-25. They have even put together a history/cook book for the event and many dozens have been sold already, probably because I wrote one piece in it…or not. Other than my story, it’s a very entertaining book.

            A final note for this week: I bought a new shaving mirror, even though some people look at my ‘beard’ and think I don’t shave. Anyway, this mirror has a feature I insisted upon. At the bottom is the sentence: “bearded persons in this mirror are much handsomer than they appear”. It’s an ego thing.          

                                            -end-

The more things change... (July 31/13 column)

There I was in my stained polo shirt

                                                             by Robert LaFrance

 

            A recent column used the theme ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. Somebody and I were recently talking about how people don’t visit people any more – that is, they don’t ‘drop in’ and say hello for half an hour. We must phone first and arrange an appointment which is then recorded in triplicate.

            It occurred to me that four or five decades ago people didn’t do those impromptu visits any more than they do now, but it was for a different reason. They had the cows to plough, the garden to wash, and the manure to spread on the barn floor – farm jobs like that. People didn’t have time to visit, but they would see each other downtown or at the Saturday night dance; the only real socializing took place at things like wedding receptions and barn raisings.

            That’s another thing (of many) that I have never understood; why did barns ever need to be raised? Seems to me they’re quite high enough as it is.

            Back to the reasons that people don’t visit these days. For a long time it was television, but with the advent of the VCR, we can tape shows and watch them when we get back home, so that’s not the reason now. Wanna know the reason? Here it is: People are run by their animals. “Oh, my, no, we can’t leave little Fifi home all alone; she would be lonely and it could affect (impact?) her psychologically. Goodness me.”

            It’s true. These days people use their pets as a wonderful excuse not to do anything, like visiting somebody in hospital or nursing home. They can’t leave Fifi home where she’d be lonely, they can’t leave her in the car while they go into the hospital, and they won’t visit people who don’t want their cringing yapping lapdogs inside their house. (Our dog stays outside where a dog should be.)

            Don’t get me started on cats.

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            I had to go to a wedding reception last Saturday and as usual I was dressed to the threes. I like to ‘put on the dog’ for those types of events where someone could be taking photos.

            “I think the expression is ‘dressed to the nines’, Bob,” said my friend Flug, who is a retired Parliament Hill barber. “If you are all spiffed up and looking good, you are dressed to the nines.”

            “Flug,” I said not quite patiently, “you have known me for at least a hundred years. Have I ever, once, been what you would call dressed to the nines?” He looked over at me in my stained polo short (did I ever play polo?) and pants that were tailor-made, but not for me. My shoes would have made an Adidas janitor retch and my socks were, as usual, mismatched, one blue and one green. My niece would have called me ‘a global fashion faux pas’, and that ain’t nothing good.

            After that perusal, he said that he had by that time understood my point; I had been dressed well for me, but no more than ‘to the threes’. That brought on a discussion of being in fashion, something that’s only occurred to me once in my life. Back in the 1990s, teenagers started appearing in public while they (the teenagers, not the public) were wearing jeans that were almost torn to shreds. I would see a 16-year-old whose parents’ annual income was in the $150,000 range dress as if he had just ‘rode the rails’ from Moncton and fell onto the tracks a few times.

            Looking down at my own clothes, I would then look back at that teenager and think: “Bob! You’re finally in style!” But that was only for a short time. When they started wearing baseball caps backward, I gave up and bought a pair of pants without rips and tears. Like barn raising, the idea of wearing the cap visor at the back didn’t make a lot of sense. Bell-bottom pants and hip-hop are two more phenomena that fit that category. When people look back, they will say: “What was I thinking?”

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            Merchandizing and capitalism in general have always fascinated me. The Kincardine Hardware Store that operates out back of the club had a massive field day (so to speak) during this summer’s heat wave. Man, was that hot for a while! Not complaining though.

            In one day the KHS sold 19 air conditioners and continued to sell a dozen a day over that heat wave. Ernie Edze, who runs the store, said he had gotten a good buy on them because they had been ‘damaged in shipment’. A friend of his drives for the AC company and had a little mishap just down the road. Didn’t hurt the van, but 90 air conditioners were scratched.

            Anyway, the point is that Ernie sold 189 AC units, and two weeks later when the weather turned much colder, he sold 94 wood heaters. They had also been damaged in shipment. Go figure.

                                        -end-