Feeling guilty about growing tansy (Sept 24)

My client regrets his (her) actions, your honour

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            What we need is some kind of media translator (MT) to take statements made by politicians, business leaders, janitors – in other words, people in power – and change them into what the speakers REALLY mean.

            Reading a story in today’s daily paper, I was struck by the words uttered by the defendant’s lawyer. “The defendant is full of regrets for what has taken place and the pain he (she) has caused.”

            If we had a good working MT, it would translate that into: “The defendant is full of regrets for getting caught and the pain and expense that he (she) has gone through in serving the minimum amount of time in jail.”

            On a similar subject, I sat dozing in my living room easy chair when all of a sudden I was either dreaming or looking at a TV show about some guys from the era of the Three Musketeers. They were what used to be called ‘swashbucklers’. It reminded of the guy (gal) in court who had been buckling swashes all over the place before he (she) got caught. A lot of people think we should go back to the days of the Three Musketeers when serious crimes resulted in the tipping of the cap with the head still in it.

            I can’t say I subscribe to that sort of thing, but it’s tempting to think of now and then. Trouble is, when you have permanent solutions like that you can’t go back and say “Oops!”

            On a side note, I don’t remember ever seeing the Three Musketeers with muskets, but almost always swords, so it was false advertising in the first place.

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            A couple of Mondays ago, as I was out picking apples so the bears wouldn’t have quite so many, a red and white helicopter appeared over the horizon. For the next half hour that vehicle went back and forth over the area; I couldn’t help but think that it must have been the RCMP looking for The Deadly Grass (TDG).

            In spite of the fact that I don’t grow anything stronger than tansy, I couldn’t help feeling guilty. A couple of times I held out my wrists for handcuffs, but they didn’t land, at least not around here. Maybe it wasn’t the police at all, but a political execution squad looking for escaping Bloc Quebecois members, but whoever it was, I don’t think I like helicopters hovering over my             gardens. After all, Save-Easy sells tomatoes, and even basil so they can hover there.

            A few days after this incident, if it could be called an incident, I read in my daily newspaper that there had been major marijuana and cocaine ‘busts’. A big co-ordinated police operation in Quebec and the Maritimes.

            As usual, I am confused as to why we might have a police helicopter (if that’s what it was) perusing my garden and orchard and spending $1000 an hour to do it, while in some areas of Canada and the U.S. cannabis is legal. Of course, as I often hear from certain wives of mine, it doesn’t take much to confuse me.

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            I try to see the funny side of things and then come and report it to you, but sometimes I don’t need any help finding a funny side.

            Ten days ago I was perusing the Sportsnet channel when I came across two gents arguing about a certain rule that Major League Baseball wants to bring in. One of these two gents was all for the new rule and the other one wasn’t “because it might slow down the game”.

            There is not a whole lot I can add to that. The idea of something that could possibly make the game of baseball any slower is away beyond anything I could imagine.

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            A lot of people are going to say I’m lying about the following news item: On August 12, a man named Louis Riel won a ‘Best Big Toe’ contest in Brandon, Manitoba. From what I can guess, this is an annual contest in that city, part of their Prairie Days celebration.

            Louis Riel – and that is the winner’s Riel name – I mean real name – is a barber from the nearby town of Forrest Station. He told reporters he spent days cutting his toenails and just generally buffing his feet. They shone like the sun. As a mechanical engineer might say: “Truth is stranger than friction.”

            Louis Riel – the barber, that is – won $500 cash and an autographed picture of the original Louis Riel. I hope he doesn’t meet the same fate – being elected to Parliament I mean.

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"A hot toddy is what you need" (Sept. 17)

A truly staggering coincidence

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I know that life is full of coincidences, but sometimes they are a little beyond coincidence.

            Take, for example, the remarkable coincidence of the charge against Liberal candidate Andrew Harvey being made public, not only during his election campaign in our riding, but one day too late for the party to put in another candidate if they wanted to. Remarkable.

            In case it hasn’t been clear from media reports – and it hasn’t - Andrew Harvey will still be running for the Liberals.

            While I am temporarily on this subject, I should point out that both “major” parties (as they call themselves) have and will encourage such ‘coincidences’. There ain’t no angels in politics.

            From the wildly entertaining subject of politics, I move on to the extremely annoying subject of the common cold. Some people capitalize the words Common Cold, but I am not here to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

            As of Tuesday, Sept. 2, I had not had a cold for six or eight months. I was beginning to think that I had found the answer to avoiding that particular malady. Whatever that answer was, I didn’t know, but I assumed I was just one of the lucky ones – invincible.

            Then came Tuesday, Sept. 2. You will have seen some of the old photos of men driving spikes as they built the railroads – keep that in mind, because that’s what happened to me. I was that spike and the cold was the hammer.

            “A hot toddy is what you need,” said my friend Flug, so we looked on the Internet for a good recipe. The one that sounded best to me was the one that combined 3.5 tablespoons of brandy, the same amount of water, a half teaspoon of honey, all heated and stirred together.

            I mixed them all up and left the cup on the counter. Meanwhile, the phone rang and a few seconds later Flug came in. Seeing the cup, decided there wasn’t nearly enough brandy. He added a dollop (4.36 ounces) more.

            My phone call over, I strode to the hot toddy cup. “I wonder if 3.5 ounces is enough?” I asked myself, and you know the answer to that question.

            Long story shorter, within ten minutes I was snoring in my favourite chair while the TV quietly played some old-time country music, my favourite. My wife came in and tried to awaken me, but as she shook me I slud (yes, I said ‘slud’ just like Dizzy Dean) onto the floor. She told me this afterward, when I awoke with an even worse cold and headache.

            “While you were on the phone, I saw your hot toddy on the counter,” she said to my aching head, “and added a dollop of brandy because it looked a little weak.” Apparently I drank a gallon of brandy from that one 12-ounce glass. That ain’t no dollop.

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            Have you ever known anyone who didn’t get colds and who never was sick? Ever? I have such a relative. He is, by popular demand, about to emigrate to New Zealand, and if there were anywhere farther away I would pay his train fare.

            Cousin Eldred LaFrance, a former resident of Victoria County, is one of those chaps who visit people a lot, and in his wake people get sick – not of him, because he’s likeable and entertaining – but he is a Carrier.

            After extensive medical lab tests, the professionals have ascertained that Eldred carries on and around him the germs and viruses for everything from sickle cell anemia to ulcers to syphilis to The Common Cold. The government wanted to execute him and carefully put the remains in a vat of hydrochloric acid, but instead bought him an isolated kiwi farm in New Zealand. You can’t say Stephen Harper isn’t decisive.

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            On Monday afternoon, after I had finished working and slaving for the day, I took a lawn chair out to my apple orchard and sat there in the shade while I read an Agatha Christie novel. I heard – and even felt – a thump and looked down to see that an apple had fallen almost at my feet.

            It just goes to show you how important timing is. Comedians Don Rickles and Bob Hope used to say that timing wasn’t just important, it was everything, and that was proven once again.

            A few centuries earlier, if that apple had fallen onto my head, I might have been the one who discovered gravity and Sir Isaac Newton would have been just a bum, a university lecturer who bored all his acquaintances with his foolishness about inertia and stuff like that.

            On the other hand, I should point out that the apple that fell at my feet was an Alexander and it was huge. If that had whacked me on the noggin I would have still been staggering around that orchard.

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"Results may vary" = sleazy (Sept. 10)

Were the old TVs doing something illegal?

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            I was thinking today (my head still hurts) about those big old televisions that used to adorn our houses - the ones that weighed about a metric tonne each. Remember them and the computer monitors that needed a mule and a crane to lift them from one room to another? Today I can easily carry a 32” flat-screen television in one hand, whereas back in 1975 I would have been hard pressed to carry a 17-inch TV with the help of lemonade and a Merle Haggard 8-track.

            My question is: what happened to all that stuff that was jammed into the backside (so to speak) of the old TVs?

            SOMETHING must have been in there. Today televisions are as flat as the top of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head and, curiously enough, that space that disappeared from the back of the old TVs is just about the size of his head. Can that be a coincidence?

            Looking at photos of the old televisions and computer monitors that mostly came to North American from Japan and other Far East countries, I am now prepared to put forth a theory on the matter.

            Drugs. All that time the North American and European drug problems have gotten worse and worse, so the only conclusion I can come to is that those big backs on the TVs and monitors held all kinds of deadly drugs. Looking at the actions of all our political leaders during that period, and realizing that each of them owned a large TV, can we doubt that drugs were heavily involved?

            I think I have proven my case (Q.E.D. as they say in math), but now we have to figure out how the drugs are getting in today, because it only takes a glance at the headlines to know that world leaders are still ‘on the line’.

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            Turning from the subject of television to the subject of television commercials, are we finding fewer cases of positive statements these days?

            Last evening, while I was watching a show called ‘Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery’ in which she solved eight murders, three embezzlements, and a spitting on the sidewalk while the police stood by baffled, there came on my (flat-screen) TV a commercial about a miracle product that would clean one’s bathtub, flush, kitchen sink and little Johnny’s dirty sneakers.

            At end of the commercial the proviso came on the screen – in small letters – “results may vary”. Of course the idea of that little warning was that if I spend the $19.99 for this minor miracle, it might be as useless as my neighbour Flug’s nephew, who is at the moment on a sight-seeing tour of Renous, NB.

            As I’ve mentioned dozens of times in these pages, I was once employed by Environment Canada as a weatherman. In reporting the weather to the public, we were all warned to NEVER use percentages, as in “there’s a 40% chance of snow in Resolute Bay”. I recall our instructor in Ottawa warning us about using that wishy-washy way of forecasting.

            “Guys and gals,” he said, as he brandished a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver, “if I EVER hear of you doing this, no matter where you’re stationed – Inuvik or Saskatoon – I will hunt you down and shoot you. Say it’s going to snow or not.” We never used percentages in our forecasts. Looking at the weather girls and boys on TV now, one can’t help but notice that it’s a 40% chance here and there. It’s called CYA, or ‘Covering Your Bum’.

            Then there is the matter of political and other polling. Even though pollsters are almost always wrong because people lie to them, they continue to rake in the money and continue to have their findings broadcast to the nations. Who is paying for these things?

            Like the ‘results may vary’ sleaze, pollsters always have their little proviso at the end of their published poll results. “We certify that this poll is correct to within four percentage points 19 times out of 20”. What does that mean?

            This is called wiggle room, or wriggle room if you’re a language purist. Like the previous two examples, the pollsters’ statement at the end is merely saying: “Hey, we don’t have any idea what’s going to happen and we’re leaving ourselves some space in case we’re left standing there with an omelette clinging to our beards”. Such as in the latest Alberta and BC elections.

            My favourite poll result of all time was during the 1974 federal election campaign when the NDP and their leader Ed Broadbent were found to have 45% of the popular vote sewn up, while Pierre Trudeau and the Liberals were mired in third place with 28%. The Liberals won a majority and the NDP got 16 seats.

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A walk-in freezer in Nunavut (Sept.3)

Observing some sad anniversaries

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            One morning last week I was talking about nutrition to, strangely enough, a nutritionist, and she asked me what I usually had for breakfast. I said that most mornings I had porridge. “You should have some acid with that,” she said.

            I grew up in the 1960s, and her words took me back to the days when, at any given time, half my friends were on the Planet Zortok and the other half were on their way back from there, so the words from this 26-year-old nutritionist in the year 2014 took me aback.

            She must have seen the look on my face, and hastily added: “I mean blueberries or apple slices on your porridge which, by the way is an excellent food.” At that moment I resolved to stop eating porridge or any other crop that might be construed as good for me. Since that day I have had a smidgen of scotch and a Twinkie for breakfast. Nothing spoils a good meal more than someone saying it’s healthy. I boycotted broccoli in 1976, cabbage in 1981.

            Watching the TV news last evening about 11:00, I wondered aloud at the weirdness of our beloved Prime Minister emerging from an Inuit structure wearing a parka and commenting on events in the Middle East where it’s about +3475ºC.

            (I should note that I wrote that previous sentence the way I did to make the language mavens pay attention. I know an Inuit structure cannot fit into a parka.)

            The news report went back and forth between the Negev Desert and Mr. Harper, who must have been in Resolute Bay or even farther north because his breath was all steamy, which could have meant he was touring a walk-in freezer.

            He asked a question of one of his Inuit companions and he reminded me of Shad Diploch, who was in grades 8 to 10 with me. Shad was one of these students who stand up and ask intelligent sounding questions, except that, even as they asked, we all knew that he knew the answer already. He wanted to impress the teacher that he, Shad, was paying attention. Meanwhile, he was impressing his classmates that he was a tool, and I don’t mean an pair of adjustable pliers.

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

            Exactly 75 years ago today Britain declared war on Germany which had attacked Poland two days before. A week later Canada also declared war on Germany. A mere two years and three months later, the U.S. declared war on Japan, and Germany declared war on the U.S.

            The reason I mention all this is not to observe anniversaries, but to remind us all that there’s a guy in Russia who wishes he could emulate the Austrian painter who pretty much owned Europe by 1943.

            World War II has been called “The Last Good War” which is a little like saying that anchovies are good on pizzas. It just ain’t so. I know some of the readers like anchovies, but you’ve obviously been misled by your taste buds who can be renegades at times.

            We Canadians tend to brag about how well we conducted ourselves during World War II, but I don’t know that we should. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen were the very best, as were the people working hard back home, but we needn’t brag too much about our politicians. They were the ones who allowed only a few thousand jews to come here and escape 99% certain death in Germany and in German-held areas while Hitler, Eichmann, Goebbels and the other jolly-boys were killing six million jews.

            Prime Minister MacKenzie King knew it too.

            Then there was the internment of Japanese citizens (of Canada) and the deporting of many to Japan, a place they probably didn’t want to be, especially in August 1945. Meanwhile residential schools and mistreatment of First Nations people was going on here as always, and war profiteers were profiting as always. It is said that many Canadian companies continuing selling their products to Germany even though Germans were killing our folks by the thousands.

            The reason I mention all this is that I want to say THANK YOU to all those who gave their health, happiness and lives in our wars including Afghanistan. Every year, as November 11 approaches, people are reminded of all this, but folks, I want you to know that every day I think of your sacrifices.

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