The Prints of Whales? (Sept 21)

DIARY

There are more Rules of Life – for sure

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Last week’s column listed several Rules of Life and I was thinking of adding another ten or so this week, but if they are Rules of Life they are going to happen to us whatever we do, so why bother?

Just one this week though – Rule of Life # 248: You’re driving to town to pick up bibles or something and it starts to rain. Your wipers do a good job of clearing the windshield except for one spot – directly in front of the driver. It’s always in that one place. If you bought $99 wipers it would be the same. Keep your money.

            Still on the subject of vehicle windshields and other windows, I have noticed the unintended consequences of vehicles having dark windows; everybody seems to have them now. The result is that people think that New Brunswickers are VERY friendly people. “Whenever I passed anybody they smiled and waved,” wrote a certain Toronto Globe and Mail columnist in last Wednesday’s edition.

            I have news for him: I, and I think most people, wave to other drivers because we can’t tell who they are and we don’t want to take a chance. There are too many nut cases around these days. Somebody with an ISIS-Mafia complex could start blasting away with a Kalashnikov.

            Last Wednesday I was in Grand Falls and stopped at Wal-Mart to buy some rechargeable batteries. Getting out of the car, I carefully locked the doors because I had two Nikon cameras on the front seat. When I came back out and got in the car, I saw that I had left both front windows rolled down. Either Wal-Mart customers are very honest or have bad vision because the cameras were still there when I returned.

            Listening to a radio report from the Rio Olympics, I heard a CBC announcer’s interview with a Canadian swimmer who said he wanted “to concentrate on the performance and not the result”. It took quite a bit of thinking for me to realize what that  meant – nothing.

            I have often said that life is far too complicated these days. Last year we bought two heat pumps and ever since then we’ve been getting hot water out of our cold water taps or vice versa. I am sure that makes sense, doesn’t it? I (vaguely) remember when we bought the pumps; the guy explained that in the winter they got heat from the ground (which would be frozen at the time) but in the summer they would take moisture from the air to cool off the house.

Let’s stop right there. I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m talking about. It reminds me of the medieval guy from what is now Iraq. He said he didn’t trust his brother any more because one day he saw him blowing on his soup to cool it and then, outside, blowing on his hands to warm them. “Anybody who can blow hot and blow cold out of the same mouth can’t be trusted,” he said.

            We hear a lot about the problem of mould (or mold if you prefer) in our houses. We have dehumidifiers running all summer so we don’t get a drop of water leaking out in our basements and causing mould, but look over there at Italy. Check out the city of Venice, whose skirts are under water 24/7. Did you ever hear that Venice has a mould problem? No, just gondolas running into each other.

            More language problems: If we say the Prince of Wales, how do people know we aren’t saying the Prints of Wales, or the Prints of Whales? And where does Wales come into things anyway? Have you seen Prince Charles there – or anywhere else – lately? Is he ever keeping a low profile.

            In the past 68 years or so, I have often criticized NB Power in this column, but this time I want to praise the company. About ten days ago the power went off here for about ten seconds – just enough for me to lose part of a column I was writing – and I was annoyed. Six hours later it went off again. I waited twenty minutes to call in a report. I was telling the call centre guy about the outage (and outrage) when the power came back on. “We’re really quite efficient, aren’t we?” he said. “You didn’t even get a chance to finish your report.” I hate a wise guy, especially when I see him in the mirror after being a victim of one-upmanship.

            I will leave you, my faithful and long-suffering readers with a question: Why, in a province that sees more than its share of snow, do so many people buy white vehicles?
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Flug's unfortunate tattoo (Sept 14)

DIARY

The Rules of life (Part 1) as we know them

                        by Robert LaFrance

            There are certain Rules of Life that we all live by, and they are what might have been called, a few thousand years ago, like about 500 BC, ‘The Law of the Medes and the Persians’. That phrase means ‘law than can never be changed – ever’.

            So it is with the Rules of Life I am about to quantify, whatever that means. I suppose in some ways the R of R are similar to Murphy’s Law; anything that can go wrong, will.

            Think first of the item that takes you from Point A to Point – if you are lucky. The automobile in its many kinds and colours comes to mind right away, with a quick second place on the same subject The Automobile Warranty.

            Say you go out and buy a new car and it comes with a warranty that is good for four years or 90,000 kilometres, whichever comes first. You are driving from Bristol to Arthurette and your odometer tells you that your warranty is going to run out at the old Caldwell place, below Red Rapids on Highway 109. So it turns over 90,000 just as you enter Red Rapids flat.

            You will probably not reach McNeil’s General Store at the upper end of the flat, so you might as well shut off the car now. Your warranty just ran out, so within the next little while the car will fall apart, piece by piece. If you try to make it back to Bristol, your car is doomed. That’s a Rule of Life.

            One more rule involving driving and vehicles. If there is a major pothole in a road, that pothole will be, logically enough, in your driving lane (where everybody drives) and it will be exactly in a shadow. So you are driving along in your usual blissful state and your car’s right front wheel hits this crevice and you say: “&^%$#^%$*! That’s a rule of life, no matter how devoutly religious you are.

            Rule #3 deals with gastronomy, and that has nothing to do with looking at stars and planets. It’s about grub going into our guts. The rule states: “NEVER go grocery shopping when you are hungry!” Once in a while I forget that rule and I pay dearly. Three days ago, for example, I went into the local grocery store and I did not eat breakfast before getting in the car (which has a warranty) and going to the grocery store whose owners are so wealthy already that that put out TWO bags of garbage each week.

            They are wealthier now by far. The cashier had to call three grocery bag carriers to help me get my stuff to the car. I wished I had brought a trailer. The bill came to $489.02. I had only gone in to buy some eggs and canned soup. I finally stopped shopping when I saw myself putting canned aniseed flavoured chickpeas in my third cart.

            This next Rule of Life is not really for me, but for a certain nameless friend (Richard LaFrance, no relation and known as Flug). Here it is: “Never get a tattoo with a loved one’s name on it, because she might not always be your loved one and you know what Hell hath no fury like.”

            Flug, back about three wives ago, thought he was in love with this Paraguayan lady named Dulcie who was doing a bartender exchange course at the Club down the road. (Our regular bartender, Freddy, had decided he wanted to see South America.)

            Flug went to Old Home Week in Woodstock and just by the gate was a tattoo artist named Wanda who tattooed ‘Dulcie’ on Flug’s limb. Well, unfortunately, by the time Wanda had tattooed the letter ‘e’ those two were in love. A match made in Winnipeg. Flug had a problem.

            Here’s a Rule of Life that can be covered by my grandfather, Muff LaFrance’s, one rule: “If you see a chance to keep your mouth shut, take it.”

            I was in town last week when my friend Irvine introduced me to a guy named Leonard Glinn from Tilley. I was quite astonished that Leonard looked strikingly like my acquaintance Glenn Patterlick, also from Tilley. Of course I couldn’t just shut up as Grampy would have, but said that out loud. There was an uncomfortable silence, then Leonard said he had to go. Irvine said: “He looks like Glenn for a reason, you wheelwrench. He was born while his mother’s husband was in the Korean War – for two years before Leonard was born.” Open mouth, change feet.
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Smart Cars are stupid (Sept 7)

DIARY

The hustle and bustle of Kincardine

                        by Robert LaFrance

“Smart Cars are stupid,” observed my friend Flug as we drove through Gorham, Maine last week. He was driving his 1987 Gremlin, so you can take whatever you like from his utterance.

            I have often wondered why anyone would pay $15,000+ for a vehicle that a brawny kindergarten student could throw into the ditch, but people will be people. From what I understand, a Smart Car will go 879 kilometres on a teaspoonful of gas, but that is rather offset by the fact that any of the Smart Cars I’ve seen could drive under the back of a tractor-trailer and find itself the involuntary passenger all the way to Dallas, Texas. On the other hand, the mileage would be even better on that trip.

            Picture the African Savanna, which is kind of a grassland plain, and picture a herd of elephants stampeding because a drone had scared them. Also running away in fear are thousands of mice. The elephants are tractor trailers and the mice are Smart Cars.

A little farther along in our travels in Gorham, we saw a Smart Car parked along the street. Someone had hit it with a bicycle whose owner was not pleased that his mosquito was damaged by a mouse. No doubt he was at least pleased it hadn’t been an elephant.

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            I hear about places like Calgary and Toronto who seem to think they have it made as far as public activities go, but they are pikers compared to my community of Kincardine, Scotch Colony, Victoria County, New Brunswick.

            You see? Just identifying it could be defined as an activity, and our mayor, Rayanne Podolski, has a much more unusual sounding name than Toronto’s mayor, John Tory.

            (I have often wondered whether Mayor Tory, when he was merely ‘John’ could have chosen any political party other than the Tories, or Conservatives, or even Progressive Conservative Party. They dropped the word ‘Progressive’ when Stephen Harper was prime minister.)

            Calgary Mayor Naheed Kurban Nenshi is the only Muslim mayor that I know of in Canada and I know Rayanne can’t compete with him for an exotic sounding name. However, she has named her kids Khalina and El Jameed, so she’s making an effort. We can’t all be born with a name like Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, England. It’s a cosmopolitan world now, folks.

            Back to the huge variety of activities found in Kincardine: There’s Burns Night every January and sometimes in the fall there’s even a Harvest Supper, depending on how the gardens have turned out. There was a ‘tea’ down there just last week, so everybody was all excited, including me, but I had thought that a tea meant there would also be food served. Live and learn.

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            On to more important topics, and could there be any more important subject than  how the roll of toilet paper (called AW when I was a kid) is installed on the roller?

            Seriously, I have even seen this argument appear on Facebook. Should the TP or AW be unrolled from the back or the front of the roll? I have seen paragraphs of explanation on one side or the other – no pun intended – and these people are serious. It’s just a silly topic, don’t you agree? That is, unless someone puts on the roll backwards IN MY HOUSE.

            Still on the important subject of bathroom etiquette, there are those who leave up the toilet seat cover and – here’s a hint – I am not talking about males. Is this something new? Decades ago we males were nagged unmercifully to “always put down the flush cover”; now we all do, but when I have guests I find those of a certain gender leave the top cover up.

            Here’s a list of things I have found in our flush: a smartphone, 6 pencils, a wallet, two passports (different names but same photo – what’s that all about?), a Husqvarna chainsaw, and a riding lawn mower tire with the initials BO painted on it. It could belong to the president of a neighbouring country, but I doubt it.

The main point is, when you’re visiting this estate, put down the flush covers, all of them. The TP roll comes off at the front.

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            Final point, this one about manners: Last Tuesday I went into the parking lot of ‘a big box store’ as people call Wal-Mart for some reason, and as I got out of my Toyota, I heard a woman say – I thought she was saying it to me – “How’s your bum?”

            Although women in parking lots are often tooting their car horns at me, I have never heard one ask me how my bum was. Just to end the suspense, I told her it was fine just as I realized she had been talking to her toddler.
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Watch those curly light bulbs (Aug. 31)

DIARY

Flug’s problem with an Ottawa woman

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Every once in a while, like the rest of us, my friend Flug says something intelligent.

            “It won’t last,” he warned me, as if I were expecting more. As registered males of the human race, we are dull as dishwater, except for occasional flashes of mediocre thought, or, in this case, brilliance.

            Flug was relating a story about telling a lie and having it come back at him like cucumbers or radish. The lie occurred several years ago when he told a lady in Ottawa that he was the owner of a trucking company in New Brunswick. Remembering that, she wrote to Flug in Tilley (he lives in Kincardine now, but we can always count on Canada Post) that she was coming for a visit, perhaps a long visit. It wouldn’t take her long to realize that Flug’s ‘trucking company’ was a 1999 Ford F150 with lots of rust.

            “What will I do?” he moaned. “She’s on her way here and she is going to shoot me.” I was thinking that he deserved shooting, for that lie and many others, but I was and am his friend.

            “I’d say shooting is the least of your worries,” I commented. “What about Roseanne?” That was and is his wife, either the 16^th or 17^th. “When she answers the door and it answers back with this Ottawa woman, you are going to be in the deepest of doo-doo ever seen in these parts. Have you thought about going on a sudden vacation?”

            He hadn’t, but ruled that out because he was in the middle of a business deal involving the purchase of another trucking company, a 2006 Ford F150 whose asking price was $1500. We talked for a while and didn’t come up with anything, but figured Ottawa wouldn’t be there for at least two days. “We gotta come up with SOMETHING,” he said. Where he found the WE he didn’t say.

            This is when he said something intelligent. “You know Bob, telling a lie is like chicken pox. It doesn’t seem like much at the time, but you look around five or ten or thirty years later and bazooka! You’ve got shingles which is the chicken pox coming back to hit you with a stick. If only you hadn’t gotten chicken pox in the first place.”

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            On to an entirely different subject (and leaving Flug to sort out his own shingles) I was sitting in my office earlier today and working on this very column when the light in my office started flickering. After four or five minutes of this, the bulb started to make a buzzing sound after which I leapt (if one can leap at age 68) to the switch and turned it off.

            Of course five minutes later I forgot about this and went back to my office. When I turned on the light it made an even louder buzz and crackle. After once more turning it off, I went to the downstairs cupboard and got a 60W incandescent bulb. I specify because the one that made the noise was one of those curly fluorescent bulbs, you know, the ones that were the answer to all our ecological prayers a few years ago. We would do away with the incandescent ones and live happily ever after because these ones would each last 20,000 hours and take half the power. And Goldilocks was a nice little girl except for her minor problem of being a food thief.

            For the reader’s information, the curly-fries bulb was the Noma brand, made in China. Asking around, I have found that those bulbs made in China have caused many a problem including worry because they contain mercury.

            So I decided to change all our house lighting to LEDs (light emitting diodes) and went to the hardware store which is located right near Jim’s Pool Hall and behind the club. I looked at the price tag - $4,320. I said to the clerk: “So how many LED bulbs does that buy?” He gave me an odd look and said it was only the down payment on one bulb.

Now where did I put those candles?

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               One of the Olympics events reminded me of the Victorian era in England. In the late 19^th century, people were urged to refrain from saying words like ‘leg’ because it was risqué, so they had to refer to a table ‘limb’. In Rio one of the events was the ‘women’s breaststroke’. Times have changed. I don’t know how many Victorian heart attacks would have been caused by women’s beach volleyball. I’m still recovering.

            By the way, the Ottawa woman who was headed this way phoned Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) Saturday evening and said she’d just met the love of her life in Cabano and was going back with him to Fort MacMurray. Just so you know.
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