My glamorous job as a reporter (Nov. 23)

Some questions about the world we live in

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Sorry about this, but my first comment has to be about Donald Trump. Because he is going to be President of the good old U.S. of A. he has to put all his 500 businesses into a ‘blind trust’ so he ostensibly has no control over them. So who is going to be in charge of this trust? His children Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, that’s who. They will also be on his transition team. Apparently Donald Trump Sr. hasn’t got the faintest idea what a blind trust is. I looked up the definition of ‘psychosis’; why don’t you? Looks interesting for the next four years, eh?

            On the subject of writing for a newspaper, I know most people think it’s a glamorous job with lots of opportunity to meet powerful and beautiful people, but although that is true, there are times when it’s nothing short of brutal. Especially if one is a sports reporter. High school hockey causes me no end of problems because both boys and girls wear the cage type of helmet face mask and to make it even more difficult the girls almost all have pony tails covering up their numbers so I haven’t a clue who they are. At my age, I’m often confused as to who I am.

            The death of poet and singer – well, poet anyway - Leonard Cohen, 82, in early November was covered in all media all over the world. People who wouldn’t have heard of him during his lifetime were suddenly distraught at the news of his death in California and funeral in Montreal. While his song ‘Hallelajuh’ was one of the best ever written, much of his other vocals were a series of mumbles and murmurs accompanied by grimaces. Like Bob Dylan and Aristotle, everybody knew his name but didn’t listen to him much until he died. Of course some say Bob Dylan is still living, the proof being that he was just chosen for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

            I didn’t mention this before Remembrance Day because I wanted the Royal Canadian Legions to raise as much money as possible, but I want to point out that whoever came up with the idea of poppy sales was surely a marketing genius. I bought and lost SEVEN poppies in the two or three weeks leading up to November 11. I spent two dollars for each poppy (and didn’t begrudge the Legion one dime). I would get to a hockey game or the synagogue or macramé class or my hunter’s safety course and find that my poppy was missing, taken on the battlefield of my car’s seat belt. On Nov. 14 I cleaned out the car and found 329 poppies under the seat. And yes, I know about the trick of putting tape on the pin, but that wouldn’t be cricket.

            People who are usually fairly sane and even sceptical in other avenues of their lives will believe anything they see on the Internet. A sure-fire cure for arthritis is touted on Facebook one day and two days later all the pharmacies are scrambling to get more ginseng, ground dogweed, garlic tablets, or Omega 3.1. Here’s an example: “Researchers at the University of North Tilley, Churchland Road campus, has concluded that a compound of arsenic and cyanide will cure everything that ails you. You won’t have an ache or a pain after you take one of these puppies. Guaranteed.”

            I like to keep track of what Flug’s nephew Andrew is up to, and the RCMP is often interested as well. His latest scam…I mean endeavour, involves the selling of RVs, meaning those 40-foot camper trailers (if that’s the right term) that people haul around behind their $60,000 pickup trucks as if they were on vacation. Vacation? Seems to me that if I wanted to go on a vacation I wouldn’t take my house with me. Those things are equipped with everything from full kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms that contain mobile Internet setups (so they can order ginseng etc.), to satellite dishes and all sorts of necessities like that. Some of them even have a well-stocked bar if you can believe that.

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, not his real name) is in trouble again with his wife. No wonder he’s been divorced 17 times. Three weeks ago he acquired or was bequeathed a border collie who is very affectionate and likes to be scratched behind the ears and given some ‘Mutt Bits’ which I believe is made by the pet food company Iams. Flug’s problem arose when he walked into his living room and when his wife, an astrophysicist, made a comment about quantum mechanics or horse racing, something like that. Flug made some stunned comment, then scratched her behind the ears. When he regained consciousness...

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Surely Trump is not like Adolph Schicklegruber (Nov 16)

DIARY

A nation stunned – the good old U.S. of A

                        by Robert LaFrance

            About 3:00 am on Wednesday, November 9^th, I woke from a sound sleep and looked at my mobile phone for news of the U.S. election. The nation I used to admire had elected a bully and a buffoon and had let loose the fascist stallion. Pity those whose skin is not quite white.

            When I realized that the filthy election campaign was finally over, I went downstairs and took a shower.

            I can’t say I was gobsmacked by the U.S. election result; the signs were there since FBI Director James Comey announced that his police were investigating still more Hillary Clinton emails. During the next nine days, while the FBI were finding out that that none of the emails was a problem, millions voted in advance polls and millions more fence-sitters made up their minds to vote for Donald Trump. He should go down on his knees and thank James Comey.

            Perhaps someday someone would explain to me EXACTLY what Hillary Clinton’s crimes were. We know about Donald Trump’s hate-filled messages and his treatment of other races, but what did Hillary Clinton do, exactly? I have asked dozens and all they refer to are the emails, the Whitewater scandal from decades ago, and the fact that she’s a woman. “Yes,” I say, “but what exactly and specifically was the crime?” No one knew.

            Anyone who owns real estate in New Brunswick should immediately put for-sale ads into American newspapers; many people are very very eager to leave the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave and emigrate to Canada. (Someone said ‘Land of the Freak, Home of the Depraved’.)

            I don’t think I want to talk about this any more.

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            Well, I suppose I had better talk about it some more and try to understand why a country with so many intelligent people let itself be railroaded into what happened on November 8^th. If we ever want to know the dictionary definition of the word ‘shock’ we only have to replay some of those TV interviews from that evening.

            CNN, a network that many Americans consider practically communistic, seemed to interview a lot more Hillary Clinton supporters than Trump supporters until it was clear that the former were too shocked to speak coherently. If it hadn’t been such a serious matter, I would have chortled – yes, I said chortled – at their discomfiture.

            Donald Trump, who emerged victorious that night, reminds me very much of an old Italian guy I used to read about. According to Wikipedia, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) “was an Italian Dominican friar and preacher active in Renaissance Florence. He was known for his prophecies of civic glory, the destruction of secular art and culture, and his calls for Christian renewal. He denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule and the exploitation of the poor.” On the rare occasions when he rose to speak clearly, Donald Trump sounded like that guy.

            On the other hand, he sounded a lot more like a more recent guy, if we can cast our minds back to Germany in 1933 and before, when the German people saw a guy named Adolph Schicklegruber (his real name) as their Savonarola who would take on the big guys. However, it didn’t seem to occur to Americans that their savior, or saviour if you prefer, was one of the ones who had been exploiting them all along.

            Donald Trump has no financial stake in all those Trump buildings – towers, skating rinks, outhouses, whatever – but there’s his name franchised like a Mcdonalds ‘restaurant’. He found tax loopholes that most of those protesting Americans never heard of and couldn’t have used if they had, and he ended up with tax dollars that should have gone to the man and woman trying to open a restaurant in Wilmington, Delaware.

            When I was a lad, I used to spend some summers on my aunt’s and uncle’s potato farm near New Sweden, Maine, and always found Americans to be friendly and bright, but as in the Joseph Heller novel, ‘Something Happened’.

            We Canadians all know that if Donald Trump governs the way he campaigned, we – and the rest of the world – are in trouble. To quote an interviewee, who identified himself only as Bill from Sudbury, on Anna Maria Tremonti’s CBC radio show The Current: “I don’t know where everything’s going to go from here, but it won’t be good.”

            As Pierre Trudeau said, Canada is a mouse sleeping with an elephant, and up to now we have gotten along, but if we can go by his words so far, I would say that Donald Trump will soon be sending us a message. Let us hope the elephant doesn’t turn over.
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The ancient computer mavens (Nov 2)

DIARY

Toxic waste and Donald Trump…same thing?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I continue to be amazed that a lot of older people are becoming computer nerds. Considering the amount of time it took me – and I was only 46 when I got my first computer – the old fogeys nowadays are learning the concept in a (pacemaker) heartbeat.

            Flug’s parents, Leroy and Alvira, are visiting with him for a week or so and Flug, NOT a computer nerd, is having quite a time with them. He does have a computer, with a high-speed Internet connection, but his main accomplishment so far has been to send a weekly (weakly?) email letter to Leroy and Alvira who live in Mississauga when they are not travelling through Greece, Iran, Austria or Tasmania – “one a them places” Flug says.

            Almost at the other end of the chronological scale, I notice now that those who run our educational system are now saying that kids should start learning mathematical concepts and stuff like that when they are “pre-K” or before they start kindergarten. We’re talking about children three and four years old. I recall the time when these same educators were saying that  kindergarten kids shouldn’t even be asked to memorize the alphabet or the ‘times table’ because that would affect their learning ability when they start grade one.

            I expect one of these days there will be a pronouncement that babies in the womb will now be expected to do some computer programming.

            Still more or less on the same subject – education – I heard from someone last week, possibly from that bastion of knowledge, Facebook, that it won’t be long before people my age, having learned cursive writing as kids, will use that as a code. After all, many if not most of today’s students do not learn cursive writing - we used to call it handwriting – therefore a decade from now students won’t even be able to understand handwriting. We old fogeys can write what we want free of prying eyes.

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

            We all hate the idea of toxic waste and nasty stuff like that, but it could be that some people get a little overzealous, if that’s not actually an oxymoron. My neighbour Carfoure who lives about two kilometres away from here, to the west, is sitting in a cell right now because he burned an old piece of clapboard that had some lead-based paint on it. His neighbour, whom we call Old Slite of Hand, as opposed to Old Sleight of Hand because he can’t spell, reported him to either the SPCA or the environment department (both with more power than they should have) that Carfoure had a bonfire in his field and was burning a piece of clapboard from a pile that he had taken off his house and replaced with vinyl – so much more environmentally friendly.

The neighbour, whom we can also call Venom, knew that there was lead-based paint on the clapboard and called the police. Soon a S.W.A.T. team arrived and hauled Carfoure away. His execution was set for Tuesday, but I heard he had hired Dennis Oland’s lawyers. His brother hired the same firm in 1999 after he shot three people and a moose. He was acquitted of shooting the people but got 20 years hard labour (no Internet) for the moose.

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

A woman on CTV news about fifteen minutes ago was talking about the way people in Ancaster, Ontario, were dealing with a local problem. She said she had ‘referenced’ a newspaper article on the subject and wanted to find out if and how the problem she was describing would ‘impact’ the local people.

I am not sure when the English language became so corrupted with garbage, but I suspect we owe a lot of it to the Americans. I don’t know exactly why I came to that conclusion, but I think the worst of it began at the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s; John Wesley Dean III used this phrase during one of the Congressional hearings: “…at this particular moment in time…”.

Of course he meant ‘now’, but that didn’t stop millions from doing it the way he did. After all, he was tearing down Richard Nixon who, ironically, is now judged to be one of the best ‘foreign policy presidents’ in the last century. Domestic policy? Not so much.

And that brings us to the event that will take place in the good old U.S.A. on November 8^th – their elections, including the big one for the job of president.

In all my years of following politics in dozens of countries, I have never seen anyone who has tried to take over a country’s top job without a particle of knowledge about what makes that country run. If (and I hope ‘when’) Donald Trump loses, I surely hope he accepts defeat and doesn’t send his followers out onto the streets, but I’m not confident.
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My first haircut since 1972 (Oct 26)

DIARY

And they say New Brunswickers are daft?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I am probably not the only person to ever say: “Truth is stranger than fiction”. It hurts me that I didn’t think of that first, but that’s the way it goes.

            Sure, Einstein was the first to think of the General Theory of Relativity, but we can’t all be Einsteins. In fact, none of us can be Einsteins.

            What I’m getting at is a news story out of Ernfold, Saskatchewan, Burdock Capital of Canada and home of famous hockey player Gordie Hull. Gordie, getting a bit bored with retirement from the SHL where adoring crowds cheered him on most nights,  asked his wife Sadie what he could invent to get back in the limelight.

            “Invent washing the dishes for a change!” she roared at Gordie, whose selective hearing didn’t pick that up. Later in the (one-sided) conversation, she said he should do something with his music. He had taken piano lessons for almost six months when he was  nine.

            Gordie pondered and he thought and he ruminated, much like other ruminants (cows and the like, chewing their cuds) in the fields and finally he came up with an idea. That night, down at a bar not unlike the watering hole Flug and I frequent, he gathered together a whole whack of his cronies, bought them each a beer so they wouldn’t make fun of him, and made his pitch.

            “Every pickup truck’s horn has a horn with slightly different pitch than everybody else’s. How about if we create a car horn symphony?”

            It took some more talking and a whole lot more lemonade, but he finally persuaded ‘the boys’ to give it a try. For the next week there was Gordie going around Ernfold with an electronic tuner to find out the pitch of each vehicle horn. Using the same method, except pink gin this time instead of lemonade, he persuaded the ladies to go along with his weird scheme and finally he had 34 vehicles lined up in the driveway of the Ernfold Church of Enlightenment. It was a Saturday night. Hundreds of people, including reporters and camera men and women from Sask TV, were ready.

            And so the universe unfolded, with all those musicians, under the direction of famous retired hockey player Gordie Hull. They played two selections from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and one from Don Messer’s ‘Victoria County Suite’.

It was a huge success. I don’t have to tell you that the whole musical scene was picked up by CBC’s ‘The National’ with Peter Mansbridge and Wendy Mesley describing it in detail. I heard that Wendy wanted to come out and see for herself, but CBC’s vice-president, speaking from Florida where he was on a fact-finding tour, said no.

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

            I was just recalling that when I was growing up in Tilley in the 1950s and 1960s I dreamed of travelling to far-off places like Edmundston and even Montreal, and I later did, but it was pretty much all in Canada, except for a 2-week stay with friends in Columbus, Indiana back in 1970.

            The reason I was reminiscing was that I just received a text message from my travelling younger daughter who is at present in Singapore. Singapore? Where’s that?

            Before that, she and her husband had stayed a week in Hong Kong which was pretty much a good experience. My son-in-law and my daughter discovered an area of Mong Kok, Kowloon that was called Sneaker Street. The whole street sold nothing but sneakers, running shoes – whatever you want to call them. He bought a pair of Nike trainers at a good price.

            To recap, there I was thinking about growing up in Tilley and considering that  Edmundston was quite a journey, and there are my daughter and son-in-law buying shoes in China.

            Speaking of that, my daughter found when she was in Hong Kong that an acquaintance from Upper Kent was working in a city called Shenzhen that was only 17 kilometres away from Hong Kong. However, getting there would have been a problem because it is located in ‘the real China’ as someone called it. It needed visas to get there and they would have taken days to get.

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

            Up to the time of this writing, we have been having a wonderful fall here, referring to the weather. I know, Old Man Winter will soon be here – and may already have arrived by the time this column is printed – and is ‘just around the corner’ as they say so I decided to celebrate.

            No parties for me, I decided to go to a hairdresser and get the old mane trimmed. I had been cutting my own hair since the summer of 1972 when my Vancouver barber made a mess of my hair for the second time in a row (Get me to tell you THAT story some time!) and I bought a pair of scissors.
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