Watch it! A mischief of mice (Oct. 4)

DIARY

A miracle happened right in your home town

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Every year at this time I say goodnight to the folks of Alert, Nunavut, as they say goodnight to the sun that they will not see again until March 4^th.

            I was stationed there, 450 nautical miles from the North Pole, from May 1974 to May 1975 as one of Canada’s Fighting Men Not in Uniform. There were over a hundred Canadian Armed Forces personnel there, and just down the hill from the base was the weather station where I worked for 54 straight weeks.

            It was actually 53 straight weeks; my last week there was in a haze and a daze because I was scheduled to fly to Trenton, Ontario, on a Hercules C-130 but when I went to the runway the pilot told me I wasn’t on the passenger list of six. While I waited for the next Thursday’s flight I practised drinking.

            Thinking about seasons this morning, I walked outside in the summer weather – although it was late September – and looked up to see two Canada Geese winging their way south. Rats deserting a sinking ship. You’d think that with a name like Canada Geese they should be forced to stay here year-around.

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            Taking a big turn from Alert and geese, I am wondering why people send viruses to the Internet, to email and to Facebook. People hack all kinds of accounts and in that case I can see that they’re trying to steal money; they are modern day bank robbers, but why send viruses to individuals?

            One day about ten years ago I was in Caribou, Maine, where I stopped in to see a friend who ran a computer shop. He was saying that he was having fun avoiding a computer meltdown that one of his ‘customers’ was trying to give him.

            Ron, as we’ll call the store owner because that was his name, said that at least once a week a certain guy would come in and sit at one of Ron’s computers that he let the public use, and he would try to wipe out the hard drive by going into an internal file to change it.

            It was a battle of wits, but finally this guy succeeded in damaging the software of that computer so that it took Ron half an hour to repair it. Fed up with the foolishness, he sent the guy an email that, when opened, showed a photo of this vandal at Ron’s computer and contained this message: “Don’t come back!” He didn’t.

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            Thinking about the phrase ‘collective nouns’ means. Not to get too technical, it means a group of something alive, like a herd of cows. The word ‘herd’ is a collective noun.

            Imagine my surprise when, listening to a CBC Radio program about Canadian wildlife, I heard an ‘expert’ say that the proper term for a group of beavers is a ‘malocclusion’ because their teeth don’t meet. This chap was very convincing too and I didn’t know at the time that he was full of male cow manure. Unfortunately I didn’t get his name or I would have sent him an email, complete with virus.

            As I mentioned, little did I know, as I was admiring this man’s fountain of knowledge, that he was somewhat off the mark. Whether he just didn’t know, or was sending the listeners a verbal virus, I don’t know.

            Here are some other collective nouns and phrases: a COLONY of beavers, a murder of crows, a congregation of alligators, a bellowing of bullfinches, a gulp of cormorants, a confusion of Guinea fowl, a mischief of mice, a murmuration of starlings, an exultation of larks, a descent of woodpeckers and a gulp of swallows.

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            As one who often eats in restaurants (my wife won’t show me where the cookstove is) I continue to be amazed at those napkin dispensers that won’t dispense a napkin and those little teapots from which it is impossible to pour tea without spreading it all over the table.

            I fondly remember the day in 1997 when I got out ONE napkin, and only one. The waitress and three of the diners applauded me. Usually if one can get out as few as five serviettes he, she or it is doing well. Why do restaurants have those things?

            Then there are those little silver teapots designed by South American death squad alumni. (They have to do SOMETHING when they retire, right?) The chances of filling one’s cup with tea and not pouring the hot liquid on the table or one’s hands are about the same as one’s chances of winning a $40 million lottery.

            However, two weeks ago, at a restaurant in a certain mountain village, I did just that – pour the cup of tea I mean, not win that lottery. A short while later I received a phone call from the Vatican wanting details of the Miracle.
                                     -end-

All hail 'crowd-funding' (Sept. 27)

DIARY

A delicate operation on the brain

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Driving along Highway 109 near Arthurette, I saw that my old friend Trout (real name Angler) was brandishing a Husqvarna weed-eater along the ditch near his front lawn. I stopped to chat and heard an earful.

            “Would you come into my office (Trout is an accountant) and interrupt me when I was working on someone’s income tax return? No you would not,” he answered his own question before I had a chance to. “Would you interrupt a surgeon who was performing a delicate operation on your brain?”

            (Which I would have thought was redundant since – I would have thought – any operation on the brain, even mine, would be delicate.)

            He wasn’t finished. “Do you know how many people have stopped to talk and interrupt me while I am trying to get rid of this grass along the ditch, since the government doesn’t seem to want to?” Before I could answer that question, he was off again. “Nine people!” he said. “Nine people stopped just because they recognized me.”

            “But Trout,” I said, “I am sure that I and the other eight people who stopped did so because of our liking and admiration for you…” I went on for a while in this vein, lying like a cedar log in a brook. Then he scratched his chin and looked thoughtful.

            You are right, ” he said, and put down his weed-eater, just like he had been putting me down earlier. “Let’s go have a coffee.”

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            Last evening I was talking to someone at the club when he said he had to go home because his ‘better half’ had threatened she would not go through with their promised divorce if he stayed out after nine o’clock.

            It was unusual to hear that expression; people don’t often say ‘the better half’ much these days. The reason for, of course, is that it has been ‘clinically proven’ as they say, that husbands are the better half.

            Still on that subject, we all know the phrase “see how the other half lives”, meaning that we who are wealthy should take a look at how poorer people live – for example only being able to have an iPhone 4 instead of the latest model.

            That phrase “the other half” is obsolete now and has been for a decade or two, or three, because the poor(er) now make up about 99% of the population and that, if I remember my math, is a kilometre or two away from half. The average rich guy would have to say he wants to “see how the other 99% live” and he’s not going to do that, is he? People were trying to get government to notice them when they voted for the current (and possibly last) U.S. president.

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            The Internet has brought us some great ideas for making money and one of the best for individuals is ‘crowd-funding’.

            That’s where you or I or my dog Fang go onto an alleged non-profit crowd-funding website and ask for money for our particular cause. We might want to raise money to build a statue honouring a certain dead hero so they ask other people to send them money for that purpose. Of course a certain amount may stick to their fingers, but with the humidity lately, that’s understandable.

            Listening yesterday to a radio program, I was astounded to hear that one enterprising young man from Manitoba had turned to crowd-funding to pay for his education. His goal was $100,000 for a four-year degree course, but I have news for him. According to my recollection, each of our children’s education cost us approximately one million dollars a month so that young man was rather optimistic.

            Crowd-funding is a simple concept. You find a crowd-funding site on the Internet and get accepted after you explain what you want the money for. What could possibly go wrong?

            I have been preparing my own application. I have to work on the wording, but this is the concept: “I want people to send me money until I have enough. I will let you know when that happens.”

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            Watching the news coverage of the plethora of hurricanes now pummelling the Caribbean, I am impressed by the technology in use these days.

            One can look at computer models of Hurricane Maria – that’s today’s storm – and see that the eye is perfectly round, what they call symmetrical, and that’s supposed to be important. Then the TV weather people show the probable track of the storm – both the British and the American guesses – so they can have that on record for the next day when they say the exact opposite.

            One thing I have noticed: In spite of all the technology today, hurricanes cause just as much damage as before. The people on the ground in Puerto Rico are getting blown around just as much as they would have in 1955; it’s just that they are getting warned earlier. 
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Barbecuing in all seasons (Sept. 20)

DIARY

Marching to the beat of a different drummer

                        by Robert LaFrance

            So all it took were a few hurricanes to shut Donald Trump’s Twitter mouth for a week or two? Who knew? As I write this, the American president has not tweeted a controversial sentence for what seems like months.

            Hurricane Harvey in southeast Texas and later Louisiana, then Hurricane Irma followed by Hurricane and Tropical Storm José flattened a lot of buildings and killed a lot of people who would probably have preferred to have remained living even though Trump was sending his stupid twits – I mean tweets – worldwide.

            To bring the results of the hurricanes a bit closer to home, I can safely say I went a little strange and then stranger as I looked at all the television coverage of these disasters, mostly of Irma.

            I watched CNN a lot because they had so many reporters on the scene to report on all the destruction in the Caribbean and Florida; one evening I was sitting in my favourite chair while some poor schmuck was standing out in the wind and rain at Miami. He had to hang on to a lamp post so he didn’t get blown into the sea.

            “WHAT’S GOING ON?” said my wife as she came home from a church meeting or some such gathering. “Why do you have plywood on all the windows? Also, I don’t appreciate having to crawl over a lilac bush and in a kitchen window because you have the TV so loud and the doors all braced shut.”

            “I was just battening down the hatches,” I defended myself. “You can’t be too careful.”

            “Actually, you can be too careful,” was her rejoinder. “AND YOU HAVE BEEN! Do you realize that it’s warm and sunny here with only a breeze? You’re not in Florida you know.”

            I shook my head in acknowledgement of her comment. “I guess I went a little overboard,” I said, and she didn’t argue. “There’s good news though. All that plywood…I’ve been needing a new chicken coop for years.” But she was gone to unload the car whose back seat was full of food she had bought ‘just in case’, and the trunk was full of gasoline containers in case we had to mow the lawn with no advance notice.

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            Speaking of mowing the lawn, I think people are weird.

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) was out mowing his front lawn when I got home from town yesterday afternoon. He was zooming around as if he were Hercules cleaning the Augean Stables which I am sure you’ll recall from the Greek myth.  Flug, like Hercules, did finish the job and when he shut off the mower he walked over to say hello where I was pulling carrots out of my garden. (If you want to dig carrots, a garden is an ideal place to find them.)

            “Glad to get that job done,” he said. “Now I won’t have to think about it until May.”

            That got me thinking (no mean feat, as they say) about attitudes. In April everyone is drooling for the summer to come so we can, among other things, mow lawns, but now in September people seem to have given up and have thrown in the towel on summer as if they were eager for it to end and eager for that 4-letter S-word to show up. This is all very strange to a Tilley boy and we Tilley boys are known for our intellectual achievements.

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            Warning: this is an entirely new subject – barbecuing.

            Around our estate here in Kincardine, we (that is, I) are/am just as likely to barbecue in February as in July. In fact, I can’t wait until the winter barby season to begin. When we invite people to our Valentine’s Day event they are often startled, staggered and amazed when they arrive and find me standing on the front porch and brushing sauce onto burgers and sausages. The effect is increased if there is a minor blizzard occurring.

            Back to the subject: why should we always barbecue the same things? I’ll bet the philosopher Henry David Thoreau never barbecued hot dogs, or even cooked corn wrapped in tinfoil on the barby. Here’s a quote from him: “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.”

            Excuse me, that had nothing whatsoever to do with barbecuing. Here’s the one I was thinking about: “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

            That wasn’t it either. Maybe this is the one I wanted: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” And so last evening I barbecued anchovies, sunchokes and peas. I’ll show him who’s a different drummer.
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Is 'problematic' the same as a problem? (Sept 13)

DIARY

Notes from a dwindling summer

                        by Robert LaFrance

            What’s wrong with television’s weather boys and girls? They are getting a bit ahead of themselves.

            I have counted five instances when one of them referred to September 1^st as “the last day of the summer season”. This has to stop. It’s not unusual (as the singer Tom Jones used to bellow) for us to have very warm weather in late September and even the first half of October, but I’ll tell you one thing: the first day of September is not the border line between summer and fall.

            True, as I write this on September 6^th, it is quite cold and feels like fall – or even winter – and it will be quite a few weeks before the season changes from summer. Officially it’s something like September 21^st. Let’s appreciate that as well as any warm weather we have left.

            I don’t know if it’s the season, the weather, or the position of the moon in the heavens, but the word ‘Houston’ seems to have driven people crazy – crazier than usual that is.

            Tomorrow, because of refineries having closed in Texas, that price of gasoline at the pumps is supposed to rise something like 14 cents a litre and Frankie, my wife’s third cousin’s father-in-law’s uncle, drove from Moose Mountain to Perth-Andover to fill his Gremlin with gas. When he finished doing that, the gasoline in the car was worth more than the car itself, but that didn’t faze Frankie.

            All over the place, people were emerging from their homes to fill up with gas before the price went up. I was not innocent. I jumped in my Corolla that was three-quarters full of gas and started for town, 20 kilometres away, but before I got to the bottom of Manse Hill where I live, sanity sneaked in. “Do the math!” I said to myself, and I did. Driving that far would use up more gas than that price increase would take care of in two weeks.

            In other important commentary, I often notice, as you have, signs that read “Lots for sale”. One of these days I hope to see a sign that will help to even things out. How about this one? “Not a lot for sale, just a bit. A pittance really.”

            It’s wonderful how the English language is evolving. Back in the old days, when we ran up against something that we would rather not have, it was a problem. Now, in 2017, it’s “problematic”. People use the word ‘impact’ as a verb when we already had a perfectly good one – ‘affect’.

            Two days ago I heard someone uptown say: “Roll up the car windows, George!” Most car windows these days are mysteriously moved by something electronic and that is not rolling. (As soon as I wrote this, I thought of Frankie’s Gremlin. He still rolls up his windows.)

            I think advertising is a great occupation, with some of the world’s greatest ideas seeing the light through an advertising agency. The Mormon Church commercials from years ago were great, and how about those Volkswaggen bug commercials that were more entertaining than the shows they were attached to? Tim Horton’s commercials are great. However, great commercials don’t ALWAYS mean a great product. It is my considered opinion that the people who make those excellent commercials advertising Coors beer should be incarcerated.

            Just a thought: Many people don’t know the different between ‘cement’ and ‘concrete’ and use the words interchangeably. Correct me if you must, but I am fairly certain that cement is an ingredient of concrete and not the final product such as my front step on which I just fell and gave myself a bruise.

            Looking back on my earlier comments, I am thinking I watch too much television, but I have yet another comment on a TV show. Last evening I was dozing in my favourite chair and woke up to hear a talk show host say to his studio audience: “Choose a winner by casting your ballast!” He said this twice. Of course we educated people know that ballast is pretty grubby stuff and I laughed at this guy’s ignorance. Then I remembered last November’s U.S. election during which voters clearly chose a winner by casting their ballast.

            There’s always somebody around who is cheerful and optimistic and don’t you hate those guys? Watching the TV news last evening, I was interested to see and hear an interview with a chap who had survived the huge hurricanes Katrina and Harvey and was bracing for Hurricane Irma that was bearing down on Florida and probably Louisiana. He lived on a hill in the latter state and expected to survive yet another flood and associated good stuff. “Your altitude determines your attitude,” he said with a maddening grin.
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