The long-lasting cement in my head (May 29 col)

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Somebody was trying to explain something to me the other day, and it was going pretty slowly. The old cement just wasn’t taking in what he was saying about Twittering, blogging, band width and iPads. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist, you know, to understand how to use this stuff,” he, exasperated, said finally.

            I beg to differ. The cement that’s in my head was poured there in 1948 and the instructions on how to ‘access’ it in 2013 have disappeared into the mists many decades ago. I do well to run a camera and type on this here what-you-call-it, keyboard.

            And then I thought back to those halcyon days of youth, as the phrase goes, and remember the items we used to get in boxes of cereal. It could have been Wheaties, but I suspect it was something more like Sugar-plus Sweet Circles of Calories. Back in those days kids’ breakfast cereal manufacturers use to market almost pure sugar and set the box on a table with orange juice, toast, etc. and say their sugar cereal was ‘part of this balanced breakfast’.

            The only thing balanced about it was that it was placed on the table so the whole thing didn’t fall over.

            My point, finally, is this: In that breakfast cereal box were often little prizes, some of them worth nearly a penny (wholesale) and one prize I remember was one of those little rockets in which the cereal eater (if he hadn’t already succumbed to diabetes) could put baking soda, and then vinegar. Zoom! Up would go the rocket, several inches.

            So you see, contrary to what that ‘somebody’ in the first paragraph was saying, I am indeed a rocket scientist. On the other hand, it still doesn’t help me understand Twittering, which I thought all this time was the chirping of a bird. Come to think of it, Twittering IS just that, but quite often the bird is the Eastern Male Cow Manure Finch.

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            Even at my advanced age, I am still occasionally surprised at the actions of human beings.

            I checked the calendar after I heard the following news story, just to make sure it wasn’t April 1^st. According to some spokesmen from NASA, an organization that put people on the moon and was careful to bring them back home again, plans are afoot for an 8-month one-way mission to Mars.

            That in itself is not that surprising – the U.S. has to keep up their deficit somehow – but the fact that there will be humans on board the spacecraft did rather shock me. The announcer said it will probably never take place, but the mere mention of the space flight already has more than two dozen applicants for what is a literal suicide mission. Some people, obviously rich people, want to go out in a blaze of glory.

            Of course as soon as the story broke, many other people were eager to volunteer OTHER people. I’m not mentioning any names, but a certain Perth-Andover gent, once he hears about the ‘one-way’ feature, will, I am sure, eagerly put forward the name of a certain Health Minister as a critical mass on the spacecraft.

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            No column would be complete without a few comments about Senator Mike Duffy.

            Someone said last week that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had orchestrated the whole scandal, including the allegedly phony expense claims by Duffy, Pamela Wallin and two other senators, so Canadians will get so fed up they will riot in the streets in favour of abolishing the Senate.

            Canadians? Rioting? Okay, maybe over a Stanley Cup final or something important like that, but not about the Senate. We are all sitting around and waiting for our phone call to join the fat cats in the Red Chamber, so why should we want to destroy the greatest trough in the country?

 

            I can be as outraged as a spitting adder about Mike Duffy’s ripping off the country, but if I got that phone call from Steve I would say: “Ready, aye ready!” I would pack my Captain Canada comic books, my laptop, toothbrush, and a few apples to eat on the way, and head for Ottawa. It’s as close as I’m ever going to get to heaven.

One of the things so funny about the Mike Duffy situation is that the media are helping him, a former journalist, as much as possible. Here’s an example, big headline: “Duffy resigns from caucus”.

 

You would be amazed at the number of people who have commented to me that it was a good thing we finally got him out of the Senate. He resigned from the Conservative caucus. It means he’s not officially listed as a Tory. He’s still a Senator, still gets his salary and all the perks. Some people think it’s all over for the poor chap whose pension from CTV, his Canada Pension, his Senate money and various other income is probably close to $350,000, but we know better, don’t we?

                                                  -END-

I am indeed cynical - lots of practice (May 22 column)

Yeah, right. This is gonna happen! 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            Yet another inventor has come up with a device that is so efficient it will reduce our home heating costs by two-thirds, so I guess we should say goodbye to that guy any day.

            A man named Ronald Ace, who lives in the state of Maryland, has invented something called a ‘solar energy trap’ that can be used to retrofit the present electrical plants including nuclear ones and will produce power that will cost two cents per kilowatt-hour. What do we pay now? I think around ten. I suggest that everyone go to Google and find out Ronnie’s home address, mail him a birthday card ASAP, and then forget about it.

            You know how these guys who invent things that allow a car to go 200 miles a gallon make a headline and are never heard from again? Within a few months Ronnie will be retired to the French Riviera with ten million dollars in the bank; the invention will disappear into the mist.

            Gee, I’m cynical, but often accurate.

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Speaking of pie in the sky, I remain on the subject of food. Last evening I was at a banquet that featured some pretty good grub, and lots of it. The hostess encouraged us to take some of the leftover food home because their poodle wasn’t up to eating such quantities without exploding.

I rejoiced at the chance of taking home some of the pumpkin pie, exotic salads, etc. until she said: “You help yourself to the remains of the food.”

As one who has enjoyed food for 65+ years, I am sorry, but I cannot partake of ‘the remains’ of anything. To me the word ‘remains’ refers to something that used to be in human form and I ain’t no cannibal. I finished filling a large plate with the ‘remains’ and brought it all home to my dog Kezman. The semantics of the situation didn’t bother him a bit. He looked at me gratefully and seemed to be saying: “Call it male cow manure if you want to; it’s top-notch grub to me.” (He’s the only dog I’ve ever seen who would use a semi-colon between his sentences.)

Speaking of male cow manure naturally brings one to the government. I heard recently that Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton had also suffered some cutbacks. Somewhere between 125 and 200 workers were handed their layoff notices and I’ll bet you’ll never guess what category of workers was terminated (as they say).

Exactly. It was nurses, LPNs, and janitorial staff – the people who actually do the work. Now another guess: who DIDN`T lose their jobs? Right, administrators. After a while, hospitals will refuse to admit patients at all because only administrators will be left in the building. It all reminds one of the Canada Post executives during a 1970s postal strike. He said the organization would run much more efficiently if they didn’t have to deliver mail.

We all recall the first announcements by Vitalité and Horizon Health Network that they were laying off a bunch of administrators, do we? What if we checked now to see where these laid-off administrators are? I think I can guarantee they are all still administrators, but in different offices down the hall – and with different titles. Same (undeserved) salaries though.

“Jeez, Bob, you’re cynical,” said Flug.

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According to some companies’ reports, we New Brunswickers are poised to become wealthy because we have shale gas reserves enough to last the world until the year Alpha 2399. They can’t wait to start shoving chemicals into the ground whether it ruins our fresh water supply or not. Armies in wars call that ‘collateral damage’ and such casualties are to be expected in a time of war.

However, there are also those who think our fresh water is kind of a treasure as well, no pun intended. What brought this to mind was a CBC Radio interview I recently heard. A chap from California was saying that his state was rapidly running out of fresh water and would soon think about piping some in from Washington State. “Or maybe Canada, ” he said. “Canada is the Saudi Arabia of fresh water.”

I’m not saying that kind of talk makes me nervous, but I like it better when the Americans ignore us, something they are very good at doing. It doesn’t bother me. I think we had better make sure we don’t have any Weapons of Mass Destruction hanging around our garages or backyards. Any excuse is better than none. On the other hand, Iraq didn’t have any of those and George W. Bush sent the troops in anyway.

                                                -end-

He was as tough as snails (May 15 column)

The club is a place of exotic topics and cold lemonade 

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

I think we have all noticed that just about everything we do is now so complicated that it’s hardly worth doing. I went into a place last week to buy a fishing licence and was told I should wait until my 65^th birthday on May 11^th because it would be half price then. I didn’t buy the licence; I do live in the SCOTCH colony and we all have to live up to the name. Or to use one of the words of my friend the late Mike MacAfee: parsimonious.

Although I did not buy the licence, I took the 2013 Fishing Guide handbook. When I got home I settled myself into my favourite easy chair and sipped on a lemonade while perusing this booklet. Booklet? ‘War and Peace’ was barely longer. After 17 lemonades, a can of smoked oysters, and some french-fries, I decided I needed help in finding out whether I could actually go fishing in New Brunswick this year. I hired three lawyers from the Kincardine firm of Anderlect, Breeton, and Shyster and, after a week, we are starting to see some light at the end of the funnel. Yes, I said FUNNEL. I’m up to funnelling in the lemonade now.

The bottom line is, I think I will soon be fishing on a lake, as long as it’s part of the headwaters of the confluence of the lakehead of a brook that forms part of the watershed of the Upper St. John River, but not west of a line that runs from…never mind. Hand me that big red funnel, boys.

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            Funny how one word can alter the meaning of a sentence; someone said last week that my friend Flug was ‘tough as nails’ and Emir Podolski, a Swede with not a great command of the English expressions and idioms, asked if it was a good thing to be ‘tough as snails’. “I happen to know that the terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs are not very tough,” he said as he sipped a lemonade. Emir is some kind of scientist who deals with that stuff. I said that snails might be puny but they will outlast all of us. That led us to the topic of gardening, then to hockey, then to Armenian playwrights, at least those who wrote after 1918. The club is a place of wide-ranging discussion.

            Big Red just came back from South Korea (if it’s still there) and said he had had quite a time in the capital city, Seoul, where he had lost track of his wife and son while they were visiting a zoo, or perhaps the legislature. “I looked everywhere in that zoo (or legislature)” he said. “I’ll tell you, I did some Seoul-searching that day.” For that bad pun the bartender, Teddy, sent him out with a flea in his ear as the saying goes. At least, I thought it was a saying until I noticed that the brand name of Teddy’s boots were ‘Flea’.

As one who has enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes cartoons for years (although the cartoonist has been retired since the 1990s), I must relate a recent case in which Calvin’s wisdom could have been useful. The Perfessor lost again in the provincial dart finals in Moncton. This is the fourth year in a row this has happened, and each time he lost to Gary Naholet of Lutes Mountain. Not one to ever admit he has any shortcoming, the Perfessor continues to deny that Naholet is actually better at darts, something that seems a little obvious. Calvin, if he had been there talking to the big loser, would have said: “I know, you’re not in denial. You’re just very selective about the reality you accept.”

            A few decades ago, one of the huge names in the oil business – or “all bidness” as they say in Texas – was Getty. John Paul Getty seemed to own every oil rig in North America. Then in 1973 JPG’s grandson was kidnapped in Italy and finally got returned – minus an ear which the kidnappers chopped off to point out they were serious – and the Getty family disappeared from the news, other than financing a library here and there.

            Not any more. That grandson had a son and he has started a resort in the Cayman Islands, a spa as it were. You can guess the name if you try. Yup, you’re right - Spa-Getty.                 

                                           -end-

Don't plant tansy (resembles MJ) May 8/13

Good thing Harper’s gang weren’t in WW2

                                                      by Robert LaFrance

 

            I have seen a few of those ‘attack ads’ that the federal Tory party (and probably we taxpayers) have produced and, take it from me, they are a great thing. We Canadians should be proud.

            All across the country for the past decade at least we have been trying to stop bullying, especially in schools, and these Harper Government television ads have finally helped Canadians make a breakthrough. (NOTE: Tobique-Mactaquac Tory MP Mike Allen has publicly disagreed with his party’s decision to run attack ads.)

We see before us a bully picking on someone else, someone with less power (at the moment) and it ain’t pretty. If the government could only find a YouTube video showing Justin Trudeau spitting on the sidewalk, refusing to help an old lady cross the street, or kicking a dog, they could entertain us even more.

            “This is great for us,” commented Zeb Padolski, Executive Director of the Anti-Bullying League of Canada. “Every time one of those stupid attack ads comes on the TV I get a hundred calls from people who want to sign up.”

            “Even better for us,” uttered Gendin Padolski (no relation), a director of the Liberal Party of Canada. “Those ads are so juvenile and so stupid – not necessarily the same thing – that people are joining the party in droves. By the time the next election rolls around in 2015, we’ll have twenty million members.”

            As long as Justin Trudeau ‘takes the high road’ he can sit back and watch the federal Tories shoot themselves in the foot. Every time one of the ads appears, his name is prominently displayed and, as the late Marilyn Monroe once observed: “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right”.

            The weird part of it all is that the Liberals aren’t even the Official Opposition in Parliament. If I were NDP leader Tom Mulcair, the actual leader of the OO, I would be getting rather upset at the lack of attention.

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            My friend Flug was writing feverishly when I visited him last evening, feverish because he had had some sort of flu bug for a week and his temperature was still 102F. (You’re on your own for conversion to metric.)

            “I’ve got to do something,” he said as he went over to the fridge for refreshments. I declined – first time in 2013 – because I didn’t want any of his germs, bacteria, viruses, etc. “This sitting around is driving me crazy. I know,” he said as I started to speak, “you’re going to say that sitting around is a specialty with me, but THIS sitting around is forced. Look, only 48 bottles of lemonade (beer) left and that has to do me until this is over. It could be three more days!”

            I asked what he was writing – feverishly – and he said he was making a list of some of the worst decisions ever made by human beings. I suggested Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions of Russia, and the decision of the Titanic captain to keep on going at full speed in an iceberg field.

            “No, I mean important stuff,” he said impatiently. “Like my first six marriages.” Remembering some of those choices, I couldn’t help but agree. Sophie Lemand came to mind. Compared to Flug’s decision to marry her, those Russian adventures by Napoleon and Hitler were mere escapades.

 

             I mean really. She invited the Hell’s Angels as weekend guests. To be fair though, she meant to invite a fishing club, Hell’s Anglers. I shouldn’t condemn her for a spelling mistake, but those motorcycles sure made a mess of my garden. I never planted tansy again, because it looks just like a plant called cannabis which the police get all worked up about.

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            This sunny spring weather reminds me that some folks in the far north where I used to live are just getting used to the sun after total darkness for months. Tough. What it really reminded me of were some nicknames we used.

            For example, Gene Kininski was one of the guys who worked at Alert weather station with me. Because he was born in exactly the country he sounded as if he had been born in, we called him The North Pole. Another guy – this fellow working in a station far to the south, along the Mackenzie River, Norman Wells – was called Billy by his friends, but I called him Will. You see, his last name was Power.

 

            Speaking of will power, a month ago I was telling George at the club that, except for one instance in my entire existence, I had none. After smoking for nine years, I quit cold turkey in 1973. George is trying to quit. At the age of 95, he feels that he would lead a healthier life without the noxious weed. However, he can’t quit.

           “I can’t do ANYTHING that requires will power,” he said. “If you ever see me using will power, that same day you will see Jock MacPherson's dog climb a tree.”

           Naturally Flug and Simon couldn't let that pass. On the way home they put Jock's poodle Cluff in a low branch of Jock's lawn poplar tree and after making sure he was well secured and safe, they called the club and reported this fact to George.

           Of course he dashed over, and the word is that he hasn't tasted tobacco since.
                                                                    -end-