Apparently golf is vital (Aug. 28/13)

Do soap opera (or operas) reflect real life? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            It takes a lot to shock this old reporter who has been on the job since 1978, but I must admit that last week something shocked me to the point where I stopped complaining about the weather and the government and went: “WOW!”

            It happened at a grocery store in Perth-Andover.

            Normally not a whole lot happens in grocery stores unless I go in there while I’m hungry and have to leave my pickup truck in partial payment for the groceries I just have to have, but on this day something did happen.

            I remember it well, it was a Thursday morning.

            “No, Bob, it was a Tuesday afternoon,” said my wife, reading over my shoulder.

            Well anyway, I was walking down the spices aisle (another interruption to say it was the ‘baking goods’ aisle, at which point I ejected her from the room) and there were jars of unsalted peanuts, which is the only kind I eat. I picked up a bottle and was about to put it in my grocery cart when I decided, just for the halibut, to check the list of ingredients to see what kinds and quantities of chemicals were included with one of my favourite snack foods.

            Here’s where the shock came in: there was one ingredient – peanuts.

            Where were the preservatives? The colouring agents? The toxic chemicals so that my system didn’t collapse? They were not there, and I began hyperventilating at the idea that, all these years, I had been eating peanuts that were not laced with the usual chemicals that my body has become used to.

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

            On the sometimes toxic subject of golf, for the first time in many years I played a game and it turned out so well that I put the results on Facebook.

            My daughter Kate and I played nine holes at Plaster Rock course (one I have always liked very much) and it seems we were the prime attractions for everyone who was golfing that day, living nearby, or driving by on the Renous Highway. Crowds gathered to see some of my drives, and my putts were the stuff of legends, as you shall see.

            Kate, who seems to have some talent for the game unlike her old Papa, pretty much always hit the ball in the direction of the green we were bravely seeking, but my shots were, as I said, ‘the stuff of legends’. I might as well go to the final score right now so the reader does not skip to the end of this report and miss the details: I won. My final score over nine holes was 548, while hers was only 68. Clearly I have the golfing talent in the…”

            “Bob,” interrupted my friend Flug, who had been reading over my shoulder, “the one with the lowest score wins the game.” Oh. Why don’t people tell me these things so I don’t make more of a fool of myself than Nature already has?

            I suppose I might as well relate the tale of the game I almost won, and would have if not for the intervention of one of those young fellows who tend to trundle around golf courses on riding mowers. It was on the third hole, and the young fellow was mowing well off to the side, so I decided to take my tee shot. Fully expecting to put it on the green (at worst) I took a smooth swing – at least it started it smooth – but Fate intervened at that second.

            The young gent on the mower caught sight of my daughter, who is quite a looker, and he veered right in front of the green. My golf ball bounced off the top of the mower and zinged over toward Two Rivers mill and right in the window of one of the big trucks going by. Mouth agape, I watched my shot head for Connecticut in the cab of the big diesel truck. I was still winning, I thought, but that didn’t help.

            Still vaguely on the subject of golf, I recall back in the early 1980s when I used to go to Plaster Rock every Wednesday afternoon – and play a round of golf if it didn’t rain – I would stop at a house along the Currie Road and visit with a little old lady who was a former neighbour from Churchland Road, Tilley.

            One day I stopped and she was watching a certain soap opera – ‘The Secret Edge of Restless Stomach’ perhaps. A certain character was holding a gun on someone in a graveyard. Exactly one week later I again stopped again to visit, and the same character was holding a gun on the same guy. This would be 168 hours without food, drink or washroom.

            It was then I realized that soap opera (that’s the plural of ‘opus’) weren’t quite factual, and if not for golf I wouldn’t have guessed.          

                                       -end-

Lies, damned lies, and Mark Twain (Aug 21)

Does ANYONE know what’s going on? 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            Trying to find a certain snippet of information, I was looking over my 1995 columns and came across this item: A total of 182 countries had met in Sweden with the aim of finally doing away with child poverty by the year 2000. I am sure that countries like Lesotho would have had a great influence on eliminating world poverty back then and it turns out they did – by adding thousands more to the bulging list.

            Although it goes against my grain to do research, I held my nose and did some. This ringing declaration of 1995 was about as useless as a Canadian Senator who never shows up in the Red Chamber and who over-claims on his or her expense account.

            If one is to believe the statistics available, child poverty has increased by fifty percent during that time. Part of that is because there are now seven billion people in the world compared to 5.7 billion back in 1995. Would you believe there were fewer than 3 billion in 1950?

            Anyway, those are mere statistics which is one category of untruths (lies, damn lies, and statistics according to Mark Twain). The point is, those turkeys who met in Sweden 18 years ago were there to sample fine cuisine and soft beds and they didn’t care any more for child poverty than a hedgehog cares about chess.

            That wasn’t a bad rant, was it? I’m no competition for Rick Mercer, but I can fume and bluster with the best.

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

            Along the same line of cynical thought, I have often wondered if ANYONE knows how things work today. Every once in a while, through no fault of my own, I get to thinking about how things work (or don’t work) in 2013. I’m talking about things like the Global Economy. I don’t think anybody really knows how it all works.

            That’s the way ‘they’ want it, isn’t it? If you bought a computer back in the early 1990s, it was a fairly straightforward piece of equipment, wasn’t it? Your word processor processed words, your printer printed, and there were a few dozen computer games that didn’t require the brain of an Einstein to play. Today I am sure that Albert Einstein would be as baffled as the rest of us at the garbage he and we see on our monitors.

            When I bought my first computer in 1994 – with advice from the late Bob Inman – I could write a sentence in my word processor and I could trust that it remained the same as I wrote it. Nowadays (an old person’s word) the sentence is just as likely to have been changed to the wording that Microsoft Word prefers and any spelling is changed to the American one. I labour hard to get the word changed from ‘labor’. Every few months I have to go into Microsoft Word’s ‘preferences’ file and say: DON’T EDIT MY WORK! I CAN SPELL, AND MISS SARA WILLIAMS WAS MY ENGLISH TEACHER!!

            Does ANYONE really understand the so-called Global Economy? I’ve met quite a few people who say they do, but a few searching questions reveal they don’t know squat. When a fire in Bangladesh can force down the price of Nike stock in Tokyo, and a train accident in Quebec can raise the price of oil, and a poor canola crop in Ontario can cause palpitations in Belgium, something’s wrong.

And then there are the global crooks who steal $460 zillion in France end up in comfortable retirement at age 29 in Cannes, Costa Rica or Crete. Those bad apples should be weeded out before they get in a position to steal all that bread. They obviously went bananas, but I suppose every outfit has some lemons.

“Bob, are there any more fruits to add to that basket?” said Flug was had been reading over my shoulder while sipping on a jar of 7% lemonade from Indonesia. “I was afraid for a moment you were going to mention spoiled pomegranates and crushed grapes.”

“Flug, I know you were the apple of your mother’s eye, but you ain’t the apple of mine, so why don’t you sip your lemonade on the porch while I finish this column?” He said he guessed the main reason was that the bottle was empty, so he got another, went out on the porch, and turned on the radio to a hip-hop (as opposed to music) station to annoy me further.

Back to the subject, I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that sometimes these rich people do get caught with their hands so far into the cookie jar that even they can’t talk their way out of it. We won’t hold our breath though, waiting for the next one. It costs too much to prosecute them. Remember all those Wall Street banks and bankers who brought international economies to their knees? Noticed any of them going to jail?

Rant Number Two complete. 

                                       -end-

Classical music lover (not) Rock Maninoff (Aug. 14)

When I ‘first started’ to celebrate anniversaries

                                                        by Robert LaFrance

 

            Some things seem so obvious once you know them; for all of my six and a half decades I thought people celebrated (or dreaded) their birthdays every year, but it turns out I have been wrong.

            I won’t embarrass him by mentioning his name, but a few months ago I heard Dr. Martin MacCauley telling someone that, contrary to what they had been thinking, they were not celebrating their birthday, but the ANNIVERSARY of their birthday. We only have one birthday, right? After that the only thing we can ‘celebrate’ is the anniversary of that joyous event.

            So as one who makes much of accuracy in speech, I and others who care about such things as that accuracy must now change the name of our annual ‘celebration’.

            I have another suggestion for those who do care about accuracy in speech. When you say, out loud, that you ‘first started’ something, perhaps you could ask yourself: “How many times did I start?”

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

            My friend Flug was pleased to have a visitor last week. His nephew Rock Maninoff, who is a professional baseball player in Alabama, was waiting out a hamstring injury and decided to visit his uncle (and my old friend) Flug. They had a grand time while Rock was here in the Scotch Colony, but they were busy.

            Here’s why: Rock made the mistake of telling someone on a committee that he had time to spare. The committee to which I refer is the Scotch Colony 140^th Anniversary Committee which is having a celebration in about nine days to mark the time 140 years ago when all those Scottish settlers arrived here looking for their destinies. They expected log houses already built for them, at least some cleared land, a Tim Horton’s maybe, but you know the old story – they found trees, rocks, and hills.

            Back to the point. All the while Rock Maninoff was here with his MP3 player ear buds glued to the side of his head, he was forced - by those dragons on that committee - to work. Oops! I forgot my wife is one of those dragons…er…I mean…PUT DOWN THAT ROLLING PIN!

            Rock may have headed back to Alabama a little early because he has never been in favour of work, you know, the kind of thing where you get up in the morning and go to. He would play guitar from supper time until 4:00 am and then the next afternoon complain because those dear ladies asked him to move some chairs in Burns Hall. And then move them again because they didn’t fit the ‘ambience’. And then once more back where they were because the ambience had apparently shifted in the meantime.

            The bottom line, as they say – and I have actually heard them say it – is that Rock Maninoff has headed back to Alabama -  and headed back a wiser man. I should say a Wiser’s man, because while he was here he certainly went through a lot of his own particular lemonade.

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

            In the remaining portion of my column (you might say ‘the remains’) I will write down a few observations I’ve made in the past month or so.

            The first is, of course, about the weather, or rather we humans’ reaction to the weather. During that wicked hot spell, while everyone with a brain was seeking out an air conditioner and complaining about the heat, Flug was being a Stoic which can be defined as ‘toughing it out’. I asked him why he wasn’t complaining like the rest of us. “Listen,” he began, which was  redundant since I was standing there looking him in the eye. “Listen, remember how I complained so much when it seemed to be raining every day and I couldn’t go fishing? I couldn’t do anything but watch TV. I’m afraid if I complain the sun will stop shining and we’ll get the rain back.”

            “Flug, I hate to say this, but ‘cum hoc propter ergo hoc’ ain’t true.” He looked baffled for some reason. “Those of us blessed with a classical education,” I continued, “know that the phrase I used is Latin and means ‘B follows A, therefore A caused B’. It ain’t true. So you go ahead and complain about the hot weather; it won’t make a difference.”

            And so he did, breaking forth with what in bad novels they call ‘a stream of invective’. I went home to finish my Georges Simenon book, and before I’d finished a page it was raining. It’s still raining. Once in a while I look over at Flug’s house. He continues to stand by the window and stare over at my house as if he were having evil thoughts.

                                          -end-

Our house is older than the city of Calgary (Aug. 7/13 column)

Some facts, or, at worst, ideas

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

             My daughter was recently visiting us from Calgary and was reading a book about all the things there are to see and do when she returns to that Alberta metropolis - if she can scrape together some money. As you know, there’s not much of that in Alberta. Looking at Chapter 4, she suddenly stopped reading and asked me when our own house here in Kincardine was built.

According to the information I have (from two history books of the Scotch Colony) our estate was started in 1886 and completed in 1991. I guess they had trouble installing some of the high-tech electronic equipment. She looked back at the book and said: “Hmmmm…you know this house is actually older than the City of Calgary? It was incorporated in 1893.” It’s a young province all right. It doesn’t seem long ago that it was just a prairie cow town where I lived in the Salvation Army hostel for two weeks, but it was 1967. Centuries ago.

            Speaking of deer, I visited Fredericton on July 27 and when I got home I walked around this estate, a wander that included my back garden that is located 91.4 metres from the house, out in the orchard. The first thing I noticed was that the string beans looked a little weird.

            “The beans really grew fast while I was gone a whole nine hours,” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way to think). Then I looked for the four beet plants I had been looking forward to devouring sometime in the next month. Three of them were gone and one was suffering Post Traumatic Quivering (PTQ). The thick row of head lettuce was also damaged. I had been deered.

            It’s just a small garden, so the deer that had visited had tramped pretty well everywhere. Anybody with half an eye and an elbow (I cleaned up that phrase for the paper) would have seen that first thing. What to do, what to do so that I could save what was left? Then I remembered the time back in the 1980s when I had a problem with deer coming in my orchard on a path from the next property. The answer then, as it was on July 27, was to hang a small net bag containing human hair. Deer won’t go near that.

            The only problem is, when my neighbour, Louee Witson, wakes up from his deep sleep, what is he going to think when he finds his shoulder-length hair is a little more jagged than it was when he sat down? Serves him right for falling asleep in a lawn chair right out in the open like that.

            People occasionally tell me that I think too much, and I think I agree. However, once in a while I come up with an original idea that arrived because my lines of thought are on a completely different plane (higher or lower?) from everybody else’s. Here’s my latest revelation: while I was sipping on a lemonade at the club’s outdoor lounge, someone mentioned that it was starting to cloud over.

            Have you thought about what you’re saying?” I said. “You’re saying the sky is clouding over, when in fact the sky is clouding UNDER, right? When it’s all cloudy we can’t see the sky, which is ABOVE the clouds.” This will shock you, but no one seemed that concerned about this. In fact, they seemed militantly unconcerned.

            A federal cabinet minister was on television yesterday afternoon and going over the fabulous accomplishments of his government since one S. Harper had formed that government a few decades ago. Or perhaps it just seems that way. So last evening – this was just after my cloud revelations – when we were all watching this performance on the club’s ancient TV, the Perfessor cleared his throat and said ponderously: “ You know, memory is closer to imagination than reality.” There was a silence while we drank this in, so to speak, and then someone got up and turned the TV over to the soccer game from Brazil.

            While the average stoat has more Scottish blood in his or her veins than I do, I still am looking forward to this month’s 140^th anniversary of the Scotch Colony celebrations here in Kincardine. The Fitzgerald Family music show on July 16 was the first event of the celebrations and it was just about the best show I’ve ever seen in Burns Hall, and there will be lots of things going on Aug. 23-25. They have even put together a history/cook book for the event and many dozens have been sold already, probably because I wrote one piece in it…or not. Other than my story, it’s a very entertaining book.

            A final note for this week: I bought a new shaving mirror, even though some people look at my ‘beard’ and think I don’t shave. Anyway, this mirror has a feature I insisted upon. At the bottom is the sentence: “bearded persons in this mirror are much handsomer than they appear”. It’s an ego thing.          

                                            -end-