A walk-in freezer in Nunavut (Sept.3)

Observing some sad anniversaries

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            One morning last week I was talking about nutrition to, strangely enough, a nutritionist, and she asked me what I usually had for breakfast. I said that most mornings I had porridge. “You should have some acid with that,” she said.

            I grew up in the 1960s, and her words took me back to the days when, at any given time, half my friends were on the Planet Zortok and the other half were on their way back from there, so the words from this 26-year-old nutritionist in the year 2014 took me aback.

            She must have seen the look on my face, and hastily added: “I mean blueberries or apple slices on your porridge which, by the way is an excellent food.” At that moment I resolved to stop eating porridge or any other crop that might be construed as good for me. Since that day I have had a smidgen of scotch and a Twinkie for breakfast. Nothing spoils a good meal more than someone saying it’s healthy. I boycotted broccoli in 1976, cabbage in 1981.

            Watching the TV news last evening about 11:00, I wondered aloud at the weirdness of our beloved Prime Minister emerging from an Inuit structure wearing a parka and commenting on events in the Middle East where it’s about +3475ºC.

            (I should note that I wrote that previous sentence the way I did to make the language mavens pay attention. I know an Inuit structure cannot fit into a parka.)

            The news report went back and forth between the Negev Desert and Mr. Harper, who must have been in Resolute Bay or even farther north because his breath was all steamy, which could have meant he was touring a walk-in freezer.

            He asked a question of one of his Inuit companions and he reminded me of Shad Diploch, who was in grades 8 to 10 with me. Shad was one of these students who stand up and ask intelligent sounding questions, except that, even as they asked, we all knew that he knew the answer already. He wanted to impress the teacher that he, Shad, was paying attention. Meanwhile, he was impressing his classmates that he was a tool, and I don’t mean an pair of adjustable pliers.

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

            Exactly 75 years ago today Britain declared war on Germany which had attacked Poland two days before. A week later Canada also declared war on Germany. A mere two years and three months later, the U.S. declared war on Japan, and Germany declared war on the U.S.

            The reason I mention all this is not to observe anniversaries, but to remind us all that there’s a guy in Russia who wishes he could emulate the Austrian painter who pretty much owned Europe by 1943.

            World War II has been called “The Last Good War” which is a little like saying that anchovies are good on pizzas. It just ain’t so. I know some of the readers like anchovies, but you’ve obviously been misled by your taste buds who can be renegades at times.

            We Canadians tend to brag about how well we conducted ourselves during World War II, but I don’t know that we should. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen were the very best, as were the people working hard back home, but we needn’t brag too much about our politicians. They were the ones who allowed only a few thousand jews to come here and escape 99% certain death in Germany and in German-held areas while Hitler, Eichmann, Goebbels and the other jolly-boys were killing six million jews.

            Prime Minister MacKenzie King knew it too.

            Then there was the internment of Japanese citizens (of Canada) and the deporting of many to Japan, a place they probably didn’t want to be, especially in August 1945. Meanwhile residential schools and mistreatment of First Nations people was going on here as always, and war profiteers were profiting as always. It is said that many Canadian companies continuing selling their products to Germany even though Germans were killing our folks by the thousands.

            The reason I mention all this is that I want to say THANK YOU to all those who gave their health, happiness and lives in our wars including Afghanistan. Every year, as November 11 approaches, people are reminded of all this, but folks, I want you to know that every day I think of your sacrifices.

                                                       -end-

My dog takes more vacations than I do (Aug. 27)

Bob LaFrance, world traveller

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            As I write this, my younger daughter has been back in Canada for a total of 27 hours after visiting South America, my older daughter is on a camping trip to the far-flung wilderness of Fundy National Park (after recently returning from trips to Montreal and Toronto, my son has been, in the past few years, to Dallas, Texas, Ottawa and who knows where, and my wife is about to head out on a 3-day road trip all around New Brunswick.

            I dream of exotic places like Minto, New Brunswick.

            I am not joking. The only places I have travelled to in the past six months has been Blue Mountain Bend and Gillespie Settlement. My wife has been in Scotland so many times they have named a hotel after her. Meanwhile I’m here slaving away, hearing about their travels. One daughter worked in Manchester, England for several months, the other one spent three weeks or so last year in France and Belgium.

            My dog Kezman travels more than I do.

            It wasn’t always like this. In February 1967, having shown UNB what I thought of their courses, I rode with friends to Campbell River, BC, then back to NB in May, then to Hamilton, Ontario where I stayed almost five years. In June 1972 I quit my job at Canadian Canners and headed for Australia, but in Vancouver they wouldn’t let me on the ship unless I had $500 cash and I only had $350. So I tarried in Vancouver for almost two years, after which I went to the Northwest Territories for four years (after training courses in Ottawa and Toronto) as a weatherman. Then back to NB where I fetched up in Tilley.

            If you hear of some Star Trek-like device that will ‘beam me up Scotty’ I might do some travelling, but that’s about it. I’m too lazy to drive and too cheap to pay for a public conveyance. Tell me all about your trip to Greece, but don’t expect me to go.

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

            This afternoon, a Sunday, I spent a couple of hours reading about the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852 and thought of my late friend Mike MacAfee of Plaster Rock and sometimes Wales.

            He died young, like other friends (Donnie Hathaway, Jim Mowbray, Arthur Rossignol and too many more) but he was always interesting. When I visited him in Plaster Rock he would (1) try and persuade me to cross country ski, even if it were July, (2) talk about people he had no chance of ever understanding, and (3) bring up the subject of the Irish Potato Famine.

            He was not a great fan of the English, whose fault he considered the whole situation to be. He said that England, which came into possession of Ireland in 1801, deliberately let tens of thousands of poor people starve to death as a means of keeping the population down. I suppose that would make sense to some; after all people don’t have the SPCA to protect them.

            While thinking at the time that a nation of people who were so kind to animals couldn’t possibly have deliberately starved humans, I told him more or once that it was Male Cow Manure (BS is its acronym), but it turned out that the English parliament did indeed – at least for a decade or more – follow a policy pushed by an economist named Malthus. That policy did say let a goodly number starve to keep down the population.

            After a while humans took over I guess, and the English did try to help during those years when over half the Irish potato crop was lost to late blight. It turned out, according to this book called ‘This Great Calamity’ by Christine Kinealy, that the worst villains were the Irish landlords, not the English, whose most heinous crime was stupidity.

            I have four great-grandparents who were born in Ireland, so I am wondering: How close did my gang come to starving to death?

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

            I shall leave the faithful and long-suffering reader with these words of wisdom gleaned from the Internet. I am certainly not smart enough to think of them.

            “To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”

            “Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.”

“You're never too old to learn something stupid.”

“Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.”

This last one is a quote from my grandfather, Narcisse (Nelson) LaFrance (1881-1976), known as Muff,  and I have used it in this column many times: “If you see a chance to keep your mouth shut, take it.”

                                                 -end- 

The apples are now ripe (Aug. 20 column)

Cats and dogs are taking over from cockroaches

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            It is now about mid-August of a fine summer, weather-wise, and the folks of the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) are having an equally fine summer, lobbying-wise.

            Yesterday my television told me – without my even asking – that the New Brunswick government had now passed a law that prevents dog owners from keeping their pets tied outside between the hours of 11:00 pm and 6:00 am.

            I realize that such laws are put there to stop ignoramuses and cruel people from mistreating their pets, but like gun laws, this one will only result in inconvenience for one and all. It will not make cruel people treat their pets any better. There are already laws on the books that are supposed to protect animals from mistreatment, but week after week we hear of some cat lady with 3,288 pets or of someone who left his or her dogs in their closed car during a hot day and killed them.

            I am not quite sure what country people with outdoor watchdogs are going to do now; there’s little enough protection against prowlers. It’s 10:59 pm – “Come on inside, Rover, you might freeze your little paws.”

            Our dog Kezman and his predecessors always slept out on the porch at night and they had to be tied or else they would have ripped the arms off a 3:00 am visitor. Their job at night was to make a noise, period, but they couldn’t have heard the burglars if they had been snug in the living room and watching ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ re-runs. Instead, at night our dogs slept in their insulated doghouse with lots of water and food handy.

            I’m thinking that the SPCA folks need to focus their energy more on ‘preventing cruelty to animals’ than on mounting massive campaigns designed to keep dog owners subservient to their pets. Apparently dogs, in their view, are those small yapping snapping jumping-up creatures that are forever annoying everyone but their owners who are busy funding the multi-billion dollar pet food industry. Oops! Did I say ‘owners’? How can one be the ‘owner’ of such a wonderful entity? If you look around, you will note that, today, it seems to be the other way around anyway; the pets own the humans.

            It’s always interesting to see one of those TV commercials for Lysol, or one of those other chemicals in spray cans used to distribute that chemical on furniture so the pet odour is replaced by springtime fresh aroma. It never seemed to occur to anyone to keep their pets off the furniture.

            Enough of that rant. We don’t allow dogs or cats inside our house, but the fact that others do is their own business. As long as a pet is not abused, people should be allowed to keep them outside. Our dog Kezman would never want to come into the house; in two minutes he would whine to go out to his comfortable doghouse where he wouldn’t have to listen to the TV news reporting yet another good-intentioned law that wasn’t well thought out.

It is said that, if the world were blown up in nuclear explosions, the only thing that would survive would be cockroaches. The way dogs and cats are coddled these days, I’d have to say they now have the edge, in radiation proof cocoons while their owners – sorry! – fry to a crisp.

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

            To get away from all that serious stuff, I am also here to report that apple season is here and that I have found a new and very efficient way to make apple pies.

            The yellow transparents were the first to ripen; they were at their best between 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm on Thursday, August 14. I am not kidding. If you aren’t standing right under the tree when they ripen you miss it, something like peonies, but then you don’t eat them. Just as a guess, if a yellow transparent apple is green at noon, it could just as easily be ‘past its best’ and mushy by supper time.

            But back to the subject of making apple pies: As soon as the first hundred YT apples got ripe and fell off the tree, I grabbed the lawn mower, set the blades at a medium level or height and went over the area. After that, I was left with a hundred peeled apples which I quickly put in a bag and took them inside to ‘she who must be obeyed’. I didn’t wait for her exclamations of gratitude, but I fancied I heard them after I dashed out to get another hundred.

            Curiously enough, there was no apple pie for supper dessert, but I am sure that must have been because she made the pies and then froze them for a tasty treat in January.

                                                -end-

Flug is on Cloud 8.5 (Aug. 13 column)

Some summer observations and weirdness

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

            In the absence of a coherent theme for this column, I present the following, a compilation of notes I have made over the past four months or so.

            In the spring, ‘they’ raised the price of beer and postage stamps on the same day. Is there some kind of conspiracy to prevent us from communicating with each other? Not to be paranoid, but why are ‘they’ all against us? It sometimes takes a beer or two for some people to say more than “Good day” and some people only communicate by letter, and I don’t mean email. It has become clear that ‘they’ are out to get us. Here in the Scotch Colony the price of postage skyrocketed to something just under ten dollars to mail a grain of sand to Wapske, or a Kleenex to Four Falls. On that same day the price of beer rose fifty cents per 12-pack. What’s next? The price of gas going up? Oh wait, it just went up. Oops, there it goes again.

            In this fast-moving world, what happens to anachronisms? Words and phrases that aren’t relevant any more but are still being used include ‘mileage’ and ‘dial a number’. When about ‘penny’? Might I also include ‘please’ and ‘thank you’?

            In the same vein, what about words and phrases that are rather insulting? My cousin Susan G. in Tilley must get a little annoyed when she hears the phrase ‘Lazy Susan’, and what do Spaniards think when they find themselves blamed for the 1918-1922 pandemic called the Spanish Flu?

            There are a great many mysteries in life, including the question of why truck drivers, whose fuel must cost about a dollar a minute, need to keep their vehicles running while they go into stores for ten or fifteen minutes. I know that cars and small trucks want to keep their air conditioners running, but for the big trucks             that’s an expensive cool. The same goes for some of those huge ‘half-tons’ whose gas kilometrage (?) must be pretty sick.

            Speaking of wasting gas, it must be hard for governments to advise people not to waste money on idling, on electric power, on tobacco and on alcohol because from each of those items comes tax revenue.

            The CBC-TV show ‘Dragon’s Den’ might be interesting to some, but I don’t watch it because I don’t like rewarding bullies. If these rich people on the panel of this show don’t like a proposed business, why can’t they just politely say “no, thanks” or, better still, not have the people come on the show? Possibly the producers of ‘Dragon’s Den’ are also the producers of ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ which are neither funny nor done at anybody’s home unless people down there live in zoos.

            My friend Flug (Richard LaFrance) recently got married for the 17^th or 18^th time (even he is unsure) and he has been on Cloud Nine or at least Cloud 8.5 ever since the nuptials. I had a hard time dragging him out for fishing in Muniac Stream, but I succeeded after a while. After we had fished for an hour without success we decided to separate where the stream forks, one part becoming Bubie Brook. A short time later I heard him yelling and I dashed up the brook. He was up a tree because a bear had been chasing him. “I called my wife to come and get me,” he moaned, “because the road is right near here, and she said she couldn’t come because she’d just finished doing her nails which weren’t dry yet.” I have a feeling that his period of wedded bliss has just about run its course. The honeymoon is toast.

            A lot of people scoff at Facebook because people say such silly things on there. That is unfair. When I wrote that I was going to be away from my computer for three  hours because I had to go uptown for a haircut, people wrote some pretty awful things. It’s as if they weren’t even interested.

            One morning in early July I stopped at a restaurant in a town nowhere near you and was just digging in to my fried eggs (doctor’s orders) when a large chap at a nearby table received a cellphone call. The ringer of his phone could have been heard in Cambodia and his voice could have been clearly understood in Sri Lanka. In other words, I wasn’t pleased. Already my eggs had started to curdle from the vibration. However, it was a short phone call, mercy me. So were the next seven.

Here is a message to all my friends and acquaintances: if I get to the point where I don’t turn off my cellphone’s ringer before sitting down in a restaurant, and don’t know enough to speak quietly if I do have to answer, take me to the Scotch Colony Home for the Criminally Insane Journalists.

                                  -end-