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.

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            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.

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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.

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            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.

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            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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Those foot racers are fanatics (Oct. 19)

DIARY

I have finally cleaned my office

            by Robert LaFrance

            Some expressions are beyond the pale, as it were, but some are right on the mark.

 Try driving sometime when my friend Flug is behind the wheel. “He (or she) is driving me crazy!” I have heard people say, but last week, because of a foot injury, I had to ask Flug to drive me to the grocery store. Next time, I take a taxi, or even a limousine service, even though the nearest one is 132 kilometres away.

            I didn’t mind Flug’s backing out of his driveway without looking behind – I assumed he had a backup camera – but going through stop signs without slowing down rather unnerved me. Especially when there was a dog (Greyhound bus) coming at speed. We survived though.

            It was only later that I realized that his 1989 Gremlin didn’t have a backup camera unless someone had duct taped it to the rear bumper.

            It was a harrowing trip, but we returned in one piece, or rather three pieces, but that was what we had started with – Flug, me and the Gremlin. Groceries aren’t worth it. I resolved to dust off my hitch-hiking thumb if the need arose again.

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            Some of the news stories I am asked to cover for the Victoria Star turn out to be rather brutal. The Dam Run (http://www.runnb.ca/) that took place Saturday, Oct. 8 in Perth-Andover, was one such event.

            There I was, lemonade belly hanging out over my belt, and looking at this gaggle of athletes, real athletes who surely would race Flug’s Gremlin from Perth-Andover to Plaster Rock to Grand Falls to St. Leonard. One guy said he had run 150 kilometres since Wednesday and looked as if a cheetah would fall back in embarrassment if they were competing in a 1000 kilometre foot race.

            A woman from the Jemseg area took off running an hour before the actual 10k race and came back half an hour later, saying she had run to St. Andre just to warm up for the Dam Run. As I was getting ready to take photos of the 10k race, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the River Valley Civic Centre’s front window. Then I looked at all those finely tuned athletes champing at the bit and decided to lose some weight. Tomorrow without fail I will cut down to six bottles of lemonade a day.

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            Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Facebook. Indeed, if there weren’t, the company running that shebang had better fold up its tents and head for Minto. Facebook is nothing but conversation.

            Yesterday evening I happened to be perusing a few Facebook posts when I saw one from my Aunt Tillie. She’s 98, and got her first computer two years ago.

            And what a brute it is! I mean the computer, not Aunt Tillie. (I’m still in hopes of a hefty inheritance. She bought 1000 shares of Microsoft in 1991 and is now worth somewhat in the vicinity of the gross national product of Algeria.) She told her computer consultant, Harry, who sells used cars, to get her one that “won’t go wimpy on me when I’m trying to get on the %$#@*&$% Interweb”.

            Harry did that all right. The CEO of IBM was by last week to take a look at it. Apparently it has a zillion gigabytes of RAM – random access memory to you non-nerds – and a hard drive that a Sherpa would have a hard time lugging around. The keyboard, made personally by Bill and Melinda Gates for Stephen Hawking who found it too high-tech, is one that runs by speech recognition. If Aunt Tillie is in the garden and feels like insulting Donald Trump (not possible, but she tries) she just says it out loud and the Donald feels a pin sticking into his comb-over.

            Back to Facebook, Aunt Tillie said this morning on FB that she felt a little “unsettled” by all this talk about New Brunswick’s having an aging population and got a lot of responses, one from the prime minister. “Sunny days, Aunt Tillie,” he wrote. “Just because of your concerns, I have set aside an extra $5 billion (with a ‘b’) for your province’s health care system. Anything else you need?”

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            This morning, first thing, my wife poked her head (as the phrase goes) into my office and pronounced it “the messiest room in the western hemisphere”.

            Of course I was chagrined and nonplussed but, peering between boxes and files, I couldn’t help but agree. I resolved to smarten up and although that resolution didn’t go very far generally, I did decide to clean up this miasma.

            “You can do it, Bob,” said She Who Must Be Obeyed. “After all, London, England cleaned up their air pollution and the sewer that was the Thames River in the 1950s, and Stickney, just below Florenceville, used to be the smokiest place east of Flin Flon, Manitoba and Trail, BC. You can do it,” she repeated.

            And so I did. I am looking at you now from my desk, which is visible from several metres away.  

Building a better fridge (Oct. 12 column)

DIARY

The secret of canoeing and kayaking

            by Robert LaFrance

            I do a lot of thinking, always with the hope that I will come up with a plan that works. The good results of doing all this pondering range from ‘seldom’ to ‘rare’ to possibly ‘go on home’ but I keep trying anyway.

            One thought I had recently was: “Why can’t I design a better fridge than the ones most of us have already?” Surely I can do better than that, I told myself. When I look for jelly, it is ALWAYS at the back of the shelf because I haven’t eaten jelly for two days. When I (and you, don’t deny it!) put something in the fridge, it goes to the front and so on.

            The milk is on the top shelf, left hand side, and it’s the only food item that can be easily seen in that miasma I call our old Maytag. At any given time the top shelf could hold applesauce, leftovers, car parts or non-food items such as my Aunt Maudy’s oatmeal cookies.

            Here’s my idea: Insulting as the phrase is to my Aunt Susie, I suggest that an entire fridge could be a Lazy Susan, with circular shelves one could just spin to find the celery or…oatmeal cookies if one were inclined that way.

            Of course the fridge itself would have to be cylindrical, otherwise there would be a lot of wasted space. Then of course there would be wasted space around the fridge, so…

            Forget it. It’s too complicated. Now, where is that maple syrup?

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            To paraphrase the late George Carlin, when a columnist finds himself talking about bodily functions, there are some subjects he’s missed, but I’m going to do it anyway.

            I am often impressed by the number, the large number, of euphemisms for things we must do every day. So-and-so has to be excused so he can go and do “number one” and heaven forfend (as the old phrase goes) if he misjudges and it turns out to be “number two” before he gets there. My late Aunt Ella used to say: “I have to go see a man about a horse”. Up in Tilley, if one had ‘the runs’ we called it “the nine flying axe-handles”. No idea where that came from.

That’s enough of that.

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            My apple orchard is producing many thousands of Novamacs, Libertys and Nova Easy Grows and the bears are happy.

            This might have a bit to do with an item I wrote previously, but I find the bears are getting a little too enthusiastic with their No. 2 production. I have to walk very gingerly around the trees because the bears leave their ‘sign’ (as father used to say) all over the place. “Two big men couldn’t shake hands over that pile,” Flug said as we walked (gingerly) through the orchard where my neighbour Rick had just cleared a big area with his ‘bush hog’.

            He went on to say that his nephew Calvin in western Saskatchewan had phoned him the night before. Calvin’s area of that province had just had an earthquake that measured 6.1 on the Richter Scale and Calvin was happy, Flug said.

            “Yeah, you know how lazy Calvin is, don’t you?” I said I did (lazier than a cut cat) but what does that have to do with Calvin’s orchard?

            “The earthquake shook almost every apple off Calvin’s trees,” Flug explained. “Now he doesn’t have to hire apple pickers.”

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            More thoughts and observations, some of them even useful:

            A warning to those whose lawns are on hilly ground and who, at the age of 68, buy a riding lawn mower for the first time – only mow UP AND DOWN, not across the hill. I wasn’t killed, but should have been. Those seats are slippery.

            I keep hearing that a certain YouTube video has ‘gone viral’. What does that mean? Along the same line, people say a certain Twitter subject is ‘trending’. It seems to me that the definitions of these words are exactly what the speaker wants them to mean, nothing more nor less. Reminds me of the George Orwell novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Big Brother, who invented his language called Newspeak.

            I’m adding two more thoughts to the Rules of Life Dictionary I am working on. (1) Raspberries are at their very best tasting when they are so ripe that two thirds of them fall off the bush before you can pick them, and (2) If you are alone in the house and sit on the flush, the phone will ring. (I can’t seem to stay out of the bathroom today.)

            There is one huge drawback about canoeing or kayaking and the world’s scientists have yet to come up with a solution. When you kayak downriver, you have to somehow get your craft back up to where you started. My solution? Start well upriver from where you want to START, ride down to your starting point, and go home from there. See, the people who say I’m stupid are very wrong indeed.

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