THE
BLUE BOX (Recycled Ideas)
by Don Cox
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It's Monday morning and I decided to start the week with
breakfast at a local restaurant. It's been a few months
since I've done a restaurant review, so today I'll do a
blanket coverage of the vast breakfast wasteland in or near
the town of Buckingham Qc.
I frequently go to the Patio Vidal in the morning after
picking up the Globe at the Depanneur Bonisoir. The Patio
is a popular truck stop, it has good lighting and wide booths
and is open 24 hours a day with breakfasts available at
any time. This is to accomodate the compulsive VLT players
who are decently closeted away in a back room and largely
out of sight. Breakfast is a patchy affair at the Patio
Vidal, mostly because of the home fries. These can vary
between brownish lumps with a hard crust and mushy interiors
to less brownish lumps with soft crusts and cool hardish
interiors. Both sorts are greasy.
The eggs are generally OK, but small compared with the
big brown ones that my hens Heather and Jocelyn make for
me. They have a good colour though, which I understand is
due to a carefully metered diet of caroteinoids that are
fed to battery hens. That's right, your breakfast eggs are
artificially colour adjusted. God knows what's lurking in
the rest of what's on the plate, I guess the bacon is loaded
with antibiotics, and the potatoes have something in them
that kills potato bugs. Probably the wheat flour in the
toast is Roundup resistant as well. Please don't tell me
about the coffee, I don't want to know. All this gives me
a feeling of confidence and security when I walk through
my garden and grounds, I am proof against potato bugs and
herbicides, they can't touch me thanks to modern science
and the Patio Vidal.
The restaurant in the shopping mall reopened recently
and I went there this morning to test the waters so to speak.
It's a large affair where the walls and booths can be moved
around if needed. The idea was to make a space with multiple
uses, it can be set up as a cosy restaurant, a banquet hall,
a disco, a bar, or possibly as a venue for danseuses nues.
It fails dismally at all of these, but the lighting is good
in some of the booths, which is a must if you are there
to read the paper.
I sat down with the Globe, hid my cellular under my hat
at the far end of the table, and opened the front section.
I was barely into the headlines when I realized I had a
companion, an active house fly. I rolled up the Sports section
and prepared to commit insecticide as soon as this obnoxious
little visitor remained quiet long enough. He lived all
the way through breakfast but finally, well into the toast,
I nailed him when he landed on the opened packet of peanut
butter. He and the peanut butter decently obscured the football
scores, it was a fitting end.
The worst was yet to come, it must have been a slow day
at the Globe because they were running an article by Stockwell
Day entitled, "My faith in public life." After the first
rising of the gorge was under control, I ventured into the
heart of the subject. He was responding to the question,
"Can Stockwell Day separate Church from State?" He starts
out, "Let me address these criticisms directly." I stopped
with a sinking feeling, where was his script writer and
editor? Why did he add the word "directly", couldn't he
simply say,"Let me address these criticisms." Evidently
we are facing another politician who will say "at this point
in time" when all he means is "now." I just know that quite
soon good old Stock will find a "window of opportunity."
I struggled through the rest of the mass of woolly cliches
and emerged covered with a not very sticky layer of verbal
detritus, bored but not greatly informed. Why do politicians
all have to regurgitate the same overly digested mess of
recycled promises and thinly disguised bribes. It's enough
to make you give up reading.
Short of entering politics, there's only one thing that
I can do to reverse this whole sorry business. It's painfully
evident, my destiny and duty as a Canadian lies before me,
I will have to reform politics by constructing a whole set
of new cliches.
This may take a little while.....
Bluebox ©2001 Don Cox
Website ©2001 OttawaWEB
