Here is the unedited 70 plus pages of what I thought were the best things I said on my radio program in 2004.
I then selected about a quarter of what I thought were the best in these 70 pages and recorded them on two CDs which I call: The humble Farmer's Most Memorable Rants of 2004.
For the rest of my life I'll sell these two CDs for $14 each to Radio Friends and people from away who would like to know what the world of today looks like through the eyes of a well
educated old Maine man with a low IQ. Thank you for looking.
I'd like to thank long-time radio friend Richard Sassaman for telling me how to edit this page in Word and reupload it, making it more readable. January 4, 2013.
So you’ve moved up to Maine to retire and have discovered that it is difficult for poor old retired people from away to get a fair shake here. Your taxes are certainly higher than they should be and the natives take advantage of you as you suffer along on a fixed income. Cheer up. I can sympathize. Newcomers have felt uncomfortable here since my great great great great great grandfather, Moses Robinson, moved to Thomaston in 1734. So remember that you are not the first newcomer to find himself freezing to death beside the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by hostile strangers who don’t even try to understand your problem. You are breaking new ground, however, when you complain that your taxes are $2.37 higher than they should be on your $950,000 house.
At 6 o’clock in the morning I was the first person in line at the Bangor International Airport. The baggage inspectors had just assumed their stations and, as I saw one snap on a pair of rubber gloves, I shuddered and said to myself, “My, these fellows certainly intend to be thorough.”
The kids were coming to stay with us over Christmas so Marsha needed to borrow a granddaughter crib from one of the neighbors. The neighbor got the message and called the next day and asked me how tall the kid was. I said, “The kid isn’t old enough to stand so she has no height. She’s at an age where she only has length.”
Gramp Wiley and I were fishing way up the northern part of the St. George River when we heard a small voice saying, “Help Me!” We looked around and saw a little frog hopping up toward us. Gram bent down and picked up the frog. And the frog said that she was really a beautiful woman turned into a frog by an evil witch. She said that if Gramp would kiss her she would turn back into a beautiful woman and do anything he wanted. And then Gramp Wiley put the frog it in his pocket. And I said, “What are you doing?” “That frog said it would turn into a beautiful woman and do anything you wanted.” And Gramp said, “At my age I would just as soon have a talking frog.”
Are you ready for The humble farmer question of the week? Listen closely. A minister who is about to officiate at an outdoor marriage ceremony (which is being held next to a lighthouse) finds that a stiff off shore breeze is blowing his tunic wildly around his head. He solves his problem with 18 or so inches of duct tape. This marriage ceremony took place in A. West Palm Beach, Florida. B. Malibu, California or, C. Port Clyde, Maine.
When I was sitting in the Knox County Courthouse hoping to be selected for jury duty, people were asked to stand if they or a close family member had been involved in an incident involving alcohol. 20 or so stood. The judge asked one man, “Was it you or a family member who was involved in this incident,” and the man said, “It was me and I still think I was innocent.”
It is possible to buy good books for ten cents or a quarter at a lawn sale. I can remember finding a brand spanking new book called “Caring for your baby and child.” I mentioned to the woman selling it that the book was in awful good condition. She said, “Yes, after I had the kid, I never had time to read it.”
My wife Marsha works hard and I thought it would be nice to take her on a little winter trip down to Key West where it is warm. I opened the AAA tour book and read the motel prices: 599, 279, 498. I says to her maybe we can’t go. But then --- I looked further down the list and said, look at this. Here are some motels we can afford: $24, $25, She said, “You are looking at the prices of meals in low class restaurants.”
My friend Dieter told me that his father survived 9 years in a prison camp in Siberia. I know that you have read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and probably other accounts of prison life, so even if you have been spared this particular type of cultural enrichment, you know what was going on in Russian prison camps 50 years ago. You have to be incredibly tough to survive 9 years in most anybody’s prison camp, but can you think of anything that would take more out of you than a prison camp in Siberia? Years later they put him in a nursing home and he died the next day.
Do you get more worked up over little insignificant things than you used to? I seem to. Last week I went to the store to buy some CD envelopes. They were $9.99 per box and I took two. When I got home I noticed that I’d been charged $10.99 for each one. I have the feeling that I was overcharged $2. Today I went to the store to buy a gallon of milk and a $2.29 pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol. At the register I was charged $4 plus for the Pepto-Bismol. I said, “I looked at the price tag on the shelf long and hard before I picked up this bottle, because your pricing was very confusing and hard to read, but I think it was $2.29.” So four people behind me in the less than 10 items lane had to wait while the very nice check out woman went up to see for herself. I said to the people who were waiting behind me in the line, “We’ll see what comes of this.” The check out woman came back and said, “You were right. Because we made a mistake, we’re going to give it to you free.” I said, “Madam, if it weren’t for this kind of thing happening to me, I wouldn’t NEED Pepto-Bismol.”
Every day I dip into my world class library of Harlequin Romances and read either Dutch or French. I often underline the words I don’t know and put them on little flash cards. Thirty five years ago I dropped out of graduate school to be with my mother as she slowly died from second hand cigarette smoke, and if that hadn’t happened I’d probably still be a full time college student studying languages. No matter how old I get, I still enjoy studying. For two weeks I’ve had quelque part, which is one of the hardest words in the French language, printed in one inch letters, taped on the light in my bedroom. In an effort to memorize quelque part, which means somewhere, I go around singing, “Quelque part, over the rainbow.” It is a terrible thing to realize that I’m in the same category as Boxer, the horse, who planned to devote the rest of his life to learning the remaining twenty-two letters of the alphabet.
A question for you coming up here on eating. The other night we went out to supper. Outside of Moody’s Diner, and grange suppers, there aren’t too many places where I will pay money to eat. Did you ever stop to think that at most restaurants most of what you are paying for is the décor and the privilege of being seen there? A very small percentage of your inflated tab will pay for anything that you have eaten. And if you are one of those people who is rich enough to go out to a restaurant for supper a couple of times a year, I want you to think about that the next time someone slides an oily menu into your hand. But Marsha and I went out to supper, because, although the friends we go with could buy several restaurants, he is the closest man I know --- unless I count my brother. So my friend isn’t going to eat anywhere unless it is a buffet style where you can go back three times for cranberry sauce on chicken that melts in your mouth, and a salad bar with carrot salad plus green and yellow melon. And after that there is all the ice cream you can eat topped off with hot butterscotch or chocolate goo. My friend is going to get more than his seven dollars and forty nine cents worth because he is going to stuff himself like a coyote in a henhouse. When we had finished off the second heaping plate of chicken with all the fixings, my friend pushed aside his plate and said, “You can feel full, but there is a special place in your body for dessert.” I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com Where do you keep it?
Without productive, culturally-transmitted language, the proliferation of human culture as a whole would never have taken place. But how did language ever start? For years linguists advanced theories that would account for this singular human phenomenon. We have the ding dong theory, that is, that there is a mystic harmony that exists between sound and meaning. Man was able to give a vocal expression to every external impression. And we have the bow wow theory. That is, that man created language by imitating the sounds of animals. Others believe that man acquired language as the result of evolutionary changes in the structure of his mind. Now, I would like to advance the even more plausible itch theory. That is, that language evolved out of necessity when a man needed to tell his wife where to scratch his back. The first words ever spoken, were probably, “Up, up, over, no, the other way to the right, to the right, up, down just a bit, yah, yah right there. Go round and round right there.”
Two buzz words you might hear today are quality time. Parents are constantly urged to spend quality time with their children. One of the reasons this is difficult to do is because nobody seems to know what quality time is. The term has even overflowed its original parent childhood banks, and now is even used to express some mysterious relationship between married couples who have no children. A St. George woman, who seldom sees her 68 year old husband, complained that they never seem to share any quality time. The only time she sees him is when they go to bed.
A Rockland man is resting comfortably in Pen Bay hospital after a $52,000 heart bypass operation, and will be returned to the county jail in a week, according to jail administrators. This man experienced severe chest pains last Thursday afternoon and knew that he was having a heart attack. Realizing that he could never pay for his medical expenses, he quickly dialed 911, dragged himself out of the house, and, with his last ounce of remaining strength, emptied his pistol into the windows of the vacant house next door. He was immediately arrested for illegal discharge of a firearm and taken to the hospital. Because he was a prisoner at the time, taxpayers will be presented with his medical bill. According to my friend lawyer Crandall, case law indicates that the county is responsible for these types of bills. Look for more of them in the immediate future.
Last Thursday Sheriff Dan Davey responded to a 911 call from a housewife in St. George who was being crushed up against her wall phone by an oven that had overflowed with Fudge Brownie Mix. It seems that the woman was confused by the directions on the back of the box, which were in the metric system. That is, the pan is supposed to be 33 by 23 by 5 cm’s and you will need 110 ml of water and 55 ml of Vegetable oil. The only thing she found in common with the metric system was the 1 egg. It took Sheriff Davey and Deputy John Carroll several extra hours to free the woman because, according to the directions on the box, the brownies had to be cut into 4 by 5 cm squares before eating.
People in Knox County have never had it better. One hundred years ago, people in Spruce Head knew how to save. Ralph Cline says that his great-grandmother Bennett was so thrifty that each spring when she cleaned out the cupboards she’d swallow any medicine that was left so as not to waste it. To appreciate the extent of great-grandmother Bennett’s suffering, one should remember that back then most popular medicines were black, gooey and 85-percent alcohol.
My wife Marsha and I were standing in the check out line at Hannaford’s so we couldn’t help but hear one very old woman say to another one, “I can’t stand in this line. My right leg is so stiff I can hardly get it off the ground.” And the other one said, “It’s my arms that bother me. In the morning I can hardly eat my breakfast. And my hand shakes so I can barely get the spoon in my mouth.” And the first one said, “I don’t have no trouble lifting the spoon to my mouth, but it’s getting awful hard to see the dish.” “See the fish?” “No, dish, dish, see the dish.” I blame it on my pills. I’m taking 12 different pills which is probably why I’m always dizzy. Well, we’re getting old and these little annoying things are going to happen. But let’s be grateful --- we can still drive.”
And now. The humble Farmer strange and mysterious question for the week. How come you can now buy your ticket on line and print out your airplane boarding pass at home, but if you show up at the airport without your boarding pass, they won’t give it to you until four hours before your flight?
Have you noticed that TV news people like Joe Cupo, Cindy Williams, Pat Callihan and Jennifer Rooks are more than human? I have never seen one of them scratch. Don’t they ever itch? Watch them closely. When they are not rattling a sheaf of papers, they sit with folded hands. You have seen David Letterman rub his nose or his ear from time to time. But most professional TV people sit like grade school kids who have been told that they can’t go out for recess until everyone is sitting up quietly. Por que es eso? One thing for which there is no match, is when you itch to up and scratch. On the back of our chairs let our shoulder blades rub, let the drawing room now be as free as the tub. Ogden Nash.
Here’s an announcement I heard down at the Portland Jetport. “Someone has left a belt at security. Please come and claim your belt.” Does this concern you? If they’ve already got your belt, can there be any question what they’ll have next?
It is not very often that a political commentator says something that makes both democrats and republicans stand on their chairs and cheer. But I just heard Mary Matalin say that George Bush plans to run on his record.
You know that I enjoy learning to read several languages. Because I won’t live long enough to read Voltaire or Thomas Mann in the original, my elementary texts are Harlequin Romances. You can write to an author and she will often send you the same book in 7 languages. My friend, the great sculptor Steve Lindsay, is going to Italy soon. Steve is fluent in French and tells me that he has read one of my Italian Harlequins twice. Some of this world literature is suitable for high school language classes and you have often heard me encourage language teachers to at least investigate the Harlequin Romance for classroom use. Some of them are funny, well written, and contain nothing that you would be ashamed to have your grandchild read. Besides learning vocabulary, simple conversation and idiomatic expressions, the advanced student finds items worthy of reflection. Listen. My translation from the French: “She contemplated her painted toe nails and wondered how long she could maintain her sophisticated image.” To an old Maine man, painted toe nails shriek out shameless hussy. Isn’t it interesting that this 21 year old girl had the impression that sophistication comes from dress or things like painted toenails. Wouldn’t it be possible to find a woman living in a jungle tree house who possessed more sophistication drinking out of a cocoanut shell than you’d find in the painted toenail refugees from the Jerry Springer show? Please tell me what sophistication means to you. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
When it was 10 below zero I watched a lot of television and listened to the nails in the walls going off like firecrackers. Ten below will do that. On television I saw a movie star who had apparently said something bad about a weasel and he got hundreds of emails from weasel lovers saying what an ignorant rat fink he was. Why are people so defensive about their pets? You can understand you don’t want people saying unkind things about your wife or your mother – even if they might be true. But why should a true observation about the uselessness of your pet raise your hackles? You know that I have three wonderful pets, but wouldn’t it be a compliment if someone said to me, “Robert, you can’t believe how I’d like to slice up your pet on my dinner plate.” If someone were to tell me that my pets are about as useful as a stiff elbow should I get all defensive and point out how they graze quietly in the assigned areas – generating a pastoral ambiance while holding back the relentless and ever encroaching Maine forest? Years ago in a course called psycholinguistics at the University of Rochester I was given a rat to train so I know that people can get attached to furry little animals. My rat Vilkus, which as you know means wolf in Lithuanian, was a true rat and it didn’t bother me to have Vilkus rat sit on my shoulder or crawl down inside the sleeve of my sport jacket. One time Jack Neubig was building me a fireplace and Jack was sitting across the table from me eating his dinner. Jack was from Friendship and just about as tough as any mason you’d find anywhere. I went in the other room and put Vilkus rat down inside my sleeve, came back in and sat down at the table. And when Vilkus rat stuck his head out of my sleeve at the dinner table and wiggled his nose and smiled with his big yellow teeth --- well, Jack said it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life. You might have seen that famous movie star on TV try to make up to his distressed public by kissing a weasel right there on camera. But I’ve never seen even a rat that was worthy of my lips. How about you?
Wouldn’t you like to find it in airports when you travel? I’m talking about a little hole in the wall where you could stick your head outside and breathe clean air. Here in Maine we now have clean air in restaurants and our airports and we now take clean air for granted. But I was unable to draw a comfortable breath for several days after spending four hours in the Pittsburgh airport. There was an ironic automatic announcement that came on every few minutes: “Welcome to Pittsburgh, a smoke free terminal. Smoking is only permitted in eating and drinking establishments.” Isn’t that nice? When you walk up the gangway from the plane you get hit by a blast of cigarette smoke. And you can’t draw a breath of air until you fly out of these third world country terminals where people smoke in restaurants and bars. You know very well that employees are also smoking out back in kitchens and utility rooms. Think of the millions of people who will get sick and perhaps even die before their time just because there are still places in this enlightened country where people still have to work in smoke all day. How many politicians have you heard say, “If I’m elected, I’ll do everything I can to improve the health of people in our great country by working to ban smoking in public places.” You could promise to blow up the world, make us hated by billions of people, and rob the poor, but- if you had banned smoking in public places the last time you had held an elected office, I would plaster your name on my Model T and work for your reelection. My irrefutable argument would be, well, here’s the only candidate with a great health program. Anyway, in third world country airports you can buy food and books. If people are still going to be permitted to smoke there, why not also a ventilated room where, for $20 an hour, you could huddle with others seeking fresh air?
The advertising community has been cheating American business out of billions of dollars annually. For the past 20 or 30 years, the smiling people who appear in ads have been beanpole thin. All this will change this fall when glamorous models who weigh 350 pounds will appear in ads. They will be surrounded by 350 pound men who are witty, wealthy and wise. In the background you will see yachts, fancy cars, mansions and a promise of romantic adventure --- if she buys what the ad is selling. Of course most people will never be able to weigh 350 pounds no matter what they eat and drink. But many will be willing to destroy their health trying to look like this new smart set. This has been proven today by the countless women who are starving themselves in hopes of getting down to the anemic 95 pound models shown in ads now. It has been estimated by the advertising community that if each woman in America gained only 20 pounds, they could sell an extra two billion dollars worth of cloth each year. Profits are expected to double in beer and spaghetti. Dry skin, which was invented by Al Peel in the 1950s, will still be promoted, however. Thanks to Al, women all over the country have discovered their dry skin. They now spend billions on creams, salves and lotions to keep their skin moist. Maine men don’t want their wives to have moist skin. Up here we call it sweat.
Here’s news. Albert Pertinen, a football player for the Boston Redskins, made the Guineas Book of Records last week by completing the past season without a serious injury. He will be awarded a trophy at the sports hall of fame banquet in September for being the first football player in America to play an entire season without having broken knees or cartilage repaired by an orthopedic surgeon. A disgusted spokesman for The American Medical Association has named Pertinen Wimp of The Year.
When my father first came to this country and started to learn English, he read a sentence about a man who went up on a hill to get something. To get in Scandinavian means two goats, so my father thought the man went up on the hill with two goats. In 1960 my aunt sent me to the store in Hogsater Sweden to get some gron saker which is green vegetables. I came home with stro saker which is sugar. These things happen when you are only starting to get a grip on a new language. If you have learned two or more languages as an adult these silly things have happened to you and I’d like to hear about the ones you remember. Jack, my 69 year old cousin from Sweden, spent 10 days in Fort Lauderdale where he wandered about like a bewildered but sober college student. Jack is too old to know English well but is old enough to have gleaned lasting impressions of American culture in the 1950s and 60s, and when he saw a sign on one of those beachfront Ft. Lauderdale bars that said, “No Coolers Allowed” you’ll never guess what he thought it meant.
Do you have friends who are always boasting? I’ve done this --- I’ve done that. I can do this. I can do that. Do you get any satisfaction out of discovering that there are countless other people who have done and can do the same thing – and maybe even do it better? I’m asking you right now for your help. So send me a note at humblefarmer@midcoast.com if you’ve got a story that will put this boaster in his place. My friend Dave claims to be the only man in Aroostook county to get his head caught in a hydraulic potato barrel hoist.
What can you tell by TV ratings? The way they understand it, some company calls around and asks a certain percentage of the population what they are watching on TV at any given time. I can’t stand game shows, shows where there is inexplicable canned laughter after every sentence, shows where big animals eat little animals, exercise machine demos and shows where they are selling something. I also click to another channel or put on the mute button when any commercial comes on --- and that even goes for my car radio. I hear, “You are listening to…” and click, they’re history. Well, from what I’ve said, you know that the only thing that I haven’t excluded is Keeping up Appearances, Cops and Jerry Springer. And if I wasn’t always studying half a dozen languages, I wouldn’t know what to do with my spare time. But I started out talking about TV ratings. My friend Dave told me that he used to have a TV show that got the highest ratings of any show in his time slot. Wow. I’m still impressed. Cable show in Aroostook County that ran from 4 til 6 every morning.
Do you keep a notebook? You’ve probably seen the little notebook I carry on my right pant leg. I write down interesting things I hear or see that I want to tell you about. Of course taking notes is simply taking notes. When you take notes you don’t want to miss a scrap of the scintillating conversation so you quickly scratch down just enough to jog your memory later. So sometimes you find notes in your notebook that make no sense whatsoever. What a great loss we all experience when I can’t enrich you with some salient comment or observation, just because I can’t remember the point of what I wrote in my notebook. Here’s an example. If it makes any sense to you, I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com We’d love to hear your explanation. All it says is, “Their name was spelled out with toilet plunger heads on the border of Aroostook and Washington County.
Some friends invited me to attend their party at the Alumni House at the University of Maine. It was a great party, and you can see pictures of it on my web page. Although I don’t know the politically correct name for one of the games we played, all it amounted to was getting 150 people to work together on a project. The people at each table were asked to glue together and decorate a gingerbread house --- a challenge indeed for Maine men who find themselves without duct tape or WD 40. Of course when 6 people work together at one table on a project there is usually at least one who is content to sit back and watch and at least one who has to manage the operation. That’s just the way things are. At one table I saw a strong argument for those of you who believe that environment shapes behavior. The house built by the Washington County crowd had a chainfall hanging from a tripod out front, a yellow police “do not cross” tape, 2 dogs chained to an outhouse and a Bait For Sale sign on the front door.
end January 2004 W&S
My wife, Marsha, is the Almost Perfect Woman. When you’re been single for 51 of your 68 years, you know how scary some women can be, because you’ve had the opportunity to read the service manuals on several different models. For some reason that I’ve never understood, some women can’t just say what they have to say. They look at you and say, “We’ve got to have a talk.” So one day I thanked Marsha because she had never said to me, “Robert --- we’ve got to have a talk.” And she said, “Talk. What good would it do to have a talk with you? You don’t hear half of what I say --- and I can’t tell what you do hear because you don’t say anything. You always say that nothing is worth discussing unless it’s a life or death situation or if somebody is going to lose a limb. You’re just like my father.” That can happen when you marry a younger woman --- her father usually is just about your age.
Have you heard the ad about the vitamins that stick? I heard it. And I wondered about it. This company claims that ordinary everyday vitamins get flushed out of your body without doing you any good. But --- you want to buy their special vitamins because they stick. I’m like you. I thought it was funny, too, when I first heard it. An organic vitamin is the same as a vitamin that’s spent the winter in a chair inside a nuclear power plant.. But then I thought about it. And if you compare these stickable vitamins with some of those donuts you used to get when you were in the service, it does make sense. When I was stationed on the Cutter Laurel in Rockland in 1955, the cook made donuts that would hang around in your stomach for four or five days.
Bill Dickey was telling me about one of the local Camden characters who always used to walk around with a paper bag full of whatever he thought he’d be needing to get through the day. And every time this character would come in to visit one of the local businessmen who owned a store, the businesman would grab the paper bag and empty it on the counter to see what was in it --- just trying to be funny. Well, you don’t have to know too much about characters in Camden or anywhere else in Maine to figure out what was going to happen – sooner or later. And it did. One warm spring day this character walked into the store with his paper bag, like he did every day, and the merchant grabbed it, like he did every day, and tipped it upside down on the scale on his counter. And he looked at what he had dumped on that scale, and he looked up at his friend, and he looked back at the scale and said, “It looks like.....” And then he said, “It smells like....” And then he said, “It is....”
I hang onto the banister when I go down stairs. A friend laughed at me and said, “Getting old?” “Living smart.” At sixty eight, most people know that although they can still run down a flight of stairs, one day, they are going to wish that they hadn’t. It was in writing over 3,000 years ago. There will come a day when the pitcher will be broken at the fountain. You might run downstairs for years, but sooner or later you’re going to trip on a shoestring or the cuff or your snowmobile suit and break yourself in pieces. Kids do it all the time, but their bones are made of rubber so you seldom hear about it. But a horrible adult example comes quickly to mind. A man on crutches with his leg in a cast said to his friend, “I don’t need your help getting down these stairs.” And it was true. He didn’t. But he was glad that his friend was there to call an ambulance to take him back to the hospital to reset his broken leg. The only man in Rockland to break his leg one New Year’s Eve did so without the help of drink. He was walking down a flight of stairs with both hands in his pocket, according to an ear witness. By ear witness, I mean that Charlie Graham told me that he heard step, step, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. So even if you’re ten years old, hang onto the banister when you come down the stairs. Then, the worst thing that can happen to you is an incurable infection from the wood splinter in your hand.
Remember the good old let boys play with dolls and girls play with trucks? They found out that that program was a hoax and a fraud. It seems that boys and girls are pre-wired and the environmental and cultural factors are negligible. I thought I was a very destructive child, but discovered on a web site that by taking an axe to old cast iron parlor stoves, and concrete steps, I was manifesting normal little boy behavior. The next level of difference between boys and girls has to do with gender-specific personality traits which affect how children learn. First, a word about gender-specific personality traits. In the 1960's and 1970's, it was fashionable to assume that gender differences in personality were "culturally constructed." Back then, psychologists thought that if we raised Johnny to play with dolls and Sally to play with trucks -- then many of these gender differences would vanish. However, cross-cultural studies over the past 30 years have provided little support for this hypothesis. Here is one of the most challenges teachers face: the girl who gets straight A's but thinks she's stupid and feels discouraged, and the boy who's barely getting B's but thinks he's brilliant. Consequently, the most basic difference in teaching style for girls vs. boys is that you want to encourage the girls, build them up, while you give the boys a reality check: make them realize they're not as brilliant as they think they are, and challenge them to do better. --- For all the good it will do, I might add. -- If you want to get 8th-grade girls interested in chemistry, show the girls how chemistry can be used to improve the world. Let them build natural biochemical filters to clean dirty water, so they can see how the water becomes fresh and clean. If you want to get 8th-grade boys interested in chemistry, teach them about dynamite. Can’t you see yourself standing before the schoolboard the following week saying, “How was I to know…”
Here is some news that was emailed to me by Marsha’s aunt. Keep a watch out for people standing near you at retail stores, restaurants, grocery stores, etc., that have a cell phone in hand. With the new camera cell phones, they can take a picture of your credit card, which gives them your name, number, and expiration date. Identification theft is one of the fastest growing scams today, and this is just another example of the means that are being used. So... be aware of your surroundings. Now, do you think that the media should broadcast warnings about these scams? Does it put people on their guard, or does it outline in detail exciting new opportunities for scammers who aren’t bright enough to think up techno-crimes on their own?
end Feb 6
Thirty or so years ago when I was in graduate school studying linguistics at the University of Rochester, I was forced to buy several books on generative grammar that were written by the linguistic guru Noam Chomsky. I went to school hoping to learn useless fun things like how to read Greek and Old Icelandic and Latin, so Chomsky’s books didn’t interest me. On top of that, I couldn’t understand any of them. They were just about as interesting as a chemistry textbook or section 47 from the 4th edition of Prosser on Torts. Only a genius could read and claim to understand Chomsky’s books on generative grammar. Because I’d heard so much about Chomsky when I was a child in graduate school, I recently opened my ears and paid close attention when I ran across him while clicking through the channels --- just to see what he was up to nowadays. Chomsky has apparently used his encyclopedic mind to become a very astute social commentator and he was taking questions about his Hegemony or Survival book from an international crowd of journalists --- the Tim Russerts from all over the globe. These are people who know what is going on in the world and who write about it in dozens of languages. And when Chomsky finished they gave him a medal for --- I think it was for speaking out or having a social conscience for mankind. You might not believe this, but I can now understand Chomsky --- perhaps because he is finally saying something that I already know.
Did you know that there are 10 or so different kinds of electronic voting machines? I came across a booth where two women were demonstrating one called ESS. I got to push the buttons on ESS and have to admit that it is a very simple operation. Electronic voting machines are so easy to use that I wouldn’t be surprised if over 90,000 votes came in from Wytopitlock.
Just about the most exciting thing a 68-year-old man can do is to take the AARP driving class for old people. So I did. I admit that I’m not a good driver and that I have caused somewhere between 6 and 8 accidents over the past 40 years. I seem to get in the way at stop signs. Here’s the big red stop sign. I ease up to it and stop. I look in my rear view mirror and see someone closing in, not looking at me but to the left at oncoming traffic, so they can run the stop sign, because they figure that I’m a typical driver and that I’ve already run the thing, and wham, before I can move I’ve had my rear bumper in the way again. You don’t know what it’s like to be chewed out for being a stupid driver until someone who has rammed you in the rear end screams in your face. When you hear some old dubber say, “I’ve driven 50 years and never had an accident,” you might want to remember that it is not the same as, “I’ve driven 50 years and never caused an accident.”
When I took an AARP driving class for old people it reminded me of a television commercial I wrote, produced and narrated for the Maine Seatbelt Coalition many years ago. It showed my friend Stanley French next to a car in his junkyard and Stanley was crying. One of his friends had hit a pole and because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt he’d gone right out through. You don’t see me in this commercial, but you hear my voice and I’m saying, “This is my friend Stanley French who owns this junkyard here in South Thomaston. There’s nothing that bothers Stanley more than seeing a car brought in here that one of his best friends was driving without wearing a seatbelt. You know, Stanley could have sold that windshield for 65 dollars.”
Those television commercials I made for the Maine Seatbelt Coalition were so successful that Betsy Frederick, who was running the thing, got me to speak at the National Seatbelt Coalition meeting in Washington. Although I was kind of new to the speaking business back then, I knew I had to have a great first line, so just before I was to go on, I called my friend Richard Warner in Rockland and said, “Richard, in 10 minutes I’m going on before the National Seatbelt Coalition in Washington DC. Quick, give me an opening line.” And Richard said, “Washington, DC is an excellent place to hold the National Seatbelt Meeting. I can’t think of a town in the entire country where there is a greater need for restraint.”
If you’ve driven Route 131 between Thomaston and my house you’ve been past the old green Finnish schoolhouse where Gary Akers now has his art gallery. When I tell you that I went to one of Gary’s shows, I don’t want you to think that it was for the free food, because there was nothing there that an old Maine man would eat. Who should I see there appreciating art but Gerry Colson from South Casco. And Gerry admitted that he listens to this program and that he loves to go to Monhegan. So Gerry and I have one thing in common. But Gary Akers is a crafty artist and I like his stuff even more because he paints things that everybody can recognize, like the houses in Port Clyde or the lighthouse on Southern Island. If I were rich, I’d get that painting of Southern Island for my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, because she mows the lawn around that lighthouse all summer and paints up inside the light tower on rainy days. But I was talking about Gary’s art show. Can you tell me why the only people with money enough to buy first class paintings seem to be attracted by tiny tomatoes wrapped in bacon or spinach sandwiches?
It can be statistically proven that people come in three sizes: large, average and small. Because most of the women used in television commercials are no more than skin stretched on very small bones, the American woman has been conditioned to place herself in the large category. You can’t look at a television commercial without realizing that someone is trying to make women dissatisfied with the way they look, smell or feel. This is why even the most sensible woman might be tempted to lose weight --- to diet. Have you ever lived with a person who eats nothing but salad? After a week you beg them to wolf brownies or at least put enough chocolate sauce on their lettuce to make them sociable. A St. George man tells me that his wife dieted faithfully for three weeks without losing a pound. She got so cranky that he started avoiding her --- he even fell asleep drinking his nightly hot chocolate in front of the TV and stayed on the couch all night. And night after night, his wife lost weight. It was two or three weeks before a doctor figured out why. The television ads for weight loss had made her so sensitive to calories that she’d been gaining half a pound every night just by smelling the hot chocolate on his breath.
I like spaghetti. Back before I married Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, I ate spaghetti every day. You can read my recipe in the Maine Writers Cook book or on my web page. I don’t like to wash dishes so I started eating spaghetti so I wouldn’t have to wash pans and dishes after eating. I simply poured the cold meatless Ragu spaghetti sauce right out of the bottle onto the hot spaghetti right there on my dish on the counter beside the sink, and when I finished I just rinsed everything off and left it there where it would be ready for the next meal. You know, after ten or fifteen years of spaghetti sometimes twice a day, you really get to like it.
You probably heard about the man who has been trapped at Charles de Gaulle Airport since 1988. His passport got messed up so he can’t enter France and yet he is unable to leave it. It was written up in the newspaper because the reporter thought it was such a strange and unusual thing. But if you compare this unfortunate fellow to a man who doesn’t get along with his wife, yet has six kids so they can’t afford a divorce, we could probably find several hundred similar cases right here in Maine.
I saw a few minutes of the Thorn Birds on TV where the hero was being punched out by Nazis in Italy. But when I walked by the screen later he was riding a horse in Australia. I asked my wife Marsha how he got to Australia and was told that he was working there with the wretched bees. Wretched bees? What’s he doing with wretched bees? And she said, “Refugees, refugees. I wish you’d wear your hearing aid.”
I once read about a mother, who was playing with her three year old. She asked, “What sound does a cow make?” And the kid said, “Moooo.” “What sound does the doggie make?” “Woof, woof.” “What sound does the froggie make?” And when the kid said, “Budweiser,” she knew it was time to stick with PBS.
Here’s more about my AARP driving class. If you Google Road Rage, you might be as surprised as I was to discover that California is not the number one Road Rage state. Yes, I think that San Bernadino is right up there with the number one road rage places, but San Bernadino not a state. San Bernadino is probably a state of mind, like Harrison, New York. My first father in law Bill Galey always said that Harrison was a state of mind. New Jersey is not near the top when it comes to Road Rage nor is --- you won’t believe this --- nor is Massachusetts. The only way I can explain this is that people in Massachusetts and New York and California are not so likely to carry loaded guns in their cars as people in red neck states. And I don’t think that road rage counts unless somebody actually gets blown away. Tailgating, light flashing, tooting your horn, obscene gestures with your hand, screaming --- everyday Massachusetts driving behavior doesn’t count. So the top states when it comes to measurable road rage are those where our red neck friends carry a cocked and loaded gun in the car. You remember the movie Easy Rider where the guy on the motorcycle got blown away? That kind of thing is becoming more and more common in some states. If you think about it, a lot of road rage could probably be blamed on a condition called hypoglycemia which means that some people snap quickly and get mad and do nutty things if they don’t eat on a regular basis. I was over 40 before I learned that if I ate on a regular basis the chemistry in my brain would change and I wouldn’t have these little senseless rage attacks, like a spoiled child, when things didn’t go just the way I wanted. Are there some people you don’t even dare talk to until they’ve had a good meal? They go wild over nothing. You know it. You live with it. You know that when they’re hungry no matter what you say they’ll start an argument or snap at you. You know who they are. Point at one of them right now.
Since my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, escaped teaching, she has spent some time as a waitress, which she finds much more relaxing. I’ve seen Marsha at work so I think of a waitress as someone who trots up to your table with a big smile and does everything possible to make you feel comfortable and at home. But my friend Marilyn said she went to Paris and met a rude waiter. Which made another world traveler say, “Paris? I’ve had more rudeness in New York City.” You have been everywhere and done everything. You come from that class that thinks nothing of throwing down $7.49, plus tip, for an all you can eat buffet. And perhaps even doing it every month. So, where have you encountered the worst waiters and what did they do to make you swear you’d never come back? And, where are the best waiters and what did they do that earned them your approval? I admit that when I travel I’m partial to McDonalds. You know what you’re going to get, and a 99 cent chicken burger will keep you going --- as long as you aren’t going very far. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
You might have heard that Congress is holding investigations because something that children shouldn’t see recently flopped out on several million tv screens. Congress is going to put a stop to the incessant amount of sex and violence we see on television. I don’t know about you, but I’ll miss the evening news.
I was riding with a crowd of friends in a car. We pulled into a driveway so we could turn around and go back the way we’d come. And someone sitting in the back seat, who noticed that the coast was clear both ways, said, “If you want to back up, go ahead.” What do you say when the driver asks you, “Do we turn left here?” You can’t scream, “Right, right, right.” You have to say, “Correct” or “Ayuh.” And even a professor of English at Colby would have to admit that if Ayuh is not correct, at least it’s safe.
I just bought a book called Frog and Toad Are Friends. It is a book written by a very good and talented man whose name was Arnold Lobel and I bought it because I recall enjoying Frog and Toad Are Friends back when I was very young, probably in my mid thirties. But now, thirty years later and hopefully a more discriminating reader, I found a couple of disturbing things. To get an exhausted Toad out of bed after only half a winter’s nap, Frog tears the February, March and April pages off Toad’s calendar. Seeing May on his calendar Toad thinks that spring has arrived, gets out of bed, and goes for a walk with the crafty Frog. The message to young people is clear: if your friends will not listen to reason, you can get your own way by employing deceit. Not that Toad himself would be able to cast the first stone, because when he couldn’t find his button he jumped up and down and screamed. Do you want your youngsters to learn that a temper tantrum is an acceptable response to frustration? However, on the positive side of Frog and Toad Are Friends, your children will preview the shameful reality we live with in the United States today, because when Frog mailed his next door neighbor a letter, Toad didn’t get it until four days later.
Do you bother to read your kid’s report card? There are a dozen or so printed comments the teacher can choose to check off: "He is not trying," --- "She is not doing her homework." One of my friends told me the comment his son brings home the most is, "He is a delight to have in class." He says it kind of worries him, as it is obviously not the same kid he has at home.
You've heard about body language --- that you can tell what a person is thinking by the way they stand. The body language experts will tell you that anyone who has his arms folded across his chest is aloof and uncommunicative. That might be true in Boston, but on the street in Rockland, Maine it could mean that you slopped clam chowder on your sweater.
Have you ever heard of an adult who didn't mind growing older, slower and more forgetful? You might have seen the one who grabbed headlines in the paper last week when he crashed his small plane. The sheriff found a very large amount of cash scattered around the crash site but the poor old pilot couldn't remember where he got the money or what he was going to do with it. The drug enforcement administration and the income tax people have been looking into the situation. The most reasonable explanation anyone has come up with so far, is that he was on his way to Lewiston to make his monthly health insurance payment.
Did you hear Tom Brokaw telling about the poor kids in Afghanistan who have no running water or indoor plumbing in their school? Did tears run down your cheeks for these unfortunates until it loosened the floor tiles in your trailer? On my webpage under “Pictures of you at shows” you can see where I went to school. And even though I went to a school that had neither indoor plumbing nor running water, it didn’t keep me from representing Harvard and MIT at an international convention of linguists in Romania. Unless you count my inability to remember your name and recognize your face, I can function in society. In 1941 the oldest boy in that one room school was Tommy Baum, who was a grandson of one of my third cousins. I can remember seeing Tommy sitting up back trying to keep a teddy bear in the air by batting it with a ruler. And going to a school that didn’t have running water didn’t keep Tommy from being president of that great huge Pratt and Whitney plant in South Berwick. As a matter of fact, when I spoke at Tommy’s Pratt & Whitney retirement party I mentioned that going to a one room school actually honed Tommy’s administrative skills. It taught him how to run meetings. Because in January, when Tommy went into that little unheated back room that was attached to the school, he knew why he was going in there. And when he did get in there he didn’t waste any time attending to the business at hand and getting back out again.
Did you attend a school that didn’t have running water? Do you remember days in November when boys might bring a shotgun or a pistol to school? Do you remember wearing your father’s cut down dress pants to school? Do you remember how cleverly you covered the hole in your shoe with a piece of tin because cardboard got wet and fell apart? And you weren’t even one of the poor kids. Do you remember when showing high school students a multi reel movie like Song of Bernadette or Our Miss Brooks was a big once a year deal? We thought we got to see the life of Stephen Foster because the teacher didn’t know that Foster was a drunk who came to a bad end. Years later we realized that was the only reason he showed it. Do you remember when a trim little 20 year old English teacher could keep a 17 year old high school boy out all night without seeing herself on the evening news? Do you remember when mothers still mended socks? Do you remember that before you had an icebox your grandmother kept the milk and butter down cellar where it was cool? Do you remember seeing your grandmother fry doughnuts in a big back kettle of grease over a woodstove? Do you remember those hard molasses cookies she kept in that round tin can in the cellar way? Do you remember putting your hand on the big round water tank behind the stove to see if the water was hot enough to take a bath? Do you remember when you had to go next door to see a telephone? And when you finally got yours the bell worked on a generator and even your mother couldn’t crank it fast enough to make it ring right. Do you remember the first time you made a phone call? And the first words you said? Do you remember that every time you’d pick up the phone, one of your neighbors would probably be on the line? And from time to time some neighbor, who was listening in on your conversation, would get so excited that without thinking she’d but right in. Tell you what really happened. Do you remember when your father put a white receptacle in your bathroom that saved you the trip out to that little unheated room on the back of the shed? Do you remember getting on a train to go see your father who was working in the shipyard in Freeport or Boothbay Harbor? Do you remember little white signs hanging from the ceiling in the store that said, OPA ceiling price. And you thought it had something to do with the ceiling? Do you remember when you had to put black coverings over all your windows before you could turn on an inside light at night? Do you remember seeing your father paint the top part of his headlights black? Do you remember hearing the shed door rattle when they dropped depth charges on German submarines? Do you remember seeing splintered pieces of gray boats washed up on the shore? Do you remember running inside when a plane went over because you had heard that planes dropped bombs? Do you remember not being able to hear your radio program because the president had died and they were playing organ music? Do you remember going to Boston in a Model A and nobody even looked or waved at you when you drove by? Do you remember the first time you saw a television screen and the green little dancing rolls of toilet paper? Do you remember the lamp on the shelf behind the kitchen stove? Grandfather had put in power 15 years before, but the lamp was still there just because it had always been there and that was where it belonged. Do you remember the old original clear light bulbs in the cellar? They’d been there since the house was wired and back then they didn’t realize that there was no money to be made if light bulbs lasted 20 years. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com and if you’re as old as I am, you might remember some of these things. And speaking of making money, times have changed, so I hope your kid is studying plumbing, computer repair or law. Because, even if you are 20 years younger than I am, even you can remember when a Maine teacher could buy a full-sized, completely furnished house on a respectable piece of land for less than one year’s salary.
My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, has brown eyes. She is not old enough to know the song, Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes which I sang to her the other day. Chorus: Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes, I'll never love blue eyes again. Willie, oh Willie, I love you, Love you with all my heart; Tomorrow we might have been married, But liquor has kept us apart. Seven long years I've been married, I wish I was single again; A woman never knows of her troubles, Until she has married a man. Down to the barroom he staggered, Staggered and fell at the door; The last words that he ever uttered, "I'll never get drunk any more." You might find it interesting to learn that I found the words to this song on an Arkansas Family Tradition Web Site.
end Feb 2004
Although it is very nice to be able to grind your teeth and make growling noises in your throat every time you look at your spouse, as I am able to do, we understand that looks are not all that important when it comes to living with someone year after year in a successful, happy marriage. Even the young people who create the reality shows on TV realize that a high IQ and a nice personality are more important than looks when it comes to choosing your life’s partner. If you only see the IQ and the kindness and the generosity and the industry, the plain container that it comes in can be beautiful. Love is blind. This was recently brought home to me as I clicked in and out of the last few minutes of a TV program called the Bachelorette. I assume that the bachelorette had gone through a whole raft of guys who weren’t concerned with this superficial looks thing and must have been interested in her as a person, and when I clicked in she was putting the skids under number two. Number two looked like the kind of guy you probably won’t see your granddaughter dragging home at spring break. I would guess that he had a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Harvard and that he worked for Chase Bank. Mother probably modeled face cream, grandfathers and great grandfathers on both sides probably doctors who loaned money to Ford or Thomas Edison. He had probably broken at least one leg while skiing in Switzerland. I doubt very much that this guy had ever, in his life, asked a girl for a date. Just a look in her direction would have been enough and after a movie and pizza he would have had to beg her to let go of his arm so he could go home. This last part sounds like my old buddy Red Minzy. Anyway, he wasn’t wiping the tears from his eyes as he turned and slowly walked down camera. But when Mr. Big Number One Winner Man came on and got the thumbs up, he hauled out a piece of metal that looked like the code a graph ring you used to get in a 1949 box of Wheaties and squeezed it on her finger. I truly hope that they will be happy and that he never finds himself in the position of the young man who married the very homely opera star. You will recall that on the third night of their honeymoon, he looked at her and said, “Please sing something.”
Strange and seemingly inexplicable situations sometimes have very simple answers when you analyze them with a bit of common sense. You might have asked yourself why you see so many people with cell phones pressed to their ears while driving cars at high speeds. Here’s the answer. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, wanted buy something over the phone and put it on her credit card. Our phone was out all day yesterday. No problem because my friend, Booger Boy Davis, was standing by with his state of the art cell phone. The Boy dialed the number on his little phone and handed it to Marsha. She got half way through the business when she looked up and said, “I can’t hear her. She keeps cutting out. And she can’t hear me.” The Boy said, “Quick go outside.” So Marsha ran outside and after turning around two or three times, like a dog getting ready to lie down in thick grass, she was able to transact her business. Cell phones have a long way to go. No matter where you are, you can only hear about half of what the other person is saying, but --- if you get in your car and drive like a bat, you might find a spot that’s just a little bit better.
I saw Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 movie about Birds the other night. Remember when Hitchcock had a TV program? There was a cartoon profile of him on the screen. He would say, “Good evening.” And then he would make some witty observation. So even though I’m not into scary films, I watched Birds because I always thought that Hitchcock was great. The blonde heroine got in a skiff and rode across a small body of water, and the first thing you notice is that she is pounding through a two foot chop when they shot her from one angle and a flat arse calm when they shot her from another. So here is 5 seconds of bobbing up and down and 5 seconds of skimming along like an iceboat back to 5 seconds of bobbing up and down. It was like reading a sentence with past tense and present tense in the same sentence. And you wonder why a genius like Hitchcock would insult us like that until you see the heroine playing piano. You can see her hands romping up and down like Garner but what you hear on the sound track are tinkling arpeggios and you wonder why they bothered to show her hands at all. Even worse was when she went upstairs with a flashlight all by herself. Here they are barricaded in a house so you know that something bad is going to happen when she goes upstairs and opens that door. In real life no one would be that stupid. What? I don’t know your son-in-law? Of course she goes in the room looking for trouble, and once she is in there and the birds attack her, she hasn’t got brains enough to turn around and walk out again. If that movie were made nowadays, every blonde in the United States would sue Hitchcock for slander.
Have you noticed that if you pay your telephone bill one day late, they tack on a couple of extra bucks? And you pay it and you don’t say anything about it because you know that you did pay the bill late and you know that the system is set up to squeeze every possible cent out of you, the customer. But when water gets into the telephone company wires so you have no phone service for a day, and you lose a lot of business because your customers were unable to reach you, does it say on the bottom of your next bill: “here’s a couple of bucks rebate you’re your service that was suspended for a day.” It is my understand that telephone companies will start giving rebates when their equipment breaks down --- on the same day that insurance companies start giving refunds on cancelled policies.
If you enjoy a challenge, you will love this. Find the worst telephone hold music in the state of Maine. While put on hold hoping to talk with Harry at the YMCA, I listened to what I would believe to be the worst telephone hold music in the State of Maine. Most telephone music is so bad that it would be difficult for you to point out the one that is the worst. Hence, the challenge. Who has the worst one? Where do these shrieks and howls come from? How does it get into telephone machines? What do the people who put it in there look like? Do they really stuff their corpulent frames with inch high greasy hamburgers and dripping fries? What are they thinking? What are they hoping to achieve by inflicting such pain and suffering upon us? What does anyone who is not producing a surrealistic horror movie have to gain by playing this music in the background? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com and “I’ve got you babe….”
Hannah Pingree tells me that some of my friends in high places in Augusta have not yet made up their minds on voting machines that do not leave a paper trail. Because I do not own stock in the company, I'm suspicious of voting machines that don't leave a paper trail. Listen very closely to what I’m about to say. Think to yourself that a voting machine is no more reliable than your computer, and if that doesn't make you want to put pencils and paper into the voting booth, nothing will.
A friend writes: Dear humble, You heard of the "golden-handshake" people get when they retire? But my brother calls it the "golden handcuffs" when you are married with three kids. He is referring to the fact that he has a good-paying job but can't quit, due to wife and kids. Humph Thank you for writing. I’m not even going to say who sent me that letter. But this golden handcuffed man with three kids wakes up every morning delirious with joy. If I can believe what I see on television, his children serve him Cheerios in bed at 5. The one great tragedy in my life is that I could never afford to have children. I have neither the smarts nor the strength that one needs to stay afloat during our occasional planned recessions. Having a child is just another way of flaunting your golden handcuffs. --- Look at me. I have such a wicked big income, even during this recession, that I can afford to have one more child. --- You know the people weighted with heavy golden handcuffs in your neighborhood. They have a new pickup truck, a boat on a trailer and two snowmobiles in the front yard. And if that doesn’t get out the message that they simply don’t know what to do with all their excess cash, they have children. My heart cries out for these golden handcuffs when I see my many friends flaunting an upward mobility that I will never experience. There will be no squabbling to get a fair share of my estate.
When my wife Marsha, The almost Perfect Woman, came home, I greeted her at the door and said, “Mike has written a movie and if, by any chance, he is able to sell it, he wants me to narrate some of it because he needs a real Maine accent.” Marsha said, “Can you fake it?”
In response to my comments about road rage, a radio friend sent me a table that ranks the states due to aggressive driving. The ultimate measurement is deaths per 100,000. Here are the 24 most aggressive states. It starts out with the most dangerous one, South Carolina, where 15 drivers out of 100,000 got blown away because of road rage. 1 South Carolina 15.1 2 Wyoming 13.9 3 Alabama 13.7 4 Kansas 13.7 5 Oklahoma 13.6 6 New Mexico 12.9 7 North Carolina 12.4 8 Arkansas 12.4 9 Idaho 11.9 10 Florida 11.7 11 Missouri 10.8 12 Mississippi 10.5 13 Tennessee 10.2 14 Montana 10.2 15 Texas 9.9 16 Arizona 9.8 17 Utah 9.7 18 Nevada 9.7 19 North Dakota 9.6 20 South Dakota 9.6 21 Georgia 9.4 22 Colorado 9.3 23 Kentucky 9.0 24 Nebraska 8.7 Blow them away. Yippi Ki Oh Ki A And here are the six states where you are least likely to get shot because of road rage. 45 Connecticut 4.5 46 New Jersey 4.1 47 New Hampshire 4.1 48 New York 3.7 49 Massachusetts 3.3 50 Rhode Island 3.1 You just heard two lists of the states where enraged people are or are not likely to whip out a gun and shoot you. Did you notice that it might also give you a hint of how they might vote in a presidential election?
Why would anyone in their right mind take 6 or 8 college courses in Shakespeare? You can get straight A’s and when you hit the street you discover that there is absolutely no market for people who can rattle off the descendents of Edward the Third. But your classmates over in any of the engineering buildings are immediately snapped up for a salary generally reserved for school superintendents. Do you remember writing term papers for all those worthless courses you took in Shakespeare? The assignment might have been, compare the Comedy of Errors with Troilus and Cressida, if Henry the Fifth, that mirror of all Christian Kings, had played the two roles of Cressida's uncle Pandarus --- and --- Dromio of Syracuse. Because this was long before computers, just before the paper was due you sat up all night typing and retyping your manuscript so that even if you didn’t have anything to say, you would at least get a good grade for handing in clean copy. And then, only a few short months or years later, you realized that only a brainless twit would waste his valuable college years studying literature instead of learning how to drain swamps or design nuclear power plants. --- Do you think there is any value in studying Shakespeare? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com and if you can come up with only one good reason why anyone should study Shakespeare, I’d like to hear from you. --- I do hope that I get several scholarly letters from my academic friends who are already formulating their articulate defenses of the Bard of Avon, because every letter will confirm what I am about to say. You already know that any Shakespearian scholar who watches TV today immediately recognizes his favorite characters and age-old plots from the comedies and tragedies. You’ll see a Dromio who says that everyone beats him. And you actually see them trying to do it. Kick, kick, punch, punch. Here’s an Othello who is destroyed by senseless jealousy. Here’s a Lorenzo who has eloped with Jessica. Here’s Doll Tearsheet and more than you want to know about the beast with two backs. Here’s a tamed Katherina telling the world how to be a good wife. And here’s a very common one: Lysander loves Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander. Helena loves Demetrius, who used to love Helena but now loves Hermia. I’m amazed that Puck has any magic love drops left because every Queen seems to be in love with a donkey and there are more Bottoms than you can count. Human nature doesn’t change, so all of Shakespeare’s lovesick, indecisive and self destructive characters are still walking the streets. And if you can see any value in watching people interact in Shakespeare’s plays, you will really enjoy watching people loving and fighting and scheming on the closest thing television has to a Shakespeare play today. It’s called the Jerry Springer Show.
My next door neighbor Etta just celebrated her 96th birthday. Etta was only 28 and living in the same house where she lives now when I came into the world across the road. Etta’s youngest grandson, The Great Ronald, who flies an airplane, was there. I knew Ronald’s grandfather was something of an innovator because he used to fly over the water in a pontoon airplane looking for fish. And when he’d find two or three boatloads of fish, he’d sell them for $10,000 and then he’d use some of it to buy a 40 acre point of land in St. George right on the ocean. And I can remember that all the fishermen laughed at him when he cut up a good section of Tenants Harbor ocean frontage into little lots and tried to sell it to people from away for $7.50 a front foot. And I was thinking about this when I asked Ronald what he did with his airplane because they don’t fly around looking for fish anymore. And Ronald said that he took aerial pictures of houses and sold them. And when I asked him how that worked he said he’d simply fly over a house and take pictures and then try to sell them to the man who lived there. Ronald said they’d look at the pictures and say, “Eyuh, eyuh that’s my house, them’s my traps on the dock, but that ain’t my pickup truck in the yard.”
If you have ever offered me a bowl of pea soup or a dish of potato salad, you know that I politely refused as I explained that pea soup and potato salad are thrills I’m saving for my 80s. When you are 70 and 80 and 90 there are things that you should be able to do for the first time with the same reaction an 11 year old experiences with his first cigarette. After all, when you have done everything, what is there left to live for? Listen closely, because I’m about to confess to something I did this morning that I have never, ever done before in my 68 years on this planet. I did something that I was sure I never would do. I did something I never thought I could do. I have sneered at others when I have seen them do it because I knew I was above such foolishness. I have even written snotty newspaper columns about it just so I could flaunt my superiority before my friends and neighbors. But when I found myself in their situation, I was powerless. I had no control over my actions. Without thinking, like a mindless puppet yanked by a string, I reacted exactly as they did. I hope you’ll tell me that it’s just part of being human, and that I shouldn’t let it bother me. Anyway, I might not be a better man than I was yesterday, but it shook me to the innermost core of my being and I’m certainly wiser. Are you ready? This morning my best friend, The Booger Boy, stopped in for a visit. He was no sooner through the door, when I took Marsha’s one year old grandchild by the hand, and said to her, “Come over here and show The Boy what you can do.”
Why do some girls fall in love with bad guys? Does it run in the family? Is it because their mothers did the same thing? Every rational person in the community can see that he’s as bad as they come, but nothing you can say to her and nothing he does ever changes her mind. Love is irrational. Love is blind. He might be a mafia chief or the leader of a street gang. He gives orders to kill people. Tell her that nice guys don’t send out hit men and she’ll say that he’s really a wonderful man who has evil enemies. He’s only defending his neighborhood. Supposing it does have rather indefinite parameters. They are to blame because they make him do the things that he does. Ask her why he and his band of robbers, who already have so much, feel they need to steal even more. She’ll tell you that he’s a family man who provides for his friends and his family: they are simply engaged in a more equitable redistribution of wealth. --- You realize, of course, that there would be no country and western songs if every community did not have at least one of these very messed up wives who blindly stands by her very bad man. Your community survives in spite of her. But can you imagine what would happen if over 51 percent of your neighbors were like that?
At the age of 68 I’m learning about children. At 68 I’m learning things that too many people learn before they’re old enough to make an intelligent decision. Marsha’s only grandchild, Sydney, who lives in Fort Kent, recently spent a week with us. I admit that I don’t know the first thing about children, so I would never, never offer a bit of advice to the child’s mother. It’s not my place to make suggestions. But something bothers me and I’m going to tell you what it is. Every morning when I come out of my bedroom, the child and her mother are up. No matter how early I get up, they are already there. Six thirty. Six o’clock. Five thirty. And although this child only weighs 20 pounds, when she runs the house shakes, boom boom boom boom, like a stampede in an old Tom Mix movie. And she is opening up drawers, taking out things and anything that won’t go in her mouth goes on the floor. So before six o’clock in the morning you would think our house had been in the path of Haitian looters. So here’s my thought. Wouldn’t you think that that child’s mother would let the poor little thing sleep in until 7:30 or 8?
One of my distant cousins, who is smart enough to work for an oil company, has sent me some letters from Nigeria. So I looked up Lagos on the Internet. And in the process, I stumbled across some newspapers that weren’t printed in the United States. If you are an international traveler you know how interesting foreign newspapers can be. You can read about little insignificant things that aren’t important enough to get into the Wall Street Journal. According to one foreign newspaper, the Pentagon is investigating some United States company that was billing the army for cleaning some offices up to four times per day. I’ve lived with Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, for 16 or so years, so I don’t see anything unusual about cleaning an office four times a day. Would you dare stand up at town meeting and say that the brave men who are defending our country don’t deserve clean offices? You’d be putting your patriotism on the line. Should any American company be suspected of criminal activity just because they bill the army for cleaning an office four times a day? Our present system depends on this kind of thing. Where else would all that political campaign money come from?
My friend John Cushing, who belongs to the Kiwanis Club in Dover Foxcroft, just had supper with us after three months in Mississippi. And when he went home I went on line to look up hate crimes in Mississippi. I found a United States map with little KKK hoods and swastikas on it. And down south was right peppered with hate crime clubs. Did you know that you only have to spray paint a swastika on the sidewalk or on a wall and it goes on the record books as a Neo-Nazi hate crime? And when you figure how many people have mental illness or are drunk at any given time, it’s surprising that we don’t see more of that than we do. On the map there was one little swastika symbol on North Dakota and one in Maine. One in Maine! When I saw that it was on Matinicus, my first thought was, “How are we going to contain it.”
When was the last time your wife said, “Yes, you’ve already mentioned that --- several times.” Do all husbands say the same things, tell the same stories, make the same observations to their wives over and over and over, or is it only the senile who are afflicted? If your husband sounds like a scratchy record and you don’t think it is because he is senile, I’d like to know about it. Perhaps saying the same thing over and over and over is a husband thing that has nothing to do with age. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
When was the last time your wife said, “Yes, you’ve already mentioned that --- several times.” Do all husbands say the same things, tell the same stories, make the same observations to their wives over and over and over, or is it only the senile who are afflicted? If your husband sounds like a scratchy record and you don’t think it is because he is senile, I’d like to know about it. Perhaps saying the same thing over and over and over is a husband thing that has nothing to do with age. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
You have heard people talk about Maine humor. And New York City humor. And Louisiana humor. And you might have heard me say that humor does not have geographical boundaries. I have taken a story out of a 1922 Swedish book, changed Skane and Haparanda to Fort Kent and Portsmouth, and waa laa, pure American humor. I have always maintained that the only boundary humor has is an intellectual one. Change the accent or the language of the person telling the story, and most stories will pass for a story in that region. There are levels of humor, however. Like it or not, there are several classes of people in society and each class enjoys its own level of humor. Sam Collins once told me something that was so dry I didn’t get it for six months. People like Sam Collins who are the wittiest people in Maine will never be appreciated because most of us are not smart enough to understand what they said. Only a handful of stories do not apply to this humble universal rule for humor. The funniest story I heard two years ago cannot be understood by people in Augusta or Ashland because they would not know that some lobster catchers steal from their neighbor’s traps. Tell the same story in Port Clyde or on Beals and people would fall off their chairs. And I just heard a story that wouldn’t work in Maine. A farmer comes down to his pond and sees two college girls swimming without a stitch on. In Maine they would come out of the water with a big tin pan in front of them and the punch line would be, “And you probably think there’s a bottom in that pan.” But in Florida the farmer says, “Don’t mind me girls, I just came down to feed my alligators.”
My friend the Booger Boy is like so many of us in that he goes off on different kicks. His present kick is Kariokie. The way I understand it, you stand in front of a computer screen that has the words to songs on it and you sing the words into a microphone while the sound system plays music to the song in the background. He told me that he went some Kariokie place the other night and went up in front of a crowd and sang a song that he dedicated to his wife. I understand that a lot of people do this, but I’m surprised that the Boy did it because he doesn’t drink. But now it only takes a word, and he’s off to someplace where he can stand and sing. Last week his wife took advantage of his new weakness. She asked him if he’d like to go with her and stand and sing another song for her. Of course he said he would, which is why the Booger Boy went to church last Sunday.
Do you listen to language tapes? I spent half an hour this morning listening to my French tapes. I walk at the same time so as to do two things at once. My best friend, who is rich, gave me the nice little rich kid CD player that I carry around my neck in a little cloth bag so I can listen to French. But if he were to see me walking and listening to French, he would say, “How much money did it make you?” No matter what I do he always says that. How much money did it make you? And he is right. He is rich because everything he has done all his life has been geared to making money. He has been the ant who has worked hard all his life and succeeded, and I have been the grasshopper who wasted 9 years of his life going to college, studying literature and history and languages, which is absolutely worthless if your IQ is low and you live in St. George, Maine. Studying history is especially worthless, because every time you read the news you see governments still doing the same unfortunate things they’ve been doing since history began --- trying to take something away from somebody else. And studying languages is a rich man’s hobby. 45 years ago I might have rationalized the need of knowing many languages, because om man kan snakka norsk, det hjalpa att traffa Norsk piga. 45 years ago it helped me pick up Norwegian girls. But of what use are several languages to a doddering 68 year old man? The only thing I need to say now in French is je suee fatigay.
I have before me a ragged and much handled paper that says: “The Post Office has stated that material sent to you is undeliverable at the address that appears in your records.” And they asked me for an address correction. Yes. Although I live in a house that was built in 1811 --- a house that has not moved since 1854 when oxen dragged it up there, the post office has changed my address three or four times over the past 10 years. Some people still haven’t caught up with me. If you live in rural Maine, your address has probably been changed, too, so you know what I’m talking about here. You can mail to one of your 7th cousins in a metropolitan area like Cushing or Wytopitlock, he might live in the same house where his family has lived for 200 years, but if you don’t have the latest address assigned to his house by the post office, it will come back to you; UNKNOWN. If you can remember when your postmaster knew and was related to everyone in town, you are probably still wondering how post office efficiency, improvements and progress, can cause anything like this to happen. There’s more. Hear this. I got this address correction paper from my brother. Although it said Robert Skoglund on it, it was delivered to the box of my brother, James Skoglund. Because I very often get things like my brother’s bank statements in the mail, I have called my good friend at the post office to ask why this happens. I don’t really understand it, but it has something to do with a machine in Portland where the mail is sorted. One of the blessings of the present system is the enjoyment of opening an occasional Christmas card in the middle of March. Although there are only two Skoglunds in St. George, Maine my brother gets my mail and I get his. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com. If your name is a common one like Smith or Jones please tell me how it’s going with you.
Do you always read the instructions? I can’t bring myself to read instructions. I’m so numb that when I think I’m doing what the instructions say, it doesn’t come out right. I like having someone show me how to do something, but I don’t have the patience to read instructions. --- There is a penalty to be paid when you don’t read or can’t understand the instructions. My neighbor Mike has only one arm and one leg that work properly. He figured it was about time to quit smoking so he went to his doctor who gave him some ZyLan. He ate the ZyLan and stopped smoking for 30 days. When he went in to the doctor for his follow up appointment, the doctor asked him if he’d been able to cut down. You see, Mike, who had quit cold turkey, didn’t understand that the ZyLan was only supposed to help him reduce his intake and that he could have been enjoying those wonderful cigarettes for the whole month.
I recently read on a Monhegan web page that there are only four kids in the Monhegan school. Prices for the smallest houses on Monhegan start at half a million dollars, so Monhegan is really not a place where your average young family could go to start out in life. The way I understand it, some residents on Monhegan, probably young parents, are trying to encourage young couples with kids to move to Monhegan and live out there year round. The way Monhegan is heading now, they say that soon it will be only a place for summer people and a handful of winter caretakers. Monhegan is only 10 or so miles from where I was born and brought up and although I have no business saying what should or should not happen on Monhegan, I would hate to see the community die off and fade away. I like Monhegan and I like the people out there. I understand that they are trying to make year round housing affordable for young people with kids. If you are a writer or an artist, a woodworker, or any kind of craftsman, or even if you are just rich so you don’t have to work --- but I repeat myself --- I would think that Monhegan would be a good place to live. There are no cars on Monhegan. When the sun goes down, it is very very dark on Monhegan. And although I go out there several times every summer to do shows, I have no idea what people do on Monhegan after dark. There are no pre school children living on the island which suggests that everyone falls asleep immediately. Which reminds me that Marsha and I spent our honeymoon out there. I do know that one morning last summer I awoke on Monhegan and looked out the window to see 13, I think it was, artists on the horizon painting the sunrise. And anyone who is up at sunrise must go to bed early. I’d like to know more about this project to bring young people to Monhegan, wouldn’t you? I’d like to know if everyone out there is in favor of bringing young families to Monhegan and setting them up in affordable housing. Would you want to live on Monhegan? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
Here’s news. Uganda Becomes World's 6th Smokefree Workplace. Uganda has eliminated tobacco smoke pollution in all workplaces and public places, including restaurants, educational institutions and bars. Uganda joins Ireland, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, and Bhutan among the world's first smokefree workplace countries. Uganda? If I lived in Uganda I’d be saying to myself, “What’s the matter with Uganda? Why has the tobacco lobby forsaken us? Aren’t we worth bothering with? Are we too poor to buy cigarettes in the first place? In Nigeria everyone understands that they want a thick smoky haze in bars so you can’t identify the gunman who robbed you. But that shouldn’t apply in most of the United States. If you can figure out how they were able to squeeze smoke free legislation by the tobacco lobby in Uganda and Bhutan and still can’t do it in the United States, a lot of people would like to know how they did it. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
A woman has written a book about what is called vanity sizing. I think the name of the book is Size Matters, and I was very hesitant to look for it in Google. Here’s the plot: Women want to wear a smaller size dress, so the manufacturers are accommodating them. They are putting a smaller size tag on a bigger dress. Women are willing to pay more for a big dress with a small size written on it. Some women, they say, cut the size tags off their clothes so they won’t have to look at them. I don’t know anything about women’s dress sizes but it said that the size 12 that Marilyn Monroe wore 50 years ago would be called a size six now. I read on line that men’s sizes are accurate. If you wear a size 62 suit you can order one through the catalog and you will get a 62. But a woman who orders a size 12 dress over the phone has no idea what will come in the mail. It is costing companies money, because so many women now have to return clothing that they buy through the mail. One man said that his wife didn’t bother to return the dress that she’d ordered from a catalog over the phone. She took it out in the garage and used it as a tarp for her car.
How do you feel when immigration quotas are raised so that your town can be flooded with kids who are willing to work for rock bottom wages? If you have a payroll --- of you own a hotel or motel or restaurant you probably think it is pretty nice. I were looking for someone who would rake away the rocks the snowplow put on my lawn and pick my apples in the fall, I’d think that importing this cheap child labor was an absolute necessity. If you are a local someone who has been doing these very necessary chores and think that you should keep your job and even get a raise for doing it, you’re not going to be happy. If you have your ear to the ground you have heard two boo hoo stories. One is a big boo- hoo from hotels and motels and restaurants that claim they can’t find people to wash dishes and make beds. The other boo hoo is that so and so and a few of her friends who were washing dishes and making beds at the big resort got fired so they could be replaced by cheap imported child labor. That’s what I heard and I can’t say a thing about it, one way or the other. But if it weren’t for people willing to come here and work cheap, cheap, cheap, my great grandfather William Williamson would probably have stayed in Arberdeen, Scotland, my father would have probably stayed in Boras, Sweden, and I wouldn’t have gone to school in St. George, Maine with dozens of kids who taught me to say, “Mitta Kulu, A playa mitta. Huvva.” Listen closely. Knowing what I know now, if I were 50 years younger I’d be washing dishes for slaves wages in Marselles, Rome, Athens, Oslo, Koblinz, Smogen, Fungerola, Vilnius, and Rovaneimi, and I wouldn’t even come home to start college until I was 27, had learned a bit about people, and could speak 8 or 10 languages.
end march 2004
I like my wife, Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman. And, although it might surprise you if you are only 40 or 50 years old, from time to time I like to hug my wife. Yes, old men like to hug their wives just like young men like to hug their wives. But I have a hugging problem because ours was a planned marriage. When you get married at 54, it is your brain that makes the decision. I wanted the kind of woman who would get down on her hands and knees and scrub the floor the first time I brought her home. Not because she wanted to --- but because she had to. As Marsha’s father Bill told me, “It’s in the genes,” There are women, just like the true princess in the fairy tale, who shriek at the sight of a speck of dust. And if you are willing to wait, you can find a scrubber and cleaner in the same skin as the woman who has to cook tasty, nutritious meals from scratch three times a day. This is why I see nothing unusual or criminal in that company that billed the army for cleaning an office four times in one day. I live in a blizzard of cleaning and cooking. My nose has lost any sensitivity it might once have had after 16 years of living in a blue haze generated by roasting turkey and Lestoil. I’m talking about a woman who started to take a before-bed shower last night at midnight and ended up wandering around in her bare skin scrubbing down two shower stalls in two bathrooms with a brillo pad. My friend. Have you ever tried to hug such a woman? This morning, halfway between the sink and the stove, I tried. All I got was a bit of a shoulder when it went by, and I said, “Don’t you have time for hugs?” And she said, “Not while I’m busy.” So I grasped her firmly by the shoulders --- if you’ve ever tried to stop a Type A woman or a runaway horse, you know what a challenge that was. And I said, “Look me in the eyes.” And I said, “Will you please tell me a time --- when you’re not sound asleep --- when you are not busy?” She said, “Something’s boiling over on the stove.”
My buddy Bill, The Almost Perfect Woman’s father, used up thousands of my frequent flier miles to subscribe to magazines and newspapers. When he was called to walk on the golden sands in the sky we cancelled everything and got what little money we could back on all of them. And I haven’t paid much attention to newspapers since. But my buddy just gave me a subscription to a newspaper and here’s what’s on the front page. Some very capable medical people, but I repeat myself. Some medical people have just revealed that lobstermen who smoke cigarettes while melting plastic twine and painting buoys beside wood stoves in tiny workshops have an unusually high incidence of lung problems. Cancer, bronchitis, pneumonia. It took a study by a doctor on Vinalhaven and a Harvard health expert to see the pattern. Lobstermen come to the doctor and wheeze, “I’m having trouble breathing and I can’t figure out why.” Can you believe that? It is interesting that if you or I had made the same observation, everyone would have sneered and said, “What do they know about the effect paint fumes and burning plastic rope and wood smoke have on the lungs?” I know about lungs. Over 50 years ago my grandmother had TB and they put her in the San in Fairfield. The thinking back then might have been, get them out of the house, get them away from the wood smoke that filled every house back then, and they might recover. Go ahead. Tell me that there is nothing cheerier on a cold winter day than a crackling fire in a woodstove. And I agree with you. But you know as well as I do that there is nothing deadlier than the inevitable invisible poison that escapes from a crackling, and eventually smoldering, fire in a woodstove. Back when I was in my 30s and 40s, I was an old batch who slept in a tiny room where the only heat came from a kitchen cook stove. Oh, it was wonderful to smell the little sprigs of green fir that I used to sprinkle on the stove. But now I have a beautiful brand new wood burning furnace that takes 3 foot sticks in my cellar, and I can’t use it because just a puff of smoke now makes me sick. So. The lobstermen have been told and, because they are not stupid, we can anticipate their next move. This is not the first time people have got sick and died because of an unhealthy workshop, so there is an economic precedent for what you can expect will happen. Lobstermen will bring in low paid foreign help.
What do you know about big deal movie companies from Hollywood that breeze into your town with a hundred people, trumpets blowing, shut down every business on Main Street for a month or two of shooting, and then leave without paying their bills? My friend Jim rented out his boat in Camden to one of those famous movie companies what --- 20 or 30 years ago, and while I was at his house yesterday I heard some mumbling about how some movie people don’t pay their bills. Got me to wondering if this is this the way everyone in the movie business operates. I believe there is an organization in Augusta that helps bring Hollywood movie people up here to make movies. They want to bring Hollywood movie companies to Maine, probably to publicize our wonderful state and also help the economy, and someone in that organization might have something to tell us about it. You might remember that I had to hitchhike home from a speaking job in Montreal on 9-11 because my flight was cancelled, and I got picked up by some movie people in Wiscasset. And they said they never got what was coming to them by some movie company out of Hollywood. So if you’re still waiting for money that some movie company owes you, I’d like to hear your story, too. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com You know, if you were a carpenter who could prove that Mel Gibson hadn’t paid you for something you built for him with two planks, I’ll bet you could get on 60 Minutes.
While eating my morning rolled oats I read on the TV screen --- I can’t hear television, but I can read the words on the bottom of the screen --- I read a woman saying “I don’t believe in zero tolerance because zero tolerance implies zero wisdom.” And if that’s not what she said, that’s what I think she said. And, as you know, it is not what you say on the radio that matters, it is what people think you said on the radio that matters. “I don’t believe in zero tolerance because zero tolerance implies zero wisdom.” Do you agree that there can be extenuating circumstances for unintentionally or inadvertently disobeying written or unwritten laws and social customs? You have read the oldest books and plays extant so you can rattle off the names of good people who found themselves in hot water, not because they did something bad, but because something unthinkable happened to them that had never happened to anyone before. You immediately think of Billy Budd. So for over 2,000 years much of the world’s notable literature has dealt with good people who went about minding their own business who, through no fault of their own, violated some zero tolerance rule, and suffered accordingly. If even a whit of common sense or wisdom had been applied to their particular situation, there would have been no story and therefore no book or play about it. Aristophanes and Melville would have been out of business. So anyone who can read learned early on what happens when zero tolerance takes the place of common sense. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of them walking our streets today. The zero tolerance problem is exacerbated today because people who can’t read have created our quantitative society. They have saddled us with things like Learning Results. You can measure Learning Results. People who can’t think love learning results because they can measure it. And then they can distort the study in any way to give them the results that they want. On the other
What do you think about zero tolerance? I’m not sure about this, but there seems to be two basic schools of thought when it comes to prisons. One is that a prison should try to rehabilitate criminals so that they can be productive members of society when they are released. Get a job. Stay straight. Pay taxes. Some folks think that if prisons can turn people around, teach them a trade, give them a new life, prisons are worth the money. The other philosophy is that a prison only exists to keep bad guys off the street and to punish them for their crimes. I’m sure we can find examples that will support each position. But the other night, while clicking to get away from a commercial in the middle of the Jerry Springer show, I saw a news story about a man who had killed three people. There was no reason to kill these three people. It was a senseless, needless stupid act by a very young boy on the run. Three families were devastated. While serving 13 years in jail, the killer managed to earn 2 college degrees suma cum laud. 4 Point average. When he got out, he earned two PhDs, got married, and got a job teaching in a college. Everybody loved him. He was a great teacher. He was a valuable contributing member of society, until the state of Texas came up with a new policy that said employers and neighbors deserved to be notified of an excon’s whereabouts. Certainly a prudent thing to do if you are releasing a pedophile. But is it a nice thing to do to a killer who has been a valuable contributing member of society in the 20 or so years since his release? How do you feel about this? Would you rather have this man teaching at a college or would you rather see your tax dollars supporting a washout on welfare? I wonder what Solomon would have to say about zero tolerance. I’m not Solomon, but I’ll bet that after that TV show that man had to hire an agent to handle his book and movie offers.
Do you see grown people face their palms and then drive their hands up inside a steering wheel before they make a turn? Back in 1970 I went to --- I think it was the University of Maine in Orono for two weeks to learn how to teach driver education. And you do not stick your hand up inside a steering wheel. You keep your hands on the outside of the steering wheel. But some Maine people learned how to drive a tractor before they could ride a bicycle. They were so little that they had to stand up and put both feet on the clutch to push it down. And they got in the habit of turning their hands around and sticking them up inside the steering wheel because before the days of power steering, it was the only way they could pull the wheel around. So the next time you’re riding with someone who sticks a hand up into a steering wheel to help make the turn, remember that they’ve lived a hard life. Before they got on the schoolbus in the morning they already had in two hours of collecting and grading eggs.
Polly Writes: Dear humble, Friday’s show included the discussion of taking a shower before going to the hospital. I thought it was quite a coincidence, as I remembered my uncle's response to a heart attack. One of my uncles, at that time a 70 year old bachelor, called one of his sisters to say he thought he was having a heart attack. He was going to drive himself to the hospital. My aunt and her husband, picked up another sister, and proceeded to meet him there. They parked near my uncle's car, where he was still behind the wheel. My aunts got out of the car, rushed over to their brother's car, and to the amazement of the other uncle, jumped in. The car sped out of the parking lot, and returned a little while later. After Uncle Ed was finally installed in the hospital, his bewildered brother-in-law asked about the detour. The reply was that Ed wanted to take the dog to the boarding kennel, before he was admitted. Uncle Ed lived happily with his dog for another 3 years. From Polly . Polly, do you realize that if he had gone directly to the hospital he might have lived with his dog for another 8 years?
From time to time my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, agrees with me that it is time for a quick trip down south where it is a bit warmer. So we rushed down to Key West. We stayed in the Big Pine Motel. I have been to the Maine Innkeepers annual meeting, and because around 90% of Maine Innkeepers and motel owners listen to this radio program, I’m going to pass along these Big Pine Motel guest rules. You might want to type them up and paste them on the wall next to the other guest rules at your own establishment. Guest rule number one. No cleaning fish on the premises. Now this wouldn’t bother me as long as they did it on the back steps. Before morning the back steps would be licked clean and the guts, bones and feathers would have been swallowed whole by who knows what. If you live in rural Maine, as I do, and if you’ve seen the Beware Sign on my web page, you know that you might even worry about young children overnighting in a backyard tent. Guest rule number two. Do not store your gasoline cans in your room. And here’s where a Maine B&B’s guest rules are different from the rules in Florida. No matter how attached Maine tourists might be to their gas cans, most people are able to leave them home. They’ll ask a neighbor to keep an eye on them. But in Florida people who travel with their gas cans know that any gas cans left outside will probably be gone in the morning. In Maine the fish heads would be gone. If you have a motel or a Bed and Breakfast, what’s the most horrible or unbelievable thing a guest tried to drag into your building? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com I couldn’t stand it on Big Pine Key. When I saw the tiny island deer eating the buds and green leaves off something that looked like my little apple trees I got so homesick I almost cried.
Talking about things that creep out of the woods at night to eat whatever they can find, reminds me of one of my favorite stories about my annual lobster picnic. For 14 years or so I invited the world to my back yard to eat lobsters, their own picnic lunch and to enjoy a stage show by Gary Crocker and Jackson Gilman and Michael Michlon and Nick Appolonio and Brad Terry and dozens of similarly talented friends who are the top performers in Maine. My wife Marsha, the almost perfect woman, hated this little informal gathering of 1,000 or so of my closest friends, and by firmly employing various and sundry measures she finally got me to put an end to it. But here’s what used to happen. When my friends had gone home, and while Roan Buck was packing up his huge lobster cooker, I sorted the contents of several trash and garbage barrels. Papers and such in one pile, lobster shells in another to be dumped in the woods for the little forest animals. And right there on my back lawn I threw the bread scraps because I knew that they would be gone before the sun came up the next day. What kind of beady-eyed animals creep into your back yard under cover of darkness to eat the scraps of food you might have dropped there? I had cats for sure, skunks and raccoons, an occasional dog and coyotes, who were always tolled in by the smell of hundreds of lobster bodies rotting on the edge of my forest. Can you think of anything these animals won’t eat? I once read of an elderly woman who was eaten by her cats before neighbors found the body. Dogs often eat pencils, canning jar rubbers, and shoe tongues, as anyone with normal vision has verified countless times. Unless you walk daily on little paths in the woods, you might not be as conversant with the gastro-intestinal prowess of skunks and raccoons, but I assure you, they are formidable. And then we have the wily coyote who can make a meal on an ossified ox jawbone. My point is that, given enough time, a collection of the aforementioned creatures would be able to eat your town’s entire landfill, tinfoil, storage batteries and all. Now I don’t need to tell you that I’m a 68 year old Maine man with a definite opinion on what is fit to eat and what is not fit to eat. So you can understand the great amount of enjoyment I got one morning when I stepped outside and saw that the only scrap left on my lawn was one of those hippie bean sprout holders they call Pita Bread.
Who did I run into the other day who told me that he enjoyed something I said years ago? I’m sorry that I can’t remember who it was so I could give him credit, but it had to do with the way a Maine man deals with trash. Even monks who live in mountain top caves in Tibet generate trash --- things that have to be burned in the stove or hauled to the dump to be recycled. Some people generate more rubbish than others. But any dump keeper in Maine will tell you that there is a basic difference between the Maine native and people from away. For example, if someone from away hires a carpenter to remodel his house, he will instruct that person to haul all of the left over doors, planks and boards to the dump. And if you happen to be on hand when a truck full of these goodies shows up at the dump, you can do rather well. But Maine men feel that they have to age their trash before they haul it away. They’ll tear out the cracked old 1790 doors and put in nice new sliding glass ones. Or they might put in doors made of laminated fiberboard. But even though they know those old 1790 doors are worthless they can’t throw them away --- until they’re properly aged. So they pile them out beside the barn. Fifteen or 20 years later, they’ll load the rotted remains onto a truck and it down to the burn pile at the dump. A Maine man will do the same thing with old iron. Look behind any native’s barn and you’ll see a pile of twisted, rusty iron. Junk men don’t buy iron any more, and you might need a piece sometime to weld onto your bush hog to hold it together, so that old iron has to lay right there until grass grows over it. Only after you’ve ground it up with the bush hog for 20 or so summers do you haul it away. The Maine universe is governed by inviolate natural laws, and a Maine man’s inability to haul off trash without first aging it is one of them. If you ever see a native hauling load after load of trash to the dump before it has been properly aged, you can bet your bottom dollar that he just married a beautiful young widow from Connecticut.
Did you ever realize that everything is relative? If you go to Fort Kent, you are in just about the coldest, most miserable northernmost point in Maine. But if you simply cross the river, you are in just about the warmest, most pleasant southernmost point in Canada.
A kid who graduated from college almost 10 years ago says that she will not have her college loans paid off for another five years when she is 35. You can understand that she is a teacher. Are there other professions that require a life of poverty for 15 years while they pay off college loans? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com and I’d like to be able to at least wave a warning flag to young people contemplating a life of hardship, not that it will do any good. My 6th cousin once removed, John Robinson, does very well working for an oil company. I think he is a logistics manager. Cousin John writes: I never could understand why some people go to college and take a course of study that doesn't prepare them for a real job. I reply: Do remember that when I started college in 1958, a teacher could expect to earn three times as much as a person in the military and that one year's teacher's salary would buy one a furnished house on an acre or so of land. Back then, a teacher’s salary moved one into the upper middle class. Back then tuition at a state teachers college was $50 or so a semester. It took me 5 Saturday nights playing bass in a dance band at the Blue Goose in Belfast to earn that $50. In my nine years of college I never lived in a dormitory. I would have forgotten this if several people had not enjoyed reminding me of it over the years, but I was known to bring home American chop suey that was destined for the school kitchen garbage can and heat it up in the driveway in a gallon can over a fire of dry twigs because we were not allowed to have hot plates in our rooms. Back then, $5, or half my week’s bass playing salary, paid for my room and the other half went for food. Cousin John continues: “I'm not talking about the people who are enough of a self starter to be writers or artists, but people who take Liberal Arts courses only to find nobody in the business world cares. But I guess these types prefer to be perpetual students.” I reply: I actually did enjoy going to college, and would still be going if I could. But trying to educate me was like pouring water into a bucket filled with holes. Now to reiterate my point and ask you a question. 45 years ago you could work your way through teachers college, emerge debt free, and in one year earn enough to buy a furnished house and barn on an acre of land. Does the same situation exist today in other fields? Today there are college graduates who are about to enter rich kid professions that will enable them to buy a furnished house on an acre of land with one year’s salary. But, thirty years from now will they discover that times have changed so much that their rich kid profession isn’t paying squat and that even their retirement plans have been snatched away? I’m glad that I will never know.
Perhaps you have noticed that our new skills with scanners and email have turned up moldy pictures from old friends. A couple of years ago Jack Alley from Calais sent me a picture of a 17 year-old Robert Skoglund frolicking with New York high school girls on a sandy Jones’s Beach. I probably met Jack and the girls at the summer music camp the University of New Hampshire used to put on for high school kids. And yesterday Jazz Man Ames sent me a picture of Dick Cash that must have been taken in Rochester, New York around 35 years ago. I immediately forwarded it to Dick’s sister Rita in Rockport. She wrote back, “Thank you very much for sending the nice pictures. They are the only really nice ones I have of fairly recent times.” When someone refers to 35 years ago as fairly recent times, I recognize a contemporary.
Although I don’t really know what Habitat for Humanity is, I think that it is an organization that builds houses for people who are unable to earn enough money to build or buy a home for themselves. I understand that Habitat for Humanity is actively supported by some organizations that constantly lobby to bring in foreign labor and constantly lobby to defeat any increase in the minimum wage. You will see pictures in the newspapers of these people, who are always on deck when it comes to grabbing credit for helping poor people, putting in an 8 hour day, hammer in hand, building these Habitats for Humanity. And when they get home at night they write letters to their congressman, urging him to vote against at a destructive $7 an hour minimum wage, when even a $14 an hour minimum wage wouldn’t enable a worker to buy or build a house today. I know it’s not nice, but I can’t think about this without laughing. Wouldn’t top writers like Edgar Allen Beem or Jay Davis have had fun with that in the old Maine Times.
This evening’s topic is non verbal communication. My friend, Walter Lilly from Dresden, is an expert on body language. How you walk and throw your body around says more about you than what you actually say. With actors, this is known as stage presence. You know some very nice people who walk around looking like sneaks. And if you didn’t know them you’d say, “I don’t trust him, or her.” I remember one of my neighbors who always had a big happy smile on his face. A likeable man, but he’d steal the pants off you. He was a crooked miserable man who always smiled and looked happy. My father was a master of non verbal communication. I don’t remember that he said much. My father came from Sweden so he didn’t have to say much. Somewhere, early on way back in the forgotten past, one got the general impression that he meant business, which eliminated all of the empty words you hear parents sprinkling on their children today, and saved us both a lot of time. When I was little, my father wouldn’t say anything when I was doing something bad, but he’d whistle da da dad a dad a da, dad a da. And now that I think of it, that’s probably why he was such a good whistler. I’ve probably only raised my voice two or three times in the past 10 years. My good friend George Page from Gilmanton, NH, was in my driveway one day and saw one of them. There is usually no need of hollering. When someone calls and says, “Is Marsha there?” I clap my hands three times, and she’ll pick up the other phone. When I want her I walk from room to room, saying, “wife, wife, wife.” And now that you’ve brought it to my attention, a voiceless labio dental fricative is about the worst phoneme anyone could use to attract someone’s attention, and from now on I will attempt to attract her attention with, “bang, bang, bang.” How do you communicate with members of your household when words are unnecessary or impossible? Do you have your own private signs and signals, like a secret order? Do you whistle or make faces? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
The people in ancient Rome were pretty tough. They could go to the Coliseum and watch people kill and mutilate each other non stop for an hour. The people who produce the evening news shows know that modern man couldn’t stand that kind of constant pressure, which is why we have commercials telling us how we can help our dogs lose weight.
The people running the Democratic presidential campaign are not very smart. They spend money to promote their candidate, when all they have to do win is sit back quietly and let voters watch the evening news.
You might be surprised to hear that in a few short days I will put on my tuxedo and emcee a variety show. Because my late lobster picnic was nothing more than a variety show and because I have worked on stage elbow to elbow with entertainers on many other pleasant occasions, I know what happens at these things. It is like marriage. The dominant party soon establishes herself and from then on she determines who will do what, when he will do it, and how long he will do it. I am of the breed that humbly stands aside on stage, so if you were to take out your watch and clock me while up there with any other person in my business, you would notice that my mouth would be running perhaps only 30 percent of our allotted 100. This is good. I don’t mind giving ground, and the person who happens to be there with me probably figures the lion’s share his due. The audience is so busy laughing that they don’t notice me sulking there on the side, so everyone is happy. I mention all this so that you will understand that while working with others in stage shows, performers labor beneath the onerous yoke of time constraints. It boils down to is courtesy. Do unto others. Stop on the tick. Do your seven minutes and get out of there. By running 2 minutes over you are saying, “What I am doing is much better than the act that follows.” But while on stage, performers become intoxicated with the audience response. Of course, if that didn’t happen, we wouldn’t do it. That fantastic high, that interaction with all the smiling faces, that great roar of laughter --- when they finally get it --- is what makes it worth while. Makes me wonder why anyone would want to tell a funny story on the radio. But no matter how good it feels out there, we have to force ourselves to stop, even though, as Pogo so nicely said, we are inebriated by the exuberance of our own verbosity. Diana, who is managing the aforementioned variety show, recognizes this inherent weakness in performers and writes, “Your right about the time thing. I have already unleashed the whip and explained to everyone that if they are not off the stage in time, the lights go down and they get off. Diana.” I smiled when I read these words from an innocent, and wrote back, “Hi Diana, How fortuitous it is that I will be on hand to guide and advise you on the finer points of running a variety show. One does not turn the lights down --- one pulls the plug on their sound.” Enquote. Ha. I know what you’re thinking. You’re quicker than I am. The first thing that came into your head when I said pull the plug on their sound, was --- what if there’s a mime out there? Smarty pants. Mimes never run over. They stop right on the tick. Mimes know that for them, we have the fire hose.
I read that about 50% of patients do not follow their doctor’s advice. I blame it on doctors for not giving us the kind of advice we want and am surprised that the figure is not closer to 95%. Who is going to take a doctor’s advice when he tells us to quit smoking, quit drinking, eat a pound of salad and walk a mile every day? Children already know these things by the time they’re in the fourth grade. Do men and women with IQs of 140 need to study medicine until they’re 34 to learn that smoking and fast food kills people? “Hey Dave, congratulations on finally graduating from medical school. Now that you’ve got a license to heal the sick tell me the most important thing you learned over the past 15 years.” “Well, humble, you’re not going to believe this, but smoking, lack of exercise and those hamburgers and fries that you get through the take out window, will kill, or even worse, incapacitate you.” Ask yourself if doctors really want us to take their good advice. Think how many of them would be unemployed if we did.
After being invited to a sixth grade stage presentation of Romeo & Juliet, I replied: Len, I would be careful if I were you. Is there any place for subversives in our present quantitative bottom-line someone-must-be-held-accountable school system? Would you want your child to waste his valuable time in school learning the need to respect others or how to be a good neighbor when it can’t even be measured on a test? Is your school going to qualify for federal and state funding if they teach children how to cook or build bookcases? How do you measure courtesy, love, respect or a pleasant smile? Ask yourself if your students will be able to survive in Yale if you teach them that it’s not nice to lie and cheat. If Maine teachers want to do the job that is presently expected of them, they had better be teaching kids how to become mindless obedient workers who all got good grades.
Some of us in St. George haven’t gone very far. I live only a few hundred feet from where my ggg grandfather lived over 200 years ago. Over 190 years ago he warmed his feet at the fireplace that was in my house. Some of his descendants who are my third cousins live right next door. The other day, in a moment of deep refection at the dinner table I pointed at the house next door and said to my wife Marsha, “Ten generations have lived right there --- and I knew 7 of them.” Marsha said, “Only 7?”
Here’s a letter from my friend Richard, who is the funniest man I know. For years he provided the substance for many newspaper columns that appeared above my name. Listen closely. Dear humble, I read your letter in the BDN. It's a very nice example of wasting no words to convey a message...the value of which came to me too late in life. One might wonder how I ever managed to avoid learning the value of minimalism in all endeavors, given the fact that I was raised among people so frugal that they spoke while inhaling, as well as while exhaling, so as not to waste the air going in and out of their lungs. I see in today's BDN a story entitled, "Fires shot, begs police to shoot him." It seems that a 28-year old Rockland man appeared in front of Rockland's public safety building and fired off a round from a shotgun, in an effort to attract the attention of the police inside. Once the attention of the Rockland constabulary had been sufficiently obtained, and police officers from both near and far had arrived on the scene, he "began yelling for someone to kill him." He most be a newly-arrived resident of Rockland to believe that getting yourself killed by the police will get you off the city's tax rolls. Why, if it were that easy, we'd all be doing it.
I'm reading a scholarly treatise on laughter. This morning I read that people seldom laugh when they are alone. I laugh all the time when I'm alone. How can anyone think, without laughing out loud? Hear this. Before I’d read ten pages the author insulted me twice. He used two very common words: onomatopoeia and glossolalia, and after each of these words he defined them for me in brackets. He is assuming that you and I don’t know what onomatopoeia and glossolalia mean. Do you think that anyone who talks down to you deserves your attention? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
I’m an old man and one of the bad things about being old, is that I get itchy ankles when I wear socks. Who ever heard of such foolishness? Fortunately, I have discovered that if I slather on a bit of bag balm, the itching goes away. If I walk the Bag Balm to my ankles every morning, I don’t even have itchy ankles. I don’t know about you but I can’t get through the day without bag balm. For years I’ve carried around just enough in a little glass container in my pocket. It’s much better for the lips and much cheaper than anything you can buy in a small tube. Bag balm comes from Lyndonville, Vermont, where my wife’s father Bill Paradis was born, so even the writing on the can provides me with meaningful soothing comfort. I put Bag Balm right up there with duct tape, when it comes to defining the Maine man’s all purpose tool. Bag Balm is the comfort to me that whiskey has been to others in ages past. Which reminds me of a song about whiskey that I must have heard from my father. This is roughly translated from the original Swedish: There’s a wonderful drink that has come to our land To strengthen the mind and to aid the shaking hand Helps the cripple to walk and the blind man to see And now I’m going to tell you what it’s done for me. Although I do not approve of the sentiments, it is a very nice schottische. My mother and father used to play that tune at the Swedish dances when I was a little kid. But I want to get back to my original topic, if you’ll remind me what it was. I think I read that thousands of years ago the average life expectancy of human beings was only 28 years. I would not be surprised if that was because they didn’t have Bag Balm.
You might have heard a poem that contains the words, “When a man gets old.” Perhaps it’s a book. When a man gets old, things that never used to work right continue to run down. I have had hearing aids for a few years, but in some situations I figure I’m guessing at 30% of the English language. At grange, where acoustics are bad, I sometimes don’t hear anything at all. I have recently been haunting the Penobscot Language School in Rockland. You should check out The Penobscot School on the web and drop by at least once just for fun. Every noon several friends sit around a table and munch lettuce leaves and granola as they converse in French, Spanish, German or Italian. Although no English is allowed around the sacred dinner table, I did ask someone a question in English in another part of the building, and when she replied, I couldn’t figure out if she were speaking French or Italian or what it was because I couldn’t understand a word of it. I finally got right up close to her and asked her where she was born, and looked at her lips so I could semi-read her answer, and she said, “Houston.” Houston, we have a problem. It is with my hearing. You have heard me say many times on this program that the first sentence anyone should learn to say in a foreign language is, “My friend will pay.” Now I am convinced that the second sentence anyone learns in a foreign language should be, “We are all friends here. There is no need to whisper.”
Not long ago my brother and I were looking out the window at the snow, and I said, “Why do you suppose our people never went south. How could they live in this cold and misery all winter?” And my brother, who knows more than anybody about St. George history and the daily lives of our ancestors who lived here, said, “They would have died.” And then he rattled off a list of people who had gone down south on boats who had come back sick. Ed Gilchrest, a brother in law to my great grandmother and who, in 1854, was living right next door to where I live now, was one of them. Alex’s grandfather. Captain Freddie’s father. And he told me that even our grandfather who went ashore in Key West in the 1880s, got malaria and was bothered with it all his life. I didn’t know that. Many people out back of our church died, just because they went south and got some horrible tropical disease. My brother said that one fellow wrote home from New Orleans that it was a city of pestilence, mosquitoes and vice. It is my understanding that they have pretty well licked the yellow fever and malaria problem in New Orleans. Now, if you’d like a short winter vacation down there, about the only thing you have to worry about are the pickpockets at Mardi Gras.
My friend Winky hates the cold so much, he hates the misery of Maine winters so much, that he finally moved to Key West where he could be warm and comfortable. Last I heard, he found a good job down there working in a meat locker.
At the risk of sounding un-American, I’d like to learn to say and understand a few simple things in French and German. Please remember that because the brain contains several compartments that do not seem to be connected, the ability to read another language does not mean that you can speak it or understand simple conversation. As far as I know, anyone is welcome to show up at noon at the Penobscot School in Rockland, munch lettuce leaves or granola while seated around a dinner table, and listen to one person, usually an American, speak French or German non stop for an hour. Their words are sometimes punctuated by grunts of agreement by the others in attendance. The other day I was one of the only two people there, so I got to not only contribute my grunts, but to also articulate my sentiments. This is what I learned. Did you see that ram they made to test the safety of side airbags in little cars? The ram is as high as the bumper on those big black station wagon cars that you always see the bad CIA guys driving in Mel Gibson movies. I think they call them SUVs. The great big simulated SUV bumper hits the little car broadside --- at only 30 miles per hour, the side airbag drops down, and the dummy flops around inside with a simulated broken neck. Some little cars survive better than others. The man on TV said that little car makers have got to beef up the amount of steel or structural support so passengers in little cars can survive being hit broadside by an SUV that has run a red light. Wouldn’t it make more sense to outlaw SUVs? Sehr schlim, oder?
I read in a letter from a friend that pollution from coal-fired power plants has contributed to Maine’s children having the highest asthma rates in the nation. Before you cast your first stone, ask yourself if you are free from environmental sin. Exposure to cats, horses, hay or smoke makes me gasp for breath. You love your horse and your cat but your new baby might have inherited your great grandfather’s allergy genes. Just being near the clothing you wore out in the horse barn might make your kid sick. Why do Maine children have the highest asthma rates in the nation? Can it be because 8 months out of the year they might come into a warm and cozy home heated by a woodstove? If you have ever run a wood stove in your home, or if you have a wood furnace in your cellar, you know that 100 percent of the smoke does not go up the chimney. The microscopic particles in whatever is left over is filtered through your lungs. Yes, we like to see you out there on the street with signs protesting coal generated pollution, because we know that before you left home to point a finger at others, your own household was in order. A couple of years ago I mentioned on this program that when I first met you at the common ground fair, I asked if you had a cat. If you didn’t, I would give you a hug. If you did, I would step back because there is no way I could survive the cat dander on your clothes. The next year at the common ground fair I noticed that just about every friend I met said they had cats.
A young Portland friend, whose produced-in-Maine television program is presently available to 35 million viewers, writes to me that “We are losing the best and the brightest kids because they don't have the opportunities that we at People, Places & Plants are building ourselves.” Both his fear and the answer to this ubiquitous but hollow mantra are incorporated his sentence. Maine’s best and brightest kids are able to build their own opportunities. He is one of them. Your kid is another. If you consider money to be an index of success, I know a man who lives on the same land in the town of St. George where he was born and brought up who earned a million dollars last year. It ain’t where you go --- it’s what you know. Being a Type A individual who can work an 18 hour day without even feeling tired helps, too. The folks who wring their hands and cry that there are only a few good jobs in Maine are very often the people who moved here and took them. Too many Maine boys and girls have an inferiority complex. They were brought up to believe that they can’t do anything and that living and working in Maine proves it. They are also taught that there is nothing in Maine to attract a child with ability. Neighbors automatically assume that anyone who writes home from an apartment in Newark must be successful. When I’m doing a stage show, I’ll sometimes tell the audience that I live seven houses from where I was born and brought up. Then I’ll ask how many of them still live in the same town where they were born. If any hands appear, I sigh and say, “Two or three of us here without no ambition.” "Our best and brightest are moving away" is an empty, undefined phrase. One hears it so often one suspects it is perpetuated to serve some nefarious economic or political end. Ask yourself if the best and brightest really do move away. I am descended from the Williamsons and Farquhars from Scotland, the Fogartys and Robinsons from Ireland, the Hilts from Germany, the Carpenters from England, the Gilchrests from who knows where and the Svensons from Sweden. Were they the best and brightest or were they simply too numb to earn a living in their own home town? Is “My daughter has a great job in New York City” a nice way of telling your neighbors that she isn’t clever enough to earn a living in Maine? Every day I give thanks that over the past 270 years most of my relatives moved out of St. George. If none of my ggggg grandfather's descendants had moved since 1734, the Thomaston area would make Hong Kong look like a howling Siberian wilderness. Why do people move? In 1816 Maine people had a good reason to leave a place that offered 12-month winters. In 1845 my great-grandmother went down to the Lowell mill to earn some pocket change, but she soon returned home. She hadn’t intended to stay. Because of restricted shipping during the Civil war, many Maine coast seafaring people had to look for what they hoped would be greener pastures. “Stay on The Farm Boys" is a good old grange song. Over 100 years ago Maine farmers worried about their children who looked longingly at the promise of a better life down at the Pittsburgh steel mills. Now, many of Maine’s best of the brightest have chosen to earn a living through the Internet. They are working out of their homes in Cutler, South Hiram, and Ashland. Professor Allen Pease tells me that his computer problems are solved by a man in India. Unfortunately, if you listen to the social scientists of my generation, people who never leave their homes and who do nothing but look at computer screens all day are not working. It will be another 20 years before a Maine mother will be able to look a neighbor in the eye and proudly say, “Nope, I ain’t seen him much neither, but he’s still down there --- must be 34 years old now. Runs his cables right out of our cellar.” If you want to define success as income earned by the best and the brightest, you should probably first quietly ease Maine people into two categories: those who are content and getting by with what they have, and those like my millionaire friend who will never have enough. On perhaps the most important level, did yesterday's best and brightest become your friendly next-door neighbors who like your kids and tolerate your dog? Or did the best and brightest evolve into smooth, me-first service providers who always have an excuse for not doing the job you thought you paid them to do? Your job isn’t your life but the best of the extremely bright enjoy their work. My brother Jim, who was visiting friends on a Maine island, observed a man cutting alders next to the small airport runway. Jim asked about the man and was told that while in high school he had worked as a caretaker for a wealthy summer resident. Discovering that the young man was brilliant, his employer sent him away to Harvard where he easily earned a degree, and came back home where he still happily digs clams and cuts alders. On the other hand, remember that tens of thousands of years ago, when the best and brightest migrated down through our continent, some of them ended up in a swamp in Florida.
One of the most useful utensils in any Maine kitchen or newspaper office is the scanner. From time to time you’ll hear that a car has gone off the road, and many years ago John Parker told me that if you can get there before the police, you get to keep the beer the driver hid in the bushes. The other day my friend Art and his recently divorced editor were working in their newspaper office when they heard some lady from Somerville reporting an unwanted male in her home. She turned to Art, pushed back her chair, and said, "What’s the shortest route to Somerville?"
End April 2004
The other day while thinking about guns I looked up the Second Amendment. It says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” I’m not a Supreme Court Justice, but I think that means we can keep guns in case we need to serve in the militia. And I interpret serve in the militia to mean a license to shoot folks from away who swagger into St. George and try to impose their form of government on me. How do you feel about that? Do Maine people still need guns in their homes, loaded and ready to repel invaders? Of course you will remember that when Hitler went into Poland and Denmark and Holland, all those young boys, his troops if you will, didn’t think of themselves as invaders --- Hitler’s young boys had been raised and trained to believe that they were liberating forces. Like almost every invading army that has ever walked the planet, their job was to get those shoulders back and get in there and free those poor oppressed people. During the early 1940s a very common word was “propaganda.” I heard it all the time. I didn’t know what propaganda meant, but I knew that it had something to do with the war. Any adult who has read a comprehensive history book realizes that propaganda is an integral component of all wars. So --- you don’t have to read too many history books before you realize that any foreign troops marching into St. George would have been told, long before they left home, that they were liberating forces. That’s the way these things have to work. If young boys can’t be convinced that they are an important part of a noble cause in a far away land, seeing a few friends picked off while swimming butt-naked in the Long Cove quarry might discourage a few of the brighter ones. Even those who came here seeking cultural enrichment might think of a more congenial place to find it. Imagine how surprised all those innocent young boys would be, arriving here, expecting a warm welcome by the general populace once they freed us from our oppressive town manager and wicked governor, only to find so many of us sniping away at them from behind every stone wall and tree. In their young one-track minds, it naturally follows that anyone who doesn’t welcome them must be a fanatical insurgent who has to be hunted down and shot like a rat. They weren’t told that The Second Amendment gives us the right to defend our families, our homes, our way of life and that we will jolly well do it. They are young. They can’t realize that no matter how bad things might be here, we really don’t appreciate liberators from away who kill our friends and family while shooting their way into town with a promise to set us free. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, and I must admit that if St. George were occupied by foreign troops, I’d hesitate to break out the glass with my gun barrel and shoot at them from my living room window. They only do that in cowboy movies. When the Concord patriots shot at the British soldiers from their homes, the soldiers went inside and put all the men to death. I’ve learned from history, so I’d be more likely to sit around a smoldering fire out in the woods, eating horsemeat with my neighbors, while figuring out how to pick them off one at a time. My high school history teacher, Mr. Honeywell, used to say, “No doubt about it.” No doubt about it: Blasting away at unwanted occupying forces from behind stone walls and trees is a time honored American tradition, established by our gritty ancestors who didn’t like being bullied. Yes, there might have a been a few wimps or moderates who initially didn’t care if it went one way or the other, but every time the British killed another fanatical patriot, a dozen or so of his indifferent friends were nudged over the line and reached for their muskets. Now that all the smoke and dust has settled, everyone agrees that King George III wasn’t all that clever. The only prudent thing he did for the British was to hire Hessian soldiers to take some of the fire. I wish I hadn’t looked up the Second Amendment because I don't have time to consider all of the attendant ramifications. Chris Faye ought to write a novel about how you and I would react if Maine were invaded. Sandra Dickson might illustrate it --- if she could bring herself to paint a dead horse.
Do you know what Vicodin is? I do. When you get 50 or so emails in one day advertising Vicodin, you make it your business to go on line to find out what it is. Surprise. Vicodin is not what I thought it was. Here’s what I learned. Vicodin addiction is an extremely powerful disease that affects the lives of many Americans each year; however, with proper treatment vicodin addiction can be overcome. In recent years prescription drug abuse and addiction has been on the rise but denial around the issue of addiction also continues to persist. Vicodin addiction is the obsessive-compulsive misuse of a mood-altering drug. In this sense, misuse means using the drug without the authorization of a medical profession, or using the drug when it is no longer needed as prescribed. Vicodin addiction can have devastating effects on a person's mind and body. So. There you have it. From what I just read, vicodin is right up there with cigarettes and alcohol when it comes to destroying your body and wrecking your personal life. No wonder so many young people can’t wait to get started with each and every one of them.
Here’s a letter from computer guru and radio friend John in Nova Scotia: Dear humble, The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. Contrarily, the French have lots of fat in their diets and also suffer fewer heart attacks than either the British or Americans. Conclusion: Eat whatever you want. It's speaking English that kills you.
From time to time human beings witness an event that is so bizarre, so unthinkable, that they are afraid to tell even their closest friends and relatives about it for fear that everyone will question their sanity. You can think of a dozen books and movies that have been written around this premise. Those who made the mistake of telling what they saw were dragged away, screaming, “You’ve got to believe me. I swear it’s true. Please, please, won’t somebody believe me.” But from that day forward, nobody ever believed a word that the poor old raving critter said. Fully cognizant of the attendant ramifications, I am still going to risk my unblemished reputation for telling the truth by passing along for your consideration something that I observed while eating a sandwich at the Penobscot School’s Stem Tish on Monday. Four nice women and a mustached man in a Frenchy looking hat and pants were seated around the table speaking the French language. I had just figured out that “mets” m-e-t-s means put, when two of the ladies started to speak at the same time. One turned to the other, said, “pardon,” and stopped --- talking.
Who made that TV commercial where the man in the blue shirt talks about Baldacci and racinos? I didn’t pay too much attention to it until I noticed that it didn’t tell me anything. So the next time it came on I watched it a bit more closely. I even asked Marsha what the man was trying to tell us and she didn’t know. Why are the opinion shaping geniuses who made that spot wasting their time in a tiny ad agency in Portland? Anyone capable of creating a commercial so vague that it can be eagerly embraced by people on both sides of the issue should be down in New York City making TV spots for our presidential candidates.
Is it nice to scare little kids? When I was very small, one heard talk of an ethereal being named the Boogie Man who would get bad children. The Boogie Man lived in dark corners and although one never saw him, we accepted him on faith. What kind of disreputable or scary person would you put right up there on a level with the Boogie Man? Do you have a neighbor who would even come close? What in the world does he look like and what does he do? My neighbor Timmy Polky told me that we used to have one around here. When his nephew Hoggy was little, Hoggy’s mother would say to him, “Hoggie, I don’t know how you can walk around dressed in rags like you do. You’re starting to look just like Robert Skoglund.”
On May 11th, my old yellow house will celebrate its 193rd birthday. I bought it, completely furnished, from one of mother’s third cousins. When I moved in, I admit that I put a stainless steel sink in the kitchen and a bathtub and flush in a small closet upstairs. I did not, however, find it necessary to tear out any of the walls. But isn’t that the first thing some people do when they buy an old house? Rip out this and rip out that. And the same goes for the grounds outdoors. Fill in this hole and dig another hole there. But, then, after you’ve lived in the house and on the grounds for a few years, you begin to notice little things. You discover why the hole you filled in needed to be there, and why the wall you tore out needed to be there. When we move into houses that are almost 200 years old, why shouldn’t we credit the family that has lived in it for the past 150 years with a bit of intelligence? It takes generations to find out where the furniture belongs in a house, and the people who put in the walls did it for a reason. Why can’t we learn from them why the house is the way it is? If you ever filled in a hole out back, as I did, and later learned why it needed to be there, or regretted that you tore out a very necessary wall, I’d like to hear from you. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
The police chief was front page news last week. Since then I’ve been asking myself why we expect the perfection in an official that it would be impossible to find in our friends or ourselves. You will remember Dirty Harry’s problem --- he shot armed robbers and psychopathic killers on the spot instead of taking them in for evaluation and counseling. If your police chief caught every crook in your county and put them in jail, does it matter if he is willing to tolerate petty bickering in his own department? Is it human nature to never know when you’re well off? No matter how good it gets, why do we continually demand more? Why do we long for an unattainable perfection? Suppose your husband is a handsome, brilliant hunk who owns a big company that he built himself. His neighbors love him, his employees have never had it better, and everything is perfect at home, as long as you overlook his last-gasp dalliance with a young secretary. Seven out of eight isn’t good enough for you, is it? Why, why, you ask yourself, couldn’t you have married a man who was free from sin? On the other hand, suppose your husband really isn’t all that clever but was lucky enough to inherit his father’s business. He reneges on his employee’s retirement, cuts back the wages of the ones he doesn’t fire, is always fighting with his neighbors, bankrupts his father’s company after first robbing the stockholders, and then thanks God for keeping him free from sin. It is my understanding that there are now women out there who figure that only getting one out of eight is doing well.
What do you think about genetic engineering? Is it a good thing or is this DNA and genes thing something that human beings shouldn’t mess with? You might agree that we all have our weakest link, and even if we live to be 100, that weakest link is going to be the factor that will sooner or later bring us to our knees. I haven’t read up on it, but I think that every body is built of little building blocks and every body is no stronger than the weakest link. Every body is also different. I don’t think that two are the same. Some bodies will break down when they are 30 years old. Some bodies will fail at 40, some at 50. Some will fail because of intrinsic flaws. Others will fail sooner than they were programmed to fail because of environmental factors, like smog, constant exposure to bad mold or powder from copy machines. Cigarette smoke and asbestos are now known to chop years off an expected life span. I just learned that Ernest Crie, a man whom I liked and admired ever since I met him over 50 years ago, just died at the age of 100. He smoked a pipe every day for probably 85 years and I can’t help but wonder how long he might have lived if he hadn’t. You’d have to look a long while to find body building blocks as good as the ones inherited by Ernest Crie. Suppose your husband wakes up in the middle of the night. His arm hurts. He eats aspirin. He eats Advil. He applies hot pads and cold packs. The pain finally somewhat abates so he is able to get back to sleep. This goes on night after night and there is only one way to get away from it because he is afflicted with a rare neurological muscular disorder for which there is no cure. Suppose gurus in human chemistry had spotted that weak gene just by comparing the collective DNA of his potential parents, and had said to them, “Hey kids, unless we step in here and replace one little snippet of DNA, in 50 years or so your son is programmed to get very sick.” You might think that genetic engineering is a bad thing. Or you might think it is something that will someday alleviate some unnecessary human suffering. I’m not going to say if it’s good or bad. But how about the woman who is roused out at 2 AM every morning by her husband’s moaning, and gets up to fetch cold packs for his arm. Had she been on the ethics board would she have voted to snip out that weak gene, and replace it with one that would offer both of them another 30 years of good night’s sleep? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
Radio friend David writes: Dear humble, You’ve had some comments about Maine folks' indifference to problems like heart attacks. I was talking to a woman who's getting on some in age. And she plays piano some, and sings, with the local octogenarian dance band. She didn't play as much as she used to, because she'd had quite an embarrassing incident a while back. Seems she was performing New Year's Eve, been playing all evening, and it was coming up to midnight, and there she was at the piano, singing. Well, right then she had a heart attack. She was able to get up and walk off stage, and it turned out all right; but she was just horribly embarrassed to have to leave the stage that way, and hasn't played for a whole evening since. Yes, David, I was mowing a field in Owls Head when a man who was watching me fell down and broke his leg. He was writhing on the ground, but he didn’t want me to call an ambulance because the embarrassment was greater than the pain. Which reminds me of Roger who was a year ahead of me in high school. When Roger had a heart attack and they came to carry him out of the house, he insisted that he could walk out to the ambulance. He almost could. If I had a heart attack on stage I wouldn’t be embarrassed but I would be terribly annoyed because it would certainly mean I’d have to give them their money back.
end 5-7-2004
Be glad if you missed the Senate hearing on TV. It was a rough day for a lot of the people involved, because a few had to pretend that they were indignant and distressed by the matter under consideration when they were really just scared. For days staff writers had polished statements for each Senator to read, because it was obviously a partisan issue. Lot of posturing there. Each side pushed its own agenda. While watching I screamed several times, and that was just at the outright lies. “Disingenuous” is the euphemism employed by newsmen afterward. You might remember Al Capps’ Lilly White League in Li’l Abner. “We are the lilly whiters, pure as driven snow, wherever there is wickedness happily we will go. We are the Lilly Whiters, brave and pure and strong. We are the really righters, everybody else is wrong.” Anyone who reads a newspaper printed in almost any county in the world will see that Americans are now considered arrogant, bullying Lilly Whiters. It’s not a good feeling. Countless millions heard and saw on live TV a US Senator from Texas bemoaning what was touted as an unusual departure from good old American values. What are American values? I can remember when a man who lived in Texas could be dragged down the road behind a pickup truck just because a few of his neighbors didn’t like his looks. Would the Senator say that that incident wasn’t typically American? He’s probably right: it just happened to be the way they did things in Texas. When I was in the Coast Guard, the old boatswain’s mate from Georgia would tell us about the people in his neighborhood he’d seen dragged off and hung by the neck from trees. There are obviously a powerful few in this country who consider the dissemination of good old-time American values a noble duty --- an obligation. It’s taking some Americans a while to learn that oppressed people in other parts of the world would like to get along without them.
The evening news called my attention to the TV program Friends. How can a program run on TV every week for 10 years without my ever knowing about it? Well, I would never have seen it if it had canned laughter in the background. When I click to a program that has canned laughter, I click on by. Canned laughter is telling me that I don’t have brains enough to figure out that something is funny. And, when I hear canned laughter after something that isn’t funny, it is telling me that something hilarious must have gone right over my head. Either way, canned laughter is telling me that I’m a loser. On the other hand, while watching some Senate hearings, I laughed every time a public figure was blatantly disingenuous. Give thanks that you don't get canned laughter with the evening news. If every televised lie by a public figure were followed by canned laughter, there'd be no time left for the commercials.
Will you give me your opinion on kids running off to Europe for five or six years before they go to college? I went to college until I was 34, and for years I advised kids to get their doctorates before they were 30. But ---- over the past year, I've been thinking that if I had it to do over, I'd work as a slave in 8 or 10 countries, six months in each one, before going to college. While I was picking up a new language, I'd learn how to repair washing machines and electric motors. I'd learn how to fix computers and automobile transmissions. Then I'd go to college with 10 or so cultures and languages and a dozen practical skills under my belt that one could use when the inevitable planned recessions --- the recessions that employers have to have to keep wages down --- you could use these skills when recessions put speakers and the other arts out of business. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, spent her junior high school year in Chile. When I flunked out of music school I spent 6 months in Sweden. Anyway, what do you think about this. Do you think your kids should get his or her doctorate before they are 30, or should they live in 8 or 10 countries and learn languages, other cultures and a dozen or so useful trades before they even start? Last week I spoke to some kids in Augusta who just got what I think is a high school equivalency degree. One girl was going study in Italy and I was delighted, because it gave me a chance to say what I had already planned to say. But while thinking about this on the way up to Augusta, I realized that because I am 68, I had forgotten one important thing that messes up all normal people between the ages of 16 and 26, and that is the juices that simmer and boil. I had forgotten how much time a young man can waste just standing outside of a window and wondering if her regular boyfriend from Finland, the one with a knife, is already in there. Talk to me about study abroad. Did you do it? Was it a good thing? Would you do it again? Would you advise young people to do it? Don’t talk to me about England or Australia. You already speak English, so why waste any time there? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
Just about the most unsettling thing I’ve seen lately on TV was not written by Stephen King. It was a Dateline show on a cult. How does anyone get sucked up by a cult? We all have friends who know that they are God’s chosen people and that the rest of us are going to burn in hell. I have a friend who tells me that he rolls on the floor and talks in tongues. Some cultists home school their children only to keep them from having friends and finding out that they are different. It’s a control thing. The women have spacey eyes, often breed like rabbits and are dominated by their husbands. I read on the web that a cult is "an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and demanding total commitment." According to Zablocki, cults are at high risk of becoming abusive to members, in part because members' adulation of charismatic leaders contributes to their becoming corrupted by the power they seek and are accorded. As I recall, this cult started off as a Bible study group. The TV narrator blamed twisted religious beliefs, whatever that might mean, for the death of a child. I immediately looked for more information on cults on the web, and from what I read there are support groups for family members and even half way houses to help recovering cultists back into society. Cults are scary, because we don’t see them on TV until from one to several hundred people suddenly end up dead. This show was about a young couple who had starved their baby to death because God was going to provide. Unless one is an infant, the premise is a valid one, because God will provide for an adult cultist. Elderly parents, who worry about their hungry and deprived grandchildren, will often provide the cultists with shelter, food and money --- for a few years. But sooner or later the old folks realize that their money is only enabling their kid and spouse to continue in their cultist behavior, and finally shut off the money with the hope that somebody will have to get a job. At that point, well-meaning neighbors, who feel bad for the kids, kick in with groceries. So God provides. A well fed cultist who hasn’t worked in 10 years has empirical data to support his thesis that God will provide. Perhaps cultists know something that we don’t.
It was mismanaged badly. I heard a US Senator say it on Tim Russett’s TV show. It was mismanaged badly. Sounds like something that has been translated word for word from Lithuanian, Old English or French. The fact that it grated on my ears bothers me because it is a terrible thing to be 68 years old and suddenly wake up and realize that one has spent a lifetime learning things that have no practical value. Last week I was in Cony High School, which you might know is in Augusta. And when I went in the room, instead of seeing the bright, smiling faces, the first thing I noticed was that the history teacher who had been writing on the blackboard didn’t know nothing about apostrophes. Yeah, there’s an s on the end of that word. Better put an apostrophe in front of it. Yes, it works with English words in Dutch. In Dutch they would write, “Please hand me the photo’s.” with an apostrophe before the s. In Swedish they spell bus with double s. Buss. So I’m never sure how to spell busses in English. One s or two? But why should I notice this apostrophe thing? Yes, more and more errors are creeping into email. We write their for there and to for too, but I know that most of us who type like machine guns do know better. Good topic for a doctoral thesis here. If you ever read a study that proves that we think phonemically instead of orthographically, please remember that you heard it here first. Yes, this is a rant on unmitigated snobbery. We are all snobs. Knowing a bit of trivia about something that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and then flaunting it is a snob thing, and if you know someone who isn’t a snob about something, please let me know who it is. Miss Marple was able to solve a crime, just because she knew that a real gardener would never plant michelmas daisies beneath a monkey puzzle. James Bond knew there was a bomb in the cake because the waiter served it with a bottle of eel ah mal ah la tet 68 instead of eel ah mal ah la gosch 67, --- which no real waiter would do. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, has the impression that colors of shirts and pants have to match up, in some mysterious way. You’ve heard Tim Sample, master of satire, talk about being “color coordinated.” Tim sees through this color coordination thing, which is a real issue with the people who have accepted it on faith. They use words like mauve and salmon and talk about warm or cool colors just as if they meant something. Some people say that the color of their rugs and walls and curtains match, just as if anyone would know if they didn’t. My question --- you know someone who flaunts his or her accumulation of esoteric and absolutely useless knowledge. You smile every time you hear your friend expounding but you don’t say a word. What is the topic? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
I was down to the Lahey Clinic the other day and it was not a pleasant visit. Because --- to get into the Lahey Clinic, you have to walk through clouds of cigarette smoke generated by all the cancer patients who now have to smoke outside of the door. I even had to move my car in the parking lot, because I was downwind of a woman who was enjoying a cigarette in the privacy of her own car. Of course she had her window screwed down. On the positive side, while there I got to see a USA Today newspaper which I always enjoy because of the color weather map on the back page. Why is it that California is always breaking records for high temperatures? If Maine were ever to break a record you can be sure that it would be for record low temperatures. In the same paper I read that hog-dog fights may be outlawed in Louisiana. Proponents of the sport defend it as a feature of rural life. Funny, I don’t remember of ever seeing hog-dog fights at the Common Ground Fair and I thought they had rural living pretty well covered. I’ll have to ask Will Sugg or Mort Mather about hog-dog fights.
As a linguist, I can assure you that living languages constantly change. This is because languages have to accommodate and reflect the culture in which one lives. Yes. An example. At the doctor’s office you are no longer greeted with “Good morning,” but “I assume you still have Medicare and Anthem.”
You cannot live someone else’s life for them. You cannot make plans for others. No matter how carefully you might try to instill your values into your children, there comes a day when you have no control over who they bring home for dinner. Your child might attend a Baptist Sunday school for 12 years and then run off at the age of 23 to join a cult. How do you tell your mother, who had her nose cut off because of melanoma, that your son has opened a tanning parlor? You receive an award for your outstanding 35 years as a high school counselor the same year your kid is sentenced to rehab. You try, you cry, you ask yourself why. But at last there comes a bright sunny morning when you and your spouse jump out of bed and give each other a knowing smile that says, “Good luck kids. We’re going to spend it.”
You might remember that hoax web site I mentioned a while back that had a page about genetic engineering --- how you could now strain out all the weak genes --- those bad genes that would enable your kid about to be conceived to get cancer, diabetes, ALS and all those other annoying things somewhere down the road --- and replace them with tough genes that should enable the candidate to survive sickness free for a hundred years or so like Ernest Crie. I don’t think they can really do that --- yet. But on my way to town to have my friend Dr. Dreher check my eyes this morning, I got to thinking about what group of people would raise a howl if they could. Well, some would. I asked Dreher what he’d do if genetic engineering eliminated the need for his services, and he said, “Go fishing.”
The last time I was in to see Dr. Dreher was 9 years ago. I remember the day well, because I had been stupid enough to try to sharpen a blade without wearing glasses. I was in too much of a hurry to put them on so Dreher had to dig the steel bits out of my eye. Do, do wear some kind of glasses before you grind. Things have changed in Dr. Dreher’s office since then. This morning two very nice ladies at the front desk greeted me. They were very intelligent and impressed me because they did not mechanically say, “How are you today?” or “Cash or Insurance?” Another very capable young woman then led me into a back room and put my chin and forehead up against an expensive looking machine so she could make some calculations. Then she took me into another room and checked me out on another piece of equipment that was even more elaborate than the first. Before I left, an even younger girl took pictures of my eyes for their files. You can see what I’m getting at here, can’t you. I anticipate a day in the not too distant future, when I’ll come home from a similar visit. My wife will ask what Dreher had to say, and I’ll simply tell her, “He wasn’t there. They don’t need him anymore.”
To make my radio program I work all week to find items that I hope will inform and interest you. Sometimes I attempt to guide the direction of your thinking. Sometimes I am so overcome by what I have seen or heard that I simply unload it on you and let you decide for yourself what it means. This next item is one of those instances. Earlier this week at a parish meeting at the church we elected my next door neighbor, Etta Hall, to serve another five year term on the board of directors. Etta is 96.
Look up Alan Abel on the Internet. Alan Abel is an interesting guy. I haven’t heard from Alan Abel for a long time, but as I recall, Alan Abel was a drummer with the Sauter Finnegan band. This is what I found when I looked up Alan Abel: Great news for girl watchers: Ogling over women's breasts is good for a man's health and can add years to his life, medical experts have discovered. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, "Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out" declared gerontologist Dr. Karen Weatherby. Dr. Weatherby and fellow researchers at three hospitals in Frankfurt, Germany, reached the startling conclusion after comparing the health of 200 male outpatients - half of whom were instructed to look at busty females daily, the other half told to refrain from doing so. The study revealed that after five years, the chest-watchers had lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates and fewer instances of coronary artery disease. "Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation," explains Dr. Weatherby. "There's no question: Gazing at breasts makes men healthier." "Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half. We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years." It’s my understanding that they were unable to duplicate this experiment in France because they couldn’t find 100 men who could keep from looking.
Did you see Rommel’s grandson on TV? Must have been Public Television, because no other channel would carry such an interesting program. Brought back memories. When I was a kid I heard about Rommel, The old Desert Fox. My grandfather Skoglund would crank up the radio as loud as it would go and then he’d sit next to it with his hand behind his ear to find out what Rommel was doing. Which reminds me that someone sent me an email that explains why some Americans are now wearing red on Fridays. The email says, Quote: “When Norway was occupied by Germany in 1940, Norwegian women began to knit RED caps for children as a way of letting everyone know that they did not like what was happening in their country, that they didn't like having their freedom taken away by the Nazis. My great aunt, Karin Knudson Myrstad, was one of the women who knit red caps for her children and others. Similarly, in Denmark, women knit red-white-and blue caps (colors of the Allies) for the very same reason. The result was that whenever Norwegians and Danes left their homes -- to go to the store, to work, etc, they could see that THE MAJORITY opposed what was going on in their country. As you know, both countries organized effective Resistance efforts and changed history -- everything that happened began simply by wearing red! (or the colors of the Allies, in Denmark).” End of quote. We have talked about this before and I think that the person who sent out this email should remember that the young boys that Hitler sent into Denmark and Norway did not think that they were taking away freedom. You can’t blame the kids. They had been told that they were bringing freedom and a new and better form of government to some backward people who were ruled by kings. For years, Hitler’s troops, these young kids, had been taught to believe that they were the freedom fighters. So when they finally went into Norway and Denmark, they knew they were part of Hitler’s glorious effort to establish order and free an enslaved people from archaic and oppressive governments. Of course, there are always a few puppet sympathizers, and Vidkun Quisling, who welcomed the occupying German soldiers, was the Norwegian Benedict Arnold. Resistance efforts? The Danes and Norwegians might have thought that they were defending their homes and country in a resistance effort, but Hitler’s troops didn’t see as resistance these people who schemed and plotted in cellars. The Danes or Norwegians who opposed Hitler’s soldiers were fanatical insurgents who should be shot on sight. If you were one of Hitler’s brighter soldiers, and you told one of your superior officers that in spite of what you’d been told, you were getting tired of helping Danes and Norwegians set up a better form of government, what do you think would have happened to you? And imagine what was going on back home in Germany. What would have happened to a German citizen who refused to pay taxes to a government that tried to protect Germans by sending tanks into Africa? "Hey Hitler, what you doing way down there in Africa with all them tanks you bought with my tax dollars? When you started this thing, you said you were protecting us from crazy people in Austria and Poland. How many crazy Poles you expecting to find in Africa?" That tax payer would have seen his property auctioned off and Hitler and Rommel would have bought even more tanks with the proceeds. Anyway, I want to thank whoever it was that produced that TV show on Rommel, because it gave me an excuse to read up a bit more about Hitler and how he snuck up behind a very intelligent people and slipped fascism in on them before they knew what hit them. Mein Kampf and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich are some of my favorite reading. If you ever want to understand the basic principles of propaganda, if you ever want to read something scarier and more unbelievable than Stephen King, read what it’s like to live under a fascist dictatorship. Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They burned books. Movies. You can’t appreciate the freedom we have here in America until you read how the Nazis censored movies. Do you think that the Nazis would let the German people see a movie that criticized the way Hitler was spreading his brand of freedom? Young people might not understand why some of us old folks, who survived Hitler and his friends, still talk about the war, but people of my generation, and that probably includes Rommel’s grandson, --- we can’t forget that the fascists were very well-dressed scary guys.
Loren Ek called from Las Vegas and talked about Guatemala. Here is what I typed as he talked. Is Guatemala safe? Yes, it’s safe except for the armed bandits that stop busses. Guatemala City is very dangerous. Busses are stopped by armed bandits in the middle of the city. They might only get $50 off the whole bus because people are so poor. El Salvador. San Salvador. Razor wire and armed guards everywhere. The week after we were there they robbed a bus. They’ve got a pretty good president now. No civil war. Just bandits. Thousands of people who were conscripted when they were 12 years old. They can’t read but they can use an AK 47, so when the war is over there is big unemployment, they either work as security guards around houses and businesses or they rob the houses and businesses. Razor wire around the houses and armed guards. Half the people are guards and the other half are the bandits. Some guards and police moonlight. I wouldn’t go back to Colombia on a bet. They kidnap gringos and hold them for 250,000 or half a million dollars. They like oil executives. That is a big industry. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of narco guerras who protect the narco trade. They claim to be upholding peasants’ rights. 1/3 of Colombia is not under the control of the government. It would be cheaper if the US government were to buy the crop from the peasants. 90 % of the money goes to the traffickers. So much for the phone call from Loren Ek. You heard the obvious reference as to how we could eliminate unemployment in areas where people don’t have jobs. The unemployed could meet in a big hall. The moderator would ask the people who wanted to be security guards to stand and move to the left of the hall. The people who wanted to be the bandits would be asked to stand and move to the right of the hall. It would then be agreed that the following night the bandits would break into half the houses in town and carry off an armload. In the morning the guards would offer their services to any property owners who didn’t want to be robbed on a regular basis. --- You are absolutely right. This system wouldn’t really do all that much to provide meaningful employment. --- But --- you’re like my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, in that you have jumped to a false conclusion before I’ve finished what I was saying. The real benefit in this system would be realized when the government set up a new agency and hired thousands of people to study the problem we have just created.
My cough had been hanging in there for 35 days and I thought it was time to put an end to it before it put and end to me. I went into Pen Bay Medical Center and sat down on the other side of the desk from Judy, who checks people in. Big sign there on Judy’s computer: “Keep your germs to yourself. Cover your cough.” I told Judy I thought that was a good sign. And I told her that at shows I sometimes stood by the door and shook hands with two or three hundred people and the first thing I did afterwards was wash my hands. Think of all the germs that I spread, one hand to another. I got to wondering why we shake hands. The custom obviously evolved before people knew about germs and I told Judy that I think we should have another way of greeting our friends that wouldn’t spread germs. And Judy said, “Well, you know what my dog does.”
I really didn’t feel like I was wasting any time when I went to town for my annual checkup because it was a typical, cold, raw, wet day the coast of Maine. Couldn’t work outside. But the first thing the doctor did when he came in the room and saw me waiting in the chair was open the window wide. The wind and the cold rain blew into the room, but the doctor smiled and looked refreshed and relieved. And it wasn’t until then that I realized I was wearing the same shoes that I wear when I go out to check on the cows.
It wasn’t too long ago that I went into a bookstore in Camden just in time to see a man buy a book written in Greek. In Greek. I thought that was pretty unusual and I said so. Not many people around who can read Greek. But it reminded me of something and I said to this man, “This morning when I got out of bed I noticed on the little stand beside my bed a book in Swedish, a book in Spanish, a book in Dutch and a book in French.” The man said, “For heaven sake --- who were you sleeping with?” (June 8, 2000)
The other night I repeated an old poem to my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman. Because she is only 54 she had never heard it. “Women’s faults are many, men have only two: Everything they say, and everything they do.
An old man walks into a jeweler's shop late one Friday with a young girl who could have been his granddaughter and says, “I'm looking for a ring for my girlfriend.” The jeweler brings out a $10,000 ring and the man says that he’ll take it. He writes out a check and says he’ll be back to get the ring on Monday when the check clears. Monday morning the jeweler calls the man and says, “There's no money in that account" "I know, but it made for a wonderful weekend." That story reminds me that I’ve got to get busy with ghost writing a book for my best friend, who, in his younger traveling salesman days was an innovative master when it came to devising similar schemes and techniques for picking up women in airports or car rental counters. You know how they say that anyone can bake a cake if they follow the recipe? This book would simply be a list of simple, but unique and clever recipes. Which also reminds me that he and I recently went over to the Owls Head Transportation museum in my Model T. I’ve been driving that Model for 53 years and the Boy, who is only 62, has had an occasional ride in it for at least 45 years. And in the course of our deliberations, it was determined that on this particular trip we were not going to try to pick up any young chicks. The Boy asked me if I had forgotten how. I said, “No, I’ve forgotten why.”
In early May I painted a picture of my model T on a flower pot for Joe Brannigan. Joe Brannigan sent me paint and brushes so all I had to invest was my time. Joe is going to sell this flower pot at an auction on Friday night, June 4th, to raise money for his Shalom House in Portland. A good cause. My Model T is white so I used a lot of white paint. But no matter how many times I painted it white, it changed to a transparent color when it dried. It took me a week to discover that the white paint I’d been painting on so carefully every day was Elmer’s glue. Someone told me that one of the most gifted artists in Maine can't sell anything he paints. This is because he looks like a banker. It is my understanding that he gets his brother who has long hair, a black beard, blue overalls and horn rim glasses, to show up at receptions and sell the stuff for him. If I were able to produce art, you can be sure I’d either wear one of those Nehru jackets like Andy Wyeth or a little French like beret on the side of my head like my artist friend in Camden, so when people saw me eating olives and crackers at my art shows they’d know they were buying quality. Yes, as my father used to say, som man ar klad, sa blir han hed. A man is known by the clothes he wears. Suppose Jennifer Lopez were about to sell 200 paintings that she’d produced over the past year. Would you go to the reception to see what she was showing? It’s probably a lie, but I heard that someone once submitted a Pulitzer Prize winning novel to several publishing houses just to see what would happen. I understand that, as expected, they all rejected the biggest best seller that had been written in a year. Is this story true? There is nothing the public enjoys more than a good hoax and here is one I’d like to try myself. Joe Brannigan has proven to me that I am right up there with Vermeer, Peter Brueghel the Elder, Monet and other French Impressionists. What fun it would be to whip up 50 or so paintings and then have my friend Ira Braus ---- with his out of state address --- book them into Linda Bean Jones’ beautiful little art gallery down here in Tenants Harbor for a week in August. I’d put prices on them like, $2500. $7500. $9500 --- with all the rest somewhere in between. Hitler said that the bigger the lie the easier it is to get people to believe it. How much you want to bet I could pick up five grand for my trouble?
According to the date on a Root catalogue in my box of bee supplies, I haven’t kept bees since 1980. I ordered two hives from Bob Egan, the Skowhegan, Maine bee man whom you have met at the Common Ground Fair, and then discovered that my hives were rotted out. When I measured them, one was 1/8 of an inch larger than the other, so I went on line to find out how big the hive should be. Guess what. I discovered that in other countries they have a different type of hive that is much less expensive. And it looks like just what I want. Anyone who has 400 hives might want standardized hives, but for just one hive for my apple trees and blueberries, this other simple bee hive looks like just the thing. Unfortunately, the directions for building this bee hive seem to be written for someone who already knows how to do it. Lot of little important steps in there that are not explained. I wrote to a man --- I think he is in Africa --- to thank him for the information he had posted on line. He wrote back “Be sure to feed the bees all they want while they're drawing out the comb during your honey flow while brood rearing is going on.” --- which I thought was very nice of him. But how do I feed the bees? How do I know when they have all they want? What is drawing out the comb and how do I know when they are doing it? What is the honey flow and how do I know when that is taking place? What is brood rearing and how do I know when that is going on? The reason I can’t do anything practical or understand simple written instructions today might be traced back to the fact that I went to college until I was 34 years old. In graduate school I was able to escape the difficult practical realities of the real world, because as a linguist I was attempting to ascertain if there is a one to one correlation between acoustic and articulatory parameters, which is so much simpler.
end June 4,
Coughing since April 28th. I think I’ve got a mysterious brand of pneumonia. The doc says all my tests come back good. I have yet to hear about the xrays. Took the transmission out of my truck and hauled it over to my friend Eric Tolman, THE transmission man. I found I can still get on a creeper and work under a truck just like I did 50 years ago. But now when I finish my work and roll the creeper from under the car I can’t get off it.
It is the nature of city people to laugh at those of us who have maintained our rural roots. Because this generality is constantly perpetuated by the media and our culture in general, even a few rural husbandmen have the impression that the only place innovative, creative and perceptive thought can take place is in a city. I am not one of them. For example, for years art scholars at our universities have parroted the mantra that Van Gough was depressed. How many of them have had the opportunity to consider that early one morning Van Gough might have been out cutting rhubarb when, forgetting what he had in his hand, he slapped at a black fly on his ear.
Leila Percy asked me to ride on George Sprowl’s truck and play in the Searsmont parade. Chris Rogers was on drums and Muriel, the Midcoast Monster, was playing piano. It was an unusually nice sunny day and after seven times through God Bless America Muriel and I had worked out four different variations on the changes that would even have impressed Don Doane. Before climbing up on the truck I talked with one old man who couldn’t wait for the parade to start. He said he was anxious to see the 20 or 30 of those little four wheeled motorcycles they call all terrain vehicles. I couldn’t believe that an old man would be interested in anything like that, until he said, “I’m looking for the kid who ruined my field in mud season.”
Here’s a letter from a Hollywood friend of mine who makes movies. Hear this letter: “Cannes was crazy as usual and, had we not been robbed, we'd be in a much more cheerful state. After over 30 years of safe international travel, our sidebag was stolen from the screening room at the Palais du Festival during one of our own screenings. They got everything from our passports and money, to all his credit cards, drivers license and the rental car keys.” End of quote. So. Are you surprised to hear that all these bad things happened to a genius who is an experienced international traveler? I am not. But I would be very surprised to hear that it happened to a Maine hick who happened to be stumbling around in Cannes. Because when a Maine hick goes to Cannes, his passport, his $35 for unforseen expenses, and his only credit card are fastened to his body with duct tape. And they are secured in a mysterious place that even his wife has never seen. A Maine hick carries everything he will need in one tiny green cloth knapsack that has a top held on with safety pins and it is in his hands when he gets on the airplane and it is in his hands when he returns to America two or four weeks later. I have gone into hotels in Morocco where they wanted my passport to put up in a little nest of mailboxes behind the counter. You must be kidding, mister. You’ve heard me tell about hearing the running footsteps coming up behind us late one night in Casablanca. When I heard the switchblade click open, I hit the footstepper beside the head with my friend’s suitcase. This has nothing to do with bravery or quick thinking. It has to do with years of working and playing in fields on the farm. When a Maine man feels hornets flying up both pant legs he doesn’t stand around picking his nose while he figures out what to do. City boys have no idea what I’m talking about here. At an early age city boys are told, “Smile and give the robber what he wants.” Rural Maine boys swat bees. What do you do to keep sticky fingers out of your pockets when you travel? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
From time to time something happens to an ordinary, everyday person that is so extraordinary that it warrants commentary. You are about to hear of one those things. You’re right. Strange and unbelievable things might happen more than we know, because the person to whom it happens knows better than to blab it round --- because people might think he is either crazy or lying. But, because my reputation has already been established, and because we’ve been friends for many years, I’m simply going to ask you to listen closely. Down in the cellar, next to wooden shelves filled with dozens of Ball canning jars that nobody will ever use, and half filled cans of paint that were there when I bought the place from one of mother’s third cousins in 1970, there is a rubber boot. I can’t remember when that rubber boot wasn’t there. It is covered with dust from the many loads of wood that were dumped in the cellar in October to be burned through the cold winter months. Some of the dust got on the boot when Steve Dennison dug the new 8 foot cellar that is under our new bed and breakfast room on back of the house. It is not a remarkable boot except for the fact that the rubber in it has not rotted out. It is a pliable and sound boot whose mate, back in the forgotten mists of time, must have either been slopped with gasoline or torn beyond repair. Now, I can’t throw away both boots if only one gets destroyed. Can you? If you were to ask my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, she would tell you that I can’t throw away anything. But when I’m not looking things like my favorite shirts are very likely to disappear. And when I ask where they are she says they’ve gone to shirt heaven. So I knew that the boot was there, in the cellar. I couldn’t forget it, because for years I have looked at it every time I’ve gone down cellar to take a shower. OK. With years of history now firmly entrenched in your mind, let’s now fast forward to this morning. I was slogging through a wet part out in my woods putting up cow fence when my sock felt soggy. One of my boots, which I had probably bought at a lawnsale for two dollars, had rotted out right above the arch where it bends when you step. It could be patched but I knew I had another good boot down in the cellar. Not to worry. Now comes the part that you might not believe. When I went down in the cellar to get that boot, not only was it still there, but it was the one I needed.
Many people who appear in films on stage or on TV, really enjoy hearing from their public. Sincere complements are very nice. One of the most memorable letters I ever got which I appreciate more than the writer can know, says, “Dear humble, You have no idea of how much we enjoyed watching that TV show you and the monkey made at Planet in Camden a week or two ago. It was a fantastic, funny show. After watching it three or four times we realized --- that it would have been just as good if you had stayed home and let the monkey do it.”
You probably know that the Survivalists are people who did a Robinson Caruso thing on some island for TV. From what I read, a lot of people watch it. As I recall, the animal rights crowd protested because some of the survivalists ate rats. But, hey, you do what you’ve got to do to survive. I once gave a Russian physicist a ride to Thomaston in my Model T. She told me that she survived Leningrad. I didn’t ask her if she ate rats, but from what I have heard, hungry people in Leningrad were known to eat worse things than that. Far as I’m concerned, people can go over in the corner, and as long as they don’t bother me, they can eat anything they want. And, on the other side of the coin, as far as I’m concerned --- this is a free country --- you can protest all you want about people eating rats. But --- you come down to the Rockland Lobster Festival on the coast of Maine this summer and protest about people eating lobsters --- and a lot of us are going to get ugly. (June 22, 2000)
Any entertainer will tell you that there are people who do not laugh. It might be because they hate the speaker. It might be because they have rotten teeth. It might be because they don’t get it. It might be that they are old Swedes like my father, who never laughed at anything. Many years ago I was speaking to a small group in Brunswick when I noticed a man in the audience who, for all practical purposes, appeared to be dead. Although I boast that I have never in my life accepted a challenge, not being a competitive Type A person, I gave this man my full attention. I looked him in the eye and hit him with the best of everything I had. The audience roared but this man might have had a face carved in granite because I couldn’t move him. I failed. When I finished, the man approached me, held out his hand, and said, “That was fantastic, humble. I never miss your show. It’s the best thing they’ve got on Public Radio.”
I was telling my brother that my cows got out twice last week because I didn’t have my fence up right. I was hoping they wouldn’t notice a little 100 foot strip down by the woods with no wire. And he told me that a man who lived here in St. George 200 or so years ago had a cow that got out and ate all his neighbor’s cabbages. And the neighbor said, “Your cow just ate all my cabbages.” And the man said, “Have you ever known of a cabbage to hurt a cow?”
Old people can be troublesome. Smart old people can cause more trouble than your average old person because smart old people can remember things. And many old people like to blab. I suppose they figure that being over 90 entitles them to tell the truth, no matter how many people don’t want to hear it. So hear this. Once upon a time in a city far away some citizens thought it would be nice to raise a statue to a police officer who was gunned down in the line of duty 70 or so years ago. So they did. But a man who will never see 90 again laughed when he heard about it and said that the police officer was a bully. During the depression there would always be a few men loitering on the street corner for lack of anything better to do, and this policeman went out of his way to make their lives even more miserable than they already were. Instead of working quietly to help and protect his friends and neighbors like all policemen do nowadays, he enjoyed flaunting his authority. He enjoyed pushing people around. And one day, while approaching an individual he’d been leaning on pretty heavily, this man simply pulled out a gun and shot the policeman dead. Not a nice thing to do. I don’t recommend it and I’m glad that kind of thing doesn’t happen nowadays, aren’t you? Anyway , before you raise up a monument to honor some long–gone public official, you might want to make sure that everyone who knew him is dead.
Here’s something that appeared in my email. It is an advertisement for some pill, or chemical that they claim has been PROVEN TO ACCOMPLISH THE FOLLOWING: Reduce body fat and build lean muscle WITHOUT EXERCISE! Remove wrinkles and cellulite. Lower blood pressure and improve cholesterol profile. Restore hair color and growth. According to the claims in this ad, you can turn back your body's biological time clock from 10 to 20 years. Of course all ads like this also claim to improve something else which I don’t even need to mention. Please listen closely. As you probably know, I have white hair and I hobble about, all bent over with arthritis. Because of this, some very nice young people are finally allotting me the small amount of respect they feel is due the elderly. If you think I’m going to throw that away just to look and feel 20 years younger, you’re crazy. (May 4, 2000)
There are two kinds of people on this planet: those of us who get tired, and the lucky ones who don’t. It is my understanding that Gary Hyvarinen doesn’t get tired. Raol Champaign and Donald Jacobson can allegedly get by on four or five hours sleep. My Onkle Rulle in Sweden said he never got tired, and if Bernard Davis ever gets tired, he won’t admit it. If my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, were a farm girl, she’d have her day’s work done and be out in the henhouse an hour before sunrise, shining a light in the rooster’s eyes, trying to get him to crow a little earlier, just so everybody else would have to get up. It’s not fair, but I get tired in the afternoon. I can usually get through the mornings, but at 3 or 4 or 5 in the afternoon, this tiredness can hit me like a sledgehammer. Bang. There are exciting things I want to do on my farm, but all of a sudden I can’t get out of my tracks. I just want to drop. Yesterday I says to my wife, “Why did you marry a man who is always tired?” She said, “Well, when I used to come down here to see you evenings, how was I to know you’d been sleeping all afternoon?” (May 4, 2000)
Years ago I learned the easiest and most productive way to eat a lobster. It is an ancient lobster eating technique that I learned from Albert Robinson, who could have learned it from Holman Day up at Colby in the 1870s. Please note that I do not boast that it is the right way to eat a lobster. But any time you want me to teach you how to eat a lobster at a table in your home I will drop whatever I am doing and rush to perform before your panel of impartial judges. If they truly have open minds, they will have to agree that I do know the easiest and most efficient way to eviscerate and get all the meat out of a lobster. Knowing that even my method can probably be refined, I have suggested to Chuck Kruger that some knowledgeable lobster eaters be selected to offer a staged demonstration at the next Annual Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland. To begin with, clumsy amateurs, who have ever squirted lobster juice on a person across the table, should immediately disqualify themselves. I would suggest that no more than half a dozen truly qualified people be elected so that the audience and judges could watch each authority dismember a lobster in turn and thereby judge for themselves which of the techniques, or even parts of the techniques, are the ones with value. Because this is a demonstration designed to improve the quality of life for lobster lovers everywhere and has nothing to do with speed or gluttony, it could lend one more educational, interesting, and entertaining feature to the Lobster Festival. If you think you know the best way to get all the meat out of a lobster, and if we are permitted to put on this demonstration please ask if you might stand beside me on stage and display your skills.
It is unfortunate that no young people listen to this program because I’m about to impart a significant bit of wisdom that they would ignore even if they were listening. My topic is: the danger of mating with an incompatible person. The divorce rate is high and although the reason for divorce is simple, it is difficult to explain. To begin with, there is a human race only because our bodies develop from the bottom up which means that the last organ to become functional is the one between our ears. You’ve heard me say it often: “I got married at the age of 54 and when you get married at 54 it is your BRAIN that makes the decision.” Tens of thousands of years ago it was all right if people 12 or 14 years old started families, because before they were 20 one of them had either been stepped on by a wooly mammoth or been eaten by a saber tooth tiger. So long before man and wife had time to discover they were incompatible, Mother Nature had already eliminated the need for endless unpleasant discussions that lead to divorce. Could we cut down on the divorce rate if we were to live together for two or three years before getting married? I used to think we might, but there is new evidence indicating that even 16 years of living together might not be long enough. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, said, “You are using my toothbrush.” I said that this was impossible, because there was a green toothbrush in the cup and there was a red toothbrush in my hand. I said, “Ever since time began I have used a red toothbrush.” I am glad that Marsha and I are not planning to have children, because she said, “So have I.”
My friend the Booger Boy just bought another one of those assisted living or nursing home places. This one is in Springvale. And because the Boy wants nothing but the best for his elderly friends, and seeing as the Maine taxpayers are footing the bill anyway, he brought a brand new 12 or so passenger van to take them shopping or on trips or wherever it is old people in homes like to go, and another nice car for management. And being an excellent business man, instead of hiring a couple of kids to drive two new vehicles to Springvale he asked me and Bruce the Goose to help him do it. So we drove two new cars to Springvale. We were getting ready to drive the old cars back home when the maintenance man at that home said, “Oh, look. That snake crawling across the hood reminds me, I took two more snakes off that car seat this morning.” Over the past 68 years I have seen several million cars on several continents, but only in Springvale, Maine have I ever seen a snake crawl across the hood of a car and down into the air vent by the windshield. If you are a herpetologist please tell us how a snake can get into an automobile and why a snake would want to take up residence there. And, remember, the next time you’re looking at a second hand car in Maine, before you get in for a test drive don’t be afraid to ask the salesman, “Is this the one with the snake?”
end 6-25
Here are two comments I got off a web page for engineers. Q: What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers ? A: Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets." You might be an engineer if the Humane society has you arrested because you actually performed the Schrodinger's Cat experiment.
A long time radio friend sent me a letter the other day. Although he said a lot of things, what it amounted to was that he liked to hear me tell about the stupid things I do every day but he didn’t like me to get too heavy into social issues because what I said and the way I said it made sense and he didn’t want to believe it. So instead of moral or social issues my topic today will be cow fence. When the grass gets short in the pasture, cows like to get out of the pasture because the grass really is greener and more plentiful on the other side. Yes, there are nutrients there, but cows are lazy and don’t like to work any more than they have to. And when there is only a 14 gauge wire between 1,000 pounds of hungry animal and your neighbor’s garden, you’d better make sure that that wire will bite. I suck on a straw and lay it on the wire 2 inches from my fingers. I move the wet straw closer until I feel zap. How do you do it? This afternoon I could even hold the wire and there was no zap. So I put on my boots and gloves and my bee keepers face screen to keep out the black flies, I unplugged the clicker, and right where the wire comes out of the barn, I started to walk the fence. It is a long fence which runs along stone walls and through the woods and through a swamp. And when it goes around the spring pond where the cows get their water it runs up toward the road and across by my asparagus plants and the apple trees and behind the henhouse and back to the place where I started. And even with gloves and the bee keepers bonnet the mosquitoes were biting through my shirt all the way. And I was sweating because I’d been lopping off ferns and twigs with pruning shears. I plugged in the clicker and walked back out to the fence. And still no zap. So I dug around until I found a little electrical tool. It has a light on one end and two wires on the other end and I thought it might work on an electric shock fence just like it does on regular electricity so I tried it on the clicker and the little light flashed. The next step was to try it right outside of the barn where the sheathed wire from the clicker hooks on to the 14 gauge fence wire. And when I went outside of the window where it comes out of the barn, it was going zap zap zap and fire was flying every time because there wasn’t a good connection between the sheathed wire and the electric fence wire. I had walked the entire fence line looking for the problem while getting bit by mosquitoes. But it wasn’t for nothing because there is a moral to this story and if you are over 60 years of age you already know what it is. Anytime there is anything wrong with your farm or your marriage or your business, the sooner you look close to home the sooner you’ll find the trouble.
My father stopped going to the movies in 1945 after seeing Lost Weekend. In case you are very young, I’ll mention that Lost Weekend was a movie about a man with ten dollars who stayed drunk for four days. My father said that it was impossible for a man with only ten dollars to stay drunk for four days and he never went to the movies again. I have not gone to the movies for at least 17 years but I’m going again, hopefully before the month is out, and I can hardly wait. I stopped going to the movies because of that horrible booming background music that drowns out anything that resembles speech. I think the last time I went to the movies was with Julian and Peggy Rubenstein. Peggy sat between us and told us what they had said and if it was funny, Julian and I laughed --- about 30 seconds after everyone else. Something like Tom Brokaw interviewing the reporter from Bagdad. Tom asks him a question and then there’s that delay while the sound catches up. But I am going to the movies for the first time in many years very soon because I can’t wait for the movie to come out on that little CD disk that we put into the box --- you know that black box thing that the kids gave Marsha and hooked up on top of our television set. If Sinclair Lewis had just made a movie called Babbitt or Elmer Gantry and the whole world was going to see it for the first time this week would you go? I would. My father came to this country in 1930 to pound granite with a hammer and turn it into paving blocks, and even though he had only an 8th grade formal education, he read a lot and he liked what Sinclair Lewis had to say. If John Steinbeck had just made a movie called the Grapes of Wrath and it was going to be shown in the movies for the first time would you go? I would. We’re talking about prize winning genius here. Of course they had to go to Europe to get their prizes because Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck were social commentators, and way back then there were a few people on this side of the pond who didn’t like what they had to say, partly because it wasn’t nice but mostly because it was true. And if you haven’t gathered your family around the fireplace lately to read parts of the Grapes of Wrath or Babbitt or Elmer Gantry to your children, they might be better for it if you did. Even though I was very small when my father told me what Steinbeck had to say, it became more meaningful year after year, and the older I get the more I admire both Steinbeck and my father. I wish that my father were still here so I could take him to the movies with me very soon -- because even though papa was not an American, like most intelligent Europeans he could recognize and appreciate American genius.
My friend Dana down in Topsham told me that he has some books by Holman Day. When I got home I looked, and see that I have 20 or so books by Holman Day, and last night when I woke up at 2 and couldn’t get back to sleep, I read The Landloper for two hours. I didn’t realize until 3 this morning that Holman Day was an agitator along the lines of Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck. You have heard me and Joe Perham recite some of Holman Day’s funny and very clever poems: “Twould make an ox curl up and die to hear how Zekle Pratt would lie.” But the theme of The Landloper is the age old battle between the haves and the have nots and the political parties that represent each group. The have nots were poor French speaking boys and girls from Quebec whose parents were encouraged to have 14 children. Many moved from Quebec to Maine to work in the mills where they hoped to find a new and better life. The haves in The Landloper were the mill owners in general and the man who owned the water company in particular. Poor children were dying from typhoid because the river water that was pumped out through their kitchen faucets wasn’t fit to drink. But business being business, the water company magnate didn’t want to spend money to lay down more pipe that would bring in clean water from a far away lake. I got back to sleep around 4 so that’s all I can tell you about the Landloper. But I have had time to reflect upon the attendant ramifications. In this book, written in 1915, Maine mills were portrayed as sweatshops where children worked long hours for low wages and got sick from very bad conditions. But because of laws that were enacted to protect workers and increase their wages, now the mills and factories are either gone or going to other countries where people are still eager to work long hours under very bad conditions for low wages. In 1915 Holman Day couldn’t have been expected to see American manufacturing plants fleeing America. He would certainly be just as surprised to see so many Maine people with French names getting rich just from repairing computers.
Last week I was talking with some woman about sports. "Oh," she said, "I’m not interested in baseball. I like hockey and football." I said, "You like violence." She said, "Well, I do live in Boston."
Man came up to me last week and said he didn't have any use for those evangelist ministers. Of course I had to snub him up short right there. I says, "Think about it for a minute. If them evangelist ministers had their way, there wouldn't be anyone in prison. If them evangelist ministers had their way, we wouldn't need locks on the henhouse door. About the only thing you'd have to watch out for, would be your wife.
Woman from away came in my place the other day to buy some of my tapes. I’ve got eight hours of my stories on tape and this woman got some of them a year or two ago. She wanted replacements, because someone had broken into her house and stolen them. Who would have thought that criminals would stoop so low. Just as if there aren’t already enough crimes, someone is inventing new ones. People are now being fined in court for a crime I’ve never heard of. The crime is called “Bulk Pile.” All it says in the Court Record is, “So & So, age 24, St. George, bulk pile 10 percent undersize.” Can bulk pile be a very serious or important crime? I think not. Otherwise, when Moses came down off the mountain with the tablets, the 11th commandment would have said, “Thou shalt not pile bulk.”
The advertisement that came in my email said, “UNIVERSITY DEGREE PROGRAMS ---- Increase your personal prestige and money earning power through an advanced university degree. Eminent, non-accredited universities [there’s an oxymoron if you ever heard one] will award you a degree for only $200. Degree granted based on your present knowledge and experience. No further effort necessary on your part. Just a short phone call is all that is required for a BA, MA, MBA, or Ph.D. diploma in the field of your choice. For details, call, “ such and such a number. I wonder if they accept counterfeit money.
Pick up any newspaper or magazine printed for general consumption and you will see an article, written by a white liberal, supporting affirmative action. On another page you will see an article, written by a well-educated member of some minority, opposing affirmative action. The only reason either article is in the publication is because the publisher thinks that the topic is a hot one which will generate a profit. Turn two more pages and you will read a story about someone who has been accused of violating someone’s Civil Rights --- by saying naughty words. Forty years ago no one would have thought anything about saying those words, but because human beings have an innate need for naughty words, and because the naughty words of 40 years ago are no longer naughty, new ones had to be invented. This prompts me to confess that last Friday night I found myself in a time-warp. I attended a meeting where everyone there was 60, 70 and 80 years of age. We grew up in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and are still burdened with the values of those degenerate days of long ago. Had a member of the Thought Police been there, all of us would have gone to jail, for, without even thinking twice about it, we all stood and sang three verses of the Too Fat Polka.
Nowadays you might make your telephone calls through your computer. I do. Robert Dennison wrote the program that I use. Anyway, last summer Patty Moran gave me a Moran's Insurance hat. She also gave a Moran's Insurance hat to one of my very good friends from Cushing, who now lives far away. He forgot to take the hat with him and it's been in my office since last summer. The other day when I called to remind him he'd forgotten his hat, I noticed on the little information screen beneath his name that on January 17, 1992, he called to tell me that the end of the world was coming in 1993. People can forget things, but computers have a habit of remembering everything. And there it was on the screen. So I said to him, "Jazzman, on January 17, 1992 you told me, that the world was going to end in 1993. Have you changed your mind about that?" And he said, "I had to."
Summer is just about over, and thousands of summer people who have been spending a vast amount of money here for the past three months have either gone, or are thinking about it. Would you suspect that big city people from away don’t think like we do here on the coast of Maine? You might not like to say it, but you’ve got to admit that it’s true. This is, of course, the reason some people claim you can’t give an IQ test to an Eskimo and get valid results --- they claim the score would be slanted by the environment. If you’ve got time, I’ll give you an example of how your outlook on things can be determined by where you live. Years ago, when they were first thinking about putting houses out on Rackliff’s Island, the state and the town held a lot of environmental meetings --- just to make sure things were done right. The developer’s plans looked pretty good, until a very smart man from away noticed that there was no allowance made for sewage disposal when the power went out. “What are you going to do?” he asked, “when there’s no power to run the sewage pumps? It will be an ecological disaster. Within 24 hours, thousands of gallons of sewage will be running over the rocks into the ocean.” Whereupon, one of the natives observed, “When the power’s out, where they going to get the water to flush?”
Having a handicap is no fun. I have hearing aids and I’m still learning how to use a telephone while wearing them. The first thing I say on the phone is, “I’m deaf. Please speak very slowly.” The other day I was talking to one of my friends and I understood every word she said. Oh, it made me happy. I really felt good and I thanked her for speaking so clearly. She said, “No problem, I’ve got my teeth in.”
Parents, attention. There are things out there on the Internet that your kids shouldn’t see, and if you kids will go in the other room, I’m going to tell your parents about a horrible thing that showed up in my email last week. It is a message titled: Attract Females Easily. It said that thousands of years ago men used to attract females simply by the smell of their bodies. I thought that was interesting because I was up at the Common Ground and noticed one or two guys who were still doing it. Anyway, that was all I read because this Attract Females email letter was obviously directed at younger men. At my age I'd rather see an article that would explain What To Do With Them once they have been attracted.
Is there someone very close to you who is always surprising you with something? There are birthday surprises and they can be nice --- if you’re young enough. And then there are unpleasant surprises, like the one your kid brought home from college with the news that they planned to marry. And then there are unnecessary surprises which I am going to talk about today, with the hope that it might spare you a bit of grief. To keep it impersonal, let’s pretend that this story is about an entertainer named Tom who is 63 years old. Let’s pretend that for three months Tom’s stomach has not felt quite right, so his doctor finally calls for the examination of a place where the sun does not shine. This is not an uncommon procedure for older people --- I understand that there is really no more to it than --- standing in front of a television camera and talking. Anybody can do it. It’s no big deal. But --- if you’ve never done these things before, you have no idea of what’s going to happen. Listen closely. The doctor gives Tom a list of things to do the day before he is scheduled for his examination. Among other things, he is asked to mix three ounces of Fleet Phospho-Soda with one half cup of water and drink it at 11:30 A. M. Nothing wrong with that, you say? Listen. Suppose Tom lives down on the coast. Suppose that on the day he has to quaff that stuff, Tom was scheduled to speak at a 12:30 Chamber of Commerce dinner in Houlton. He leaves Rockland at 7:30. At 11:30 A. M., just outside of Island Falls, he chugalugs his Soda and chases it with three cups of water. My friends, if Tom’s doctor had any kindness in his heart for his fellow men, somewhere on that page of directions it should say, that if you drink a Phospho-Soda cocktail at 11:30, the last place in the world you want to be at 12:30 is on a stage in front of 200 people. The medical community knows all about that stuff, but they think it’s a joke when they don’t tell you what it does. When Tom mentioned it the next day to Barbara, his nurse, she said, “Oh yeah, just a sip of Phospho-Soda is enough to blow the cover of your septic tank into your neighbor’s dooryard.”
I promised to tell you about one more thing that I saw in Spain five years ago. Some men were painting white lines on a city street. To do so, they blocked off the street --- put up a NO ENTRY sign right where the traffic split to go around a monument. The sign was very clear, but there was room to sneak out around it and go around the monument. Many drivers did, but these men who were painting had obviously done this before. On the other side of the monument they actually blockaded the road with their own cars. So everyone who drove around the NO ENTRY sign had no choice but to continue around the rotary and go back out the way they came in. Living out in the country like I do, I looked at this with a different perspective than someone raised in the city. I know that a little furry animal is not likely to go into a trap if he can’t see all the way through to the other side. Which indicates to me that it would be more difficult to trap skunks than Europeans.
Parents. Do you let your kids search the Internet? Do you care about what your kids are reading out there in Internet land? You have heard about some of the bad things out there that are not fit for children, and, as you might expect, as a public service, I am going to talk about one of them now. So, get away from the radio you kids. This is for your parents. Parents. This information about Doctor Ritter came in my email last week. Dr. Ritter is an expert on colon cleansing. I got a letter from his press agent suggesting that I might like to have Dr. Ritter on my Friday evening Maine Public Radio show so that he could tell everyone in Maine: One: How many people go to the bathroom once every seven days. Two: how to improve your physical appearance through a healthy, clean and well evacuated intestinal tract. Three: how to eliminate every day like clockwork. Well, there was more but this is probably enough of an example of what your kid is likely to run into out there in Internet land. Why do we need to talk about these things? There’s really no need of it, because everybody knows all these bathroom things already. We know that some people don’t go to the bathroom every day and we know how hard these people are to live with. I was a single man for 20 years and I always swore that if I could ever find a girl who went to the bathroom every day, I’d probably try to marry her. Think how easy she’d be to live with. Anyway, I probably don’t need to tell you that Dr. Ritter lives in California, and that I don’t intend to invite him to be a guest on my radio show. After all, would you expect a colon expert to speak from the heart?
When I went into the Maine State Automobile Registration office to get a paper for a friend, I was surprised by the large crowd of people waiting there. There was a sign that said, “Take a number.” Then you wait for them to get around to you. This is a result of downsizing. You’ve heard about it. Downsizing means getting rid of useless bureaucrats to save the taxpayers money. Most people feel good when they hear about it. But now we are downsized to the extent that when you call Augusta to try to find out about something, you get an answering machine which refers you to yet another answering machine. So it is now virtually impossible to find out about anything, and when we go in to register a car we take a number and wait. Perhaps you’re not old enough to remember when it was fashionable to laugh at the long waiting lines they had in Russia. We always saw pictures of the lines, and underneath it would say, “This is what it’s like to live under Communism.” The next time you have to stand and wait, remember that it is downsizing that has advanced our country to the kind of lines that the Russians were complaining about 20 years ago.
After 5 years of marriage, our home is still a hotbed of romance. The other day while The Almost Perfect Woman was working at her desk, I leaned over her and said, “MMMMM, you smell like Christmas trees.” She said, “It must be the toilet bowl cleaner on my hands.”
I took a risky chance down at the last lobster festival, and hugged a sweet little 80 year old woman. Of course I didn’t realize that it was risky at the time, but now I know that I was leaving myself wide open for a charge of sexual harassment. There’s big money in that now. There are experts who will come into your school or your Rotary Club meeting and tell you what sexual harassment is --- because, you know, where it’s rather new, the boundaries are still somewhat fuzzy and ill defined. You might be sexually harassing someone and not even know it unless an expert came in and told you what you’d done that was wrong. Right now that little six year old first grade kid down in North Carolina is getting a lot of coverage for giving in to the little girl who asked him to kiss her. Wouldn’t you think that even at six years old he would know that kissing is an unnatural act which is not condoned? Where do you suppose he ever learned a nasty thing like that? It’s quite unlikely that he sees his father kiss his mother on the cheek, because if we may believe what we see on the daily talk shows, it would be much more likely if his parents were fighting all the time, or divorced and separated. Anyway, I’ll bet that six year old kid learned his lesson and he’ll think twice before he lets some morally depraved little girl sweet talk him into kissing her again. You must admit that we live in interesting times. Had he smashed the little girl in the face with his fist, his name would be unknown in America today. And, had he kissed a boy, nobody would have thought it strange.
If you visit enough stores in Camden, you’ll find a book named, “Why Gay Guys are a Girl’s Best Friend.” How could you argue with that? Anybody who thinks about it at all knows that gay guys are everybody’s best friend. Ever see one run up your taxes by sending 8 kids to your school’s remedial reading program? Ever have one break your heart by marrying your high school sweetheart or running off with your wife? Seeing that book brought to mind a poem I wrote years ago that summarizes the situation: “Oh what a great world this would be, if all the guys were gay --- but me.”
end 7-30
One of the most uncomfortable things I have to do in is go to the dentist. This is because I can’t afford the state of the art dental care that is now available. My dentist has a practice geared to a socio economic class well above mine. I am talking about people who go in for straightening and whitening. If they are old enough they might have a crack or two or an unnecessary cosmetic facing that dropped off somewhere along they way. These things can be fixed and they should be fixed, but they are unfortunately way beyond my reach. I am there only because a tooth has cried out for attention. I have to look a brilliant young professional in the eye and apologize for being presumptuous enough to get a toothache in the first place. Although he already knows I was not smart enough or strong enough to amass a nest egg that would enable me to have my teeth fixed in my old age, he makes me say it out loud. I have to apologetically explain that I am here to have one tooth repaired. The one that hurts. I’ll be grateful if you’ll please fix it the quickest, cheapest way possible. I’m going to mortgage the farm to have it done. My heirs know that I’m 68 years old. If they are lucky, I’ll be dead before I even need to come back for my semi annual cleaning.
You might have heard that there are people who do not enjoy the fruits of mainstream America, because their mental or physical ability is somewhat below average. They can’t even afford to go to the dentist. Do you have compassion for these Americans who are physically or mentally challenged? You could and should have compassion for these people and I’m going to tell you why. But first, take, for example, a physically handicapped man who is pushing 70. During what should have been the most productive years of his life he was never able to work an 8 hour day. He was over 50 before a doctor finally discovered that his thyroid was dead. Because he usually dropped with exhaustion by noon, he never made any money so now his monthly social security check of $384 doesn’t quite cover his monthly health insurance tab which is $680. We live in a system that gives the poor old dubber $4,000 a year in social security with one hand and takes back an $8,000 health insurance payment with the other. Of course everyone knows that social security is a catch 22 joke in itself. If you were able to work and make healthy payments into the system, you were able to amass enough wealth by the time you were 65 so you don’t need a social security check. Pfft, use that pittance to buy Christmas and birthday presents for the grandchildren. If you weren’t able to work you weren’t able to accumulate wealth and because you paid nothing into the system, that’s exactly what you get back. Yes, you might say that that’s only fair, and if you were to search deep enough into the back part of your mind, you could probably come up with a final solution that would eliminate these unproductive members of our society. So let each and every one of us have compassion for these poor people. There is no reason why we can’t. Let’s start right this minute. All that compassion really means is: “I’m glad it’s not happening to me or any of my friends and it is not going to cost us a cent.”
You’ve heard me boast and brag about the very efficient two extra pockets I have sewed on my pants. You’ve seen them. The one on my right leg holds my notebook and two pens and the smaller one on my left leg holds my wallet and my comb. I carry a handkerchief in my right pants pocket and in the left I have a coin purse containing a bullet I picked up in Israel, change and hearing aid batteries. In that pocket I also have a small glass container of bag balm, a Swiss knife with a corkscrew that I have never needed, the keys to my truck and a small leather pouch containing a nail clipper and a nail file that I’d probably lose if I ever tried to take it through an airport. I carry so much stuff that if I fell overboard, I’d go right to the bottom. And by the way, I got that excellent leather pouch nail clipper as a present when I spoke at a Rotary or Kiwanis or Lions club 15 or more years ago. They’d probably run out of cups. This morning I realized that the amount of stuff I find it necessary to carry exactly fills the pockets on my pants. It seems to operate on the same natural law as a prison. You can build a new prison, but when you do you’d better tear down the old one quick because if you don’t, you’ll soon find that you have enough prisoners to fill that one, too. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, says that the same thing applies to a woman’s pocketbook: the bigger it is, there more stuff you discover you have to carry around in it. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com and I welcome your observations.
When I was a little boy I spent a lot of time walking in the woods and the fields. And in the natural course of events, several times every summer, I’d accidentally step on a hornet’s nest and I’d get stung. And I’d run and I’d roll and I’d swat until I got clear of the hornets. If you know little boys, you can believe that I’d creep back to that hornet’s nest when they’d calmed down a bit --- and hornets do calm down quickly if you leave them alone --- I’d creep back so I could get close, and I’d poke a stick in their little hole in the ground where they were coming out. And because I was a little boy I’d also chunk a couple of rocks about the size of croquet balls at their hole. And even though I thought I was bigger and smarter than a hornet, I’d still get stung a dozen more times for my trouble. And even if I had the satisfaction of wiping out the whole nest, the following week I’d usually step on another nest, because you ain’t going to get rid of hornets. They’re out there everywhere in little holes in the ground, and unless you stay away from their holes, they’re going to be all over you. A few of us were dangerous when we were little boys because we didn’t understand cause and effect. We were very likely to do stupid things, like poking a stick in a hornet’s nest. Our parents and our neighbors thought we’d never grow up. Some people think a boy isn’t grown up until he can drink a few beers while driving a car. But I don’t think a boy becomes a man until he can get stung by a hornet and keep on walking.
end 9-03
I love the Common Ground Fair in Unity. You should check it out because you’d have a wonderful time. I was there for all three days last year and I plan to be there all three days next year. The Common Ground Fair celebrates living a healthy, rural life. We are talking here about people who are so dedicated to maintaining a healthy lifestyle that you have to leave the fairgrounds to buy a cup of coffee. The Common Ground Fair is about eating healthy food. The Common Ground Fair people attempt to educate Maine people about avoiding sprays and poisons that are harmful to the body and the environment. Many of these Common Ground Fair people are healers who can teach you how to keep your body healthy and in harmony with nature. The Common Ground fair is about the only place in Maine where you can stand in the middle of a crowd of 200 adults and children and light up a cigarette without even getting a dirty look. For the sake of my smoker friends I hope that they will not be permitted to smoke at the Common Ground Fair this year. Because --- well, can you think of anything more cruel to a smoker than being allowed to light up and then discover that you have to go off the fair grounds to buy a cup of coffee? At the tail end of one Common Ground Fair, my friend David Bright showed up at the media tent, and he was helping me load my signs and rocking chair and table into my truck, when he looked over at the Whole Life Healing tent, which was right next door. And he saw a pair of abandoned crutches lying on the grass. And David said, "humble, those healers must be fantastic. Look. Someone walked away without his crutches." And I said, "David, it's more likely that he crawled off to get away from their cigarette smoke."
You might remember a few years back, when I called your attention to the reckless abandon with which doctors prescribe phosphor soda. If you don’t know what phosphor soda is, you’d better find out before you drink a pint of it and then go out on a stage in Houlton Maine to entertain 200 people. Listen closely. There is a similar unheralded danger out there and this one originates not with your doctor but your friendly tooth extracting dentist. My brother Jim drove me up for my appointment with my very capable friend and good neighbor Dr. Gee where I was to have a wisdom tooth pulled. Really should have had him pull it 20 years ago when he pulled the first one. Great dentist. Did a wonderful job both times. Anyway, you have to have someone drive you home. That’s what Dr. Gee said. You can’t drive a car after you’ve been put to sleep by gas. No problem. My brother drove me to and from the dentist. But a few hours later that afternoon, I found some anti-biotic pills on the dining room table so I called up my brother to find out where they’d come from. He said I’d bought them at Goodnow’s Drugstore. I did remember a dream about saying something to my best friend’s daughter, who owns Goodnow’s, but that’s all. I don’t remember going in to Goodnow’s Drugstore. I don’t know what I might have said to the girl who owns it. I don’t remember paying for the pills, if I did. I don’t remember the drive home. Are you listening? Besides having someone drive you home, you should be told that for the rest of the day you must be held incommunicado. You should be gagged and tied in a chair. Because, my brother later told me that I had mentioned in Goodnow’s Drugstore that I had just booked a $2,000 speaking job in Michigan. And, before the sun went down that night, I had bought a round trip plane ticket to Orlando, fenced my cows out on the side lawn, and hauled to the dump some valuable wood scraps that I’d been saving for over 30 years.
This morning my house guest Bera from Boston said that when she was a kid, they all went swimming together. We did, too. I told her that 15 or so of us, all the kids in the neighborhood, would walk down to Tootie’s shore and go swimming. Every day we’d go an hour later, because when the tide was coming in over the clamflats on sunny days the water would be warmer. I wasn’t a very clever boy 55 years ago, because it wasn’t until we were talking about swimming this morning that I suddenly realized that when some girl’s towel would slip and fall off, it wasn’t an accident.
My house guest Dan from Boston mentioned that the Kenyans did not win the Marathon at the Olympics. I asked him how this could happen, and he said that it was because there was no prize money. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com if you have another answer.
The other day I was trying to saw a 6 by 6 on a table saw and of course it jammed up and the motor howled and stopped. I took the motor to Bill Daggett who is 92 years old. When you think about it, you will realize that about the only people who know how to fix things are 78, 85, 92 years old. Nowadays everything that can be made unfixable is made unfixable. Things are made to break and unless you were born before 1940, you throw things away without even thinking about it. If you were born before 1940, even if it can’t be fixed, you put it in the garage or in the attic because even though it’s worthless, you can’t bring yourself to throw it away. But Bill Daggett took my electric saw motor apart and stacked the parts here and there on his workbench, and all I could think is, how in the world can he remember how to put this all back together. And I looked at him with admiration and said, “That don’t scare you a bit, does it?” And 92 year old Bill Daggett said, “No, it’s not my motor.”
Bill is a consummate expert in the field of bovine midwifery and it’s a good thing because he heard a cow that was obviously having trouble dropping a calf. He got a piece of rope and ran out to help, but the first thing he noticed was that the calf had breached. He tried to turn the calf around but couldn’t. So he grabbed the calf’s hind legs and pulled. Just then a young woman from New Jersey who’d been up on the hill working on a pastoral watercolor came down to see what’s going on. She gets there just in time to see Bill bring that calf into the world. And she says, “I can’t believe that. How fast was that little one going when it hit the big one?"
While clicking aimlessly the other day, I stumbled on a program called Maury Povitch. Maury Povitch has guests who wonder about the parenthood of their children. He takes a DNA sample and within 48 hours mama knows who fathered her child. 48 hours. It reminded me that there are people in jail who have waited for years for the state to process some DNA that would prove their innocence, open the cell door and let them walk home. Wouldn’t you think that every taxpayer would want to be rid of all those innocent prisoners who are taking up space? Do you know what it costs the state to keep an innocent man in jail for a year? What an unnecessary expense. Maury Povitch can run the DNA test in 48 hours. It’s an expensive test, yes, but not as expensive as what it costs to keep an innocent man in jail for a year. The test would pay for itself within a month or two. I found this hard to believe when I first heard about it, but there is great opposition to letting innocent people out of jail. It makes sense when you think about it. The district attorneys and the judges who convicted these people on circumstantial evidence don’t want to admit that the evidence they permitted the juries to hear was incomplete. What a waste of all their time and effort to have to let someone out of jail only because he is innocent. He’s in there. It’s a done deal. Let’s forget about it. They consider it a black mark against their professional expertise. I would look at it exactly the opposite way. They are so proficient that they can even convince a jury to convict and lock up an innocent man. Of course judges and district attorneys are supported by all of their very powerful friends. So some of these cases where everyone finally realizes that the person was innocent, become hot political footballs. No way is a district attorney, who wants to be governor, going to help an innocent man have a new trial or look at the DNA so he can get out of jail. What do you think about this DNA thing? DNA has helped put a lot of bad guys in jail. But if you were convicted by jurors who were only permitted to hear half the circumstantial evidence long before this DNA testing was available to prove your innocence, you might as well forget about the attorney general. Send a note to this Maury Povitch.
You know that I am a student of Hitler. When I was getting an undergraduate degree in history I was told that those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. When I reread Mein Kampf and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and my Readers Digest condensed biography of Hitler, I come back again and again to salient passages that I underlined long ago. Although Hitler was a genius when it came to political infighting --- that is lying, intimidation, exploiting his opponents’ weak points and then acting with ruthless decisiveness, when the going got tough he didn’t understand the logistics involved in fighting a war. He was smart enough to realize that when you blow up a house full of people, many of their friends and relatives would very likely find this a bit unsettling, and that more than a handful of them might be crazy enough to die while seeking revenge. And because Hitler was smart enough to realize that a resistance movement would be inevitable, entire populations were to be slaughtered or enslaved. My favorite professor at the University of Rochester, Antanas Klimas, learned German while in a work-study program --- that is, he was a slave. If you’ve never been privileged to spend three years in classes taught by one of Hitler’s Lithuanian slaves and want to round out your studies in WWII history, you might find instruction in the letters Hitler’s young soldiers wrote to their parents and loved ones at home. You will find many that tell how proud these young soldiers were to help out with the wonderful work they were doing to promote freedom in France --- Holland --- Belgium. You can easily find any number of them by typing “German soldiers letters WWII” into Google. Quote: “our obligation is to do our duty and believe in a brighter future for our people. In hardship and death, we see the foundation for a new, purified future." And so on. It’s a good thing that Hitler lived when he did. He’d never be able to dupe so many young people today.
The CGF is one of the greatest things going in Maine. For three days, every year, there is more IQ, more talent, more people with ability to do things walking around on that fair ground than you will find any place this side of Cambridge Massachusetts. I just go to say hi to you and to look at you and marvel. I also enjoyed seeing the car that runs on second hand French fry grease. I was told any restaurant will give you the grease just to get rid of it, and I’m going to look into that. I was also impressed by a big sociological chart with four boxes in it. The choices were something like this: Raised poor, raised lower middle class, raised upper middle class, raised rich. People were asked to make an x in their box. You know that people are ashamed to admit that their father or grandfather was smart enough or clever enough to be able to send them to Bowdoin or Harvard. Why is this? I only saw one man put an x in the rich box. I rushed over and said that I admired his courage. He said that he had nothing to do with it. Being born in Greenwich Connecticut was an accident of birth, much like my accent. The way I talk. We couldn’t do anything about where our mothers brought us into this world or how she taught us to talk. Why hold it against us?
I had several nice talks with the woman who was running that sociological chart --- poor, middle class, rich. She said that people in the upper classes are always networking. Always socializing. And you know that’s true. And when you think about it you’ll realize why rich people are always hanging out with rich people. Who wants to hang out with poor people? Please listen. If I were a young girl I’d stand by that chart for all three days next summer. The first guy without a ring in his nose who put an x in that rich box wouldn’t stand a chance.
You know that I’m not all that clever. I don’t think when I say some things. I don’t think things through. I do know that the radio friends I meet every year at the CGF are wicked smart. I’m talking about you. Don’t you think that you are a bit above average in intelligence? If you don’t have an advanced degree, couldn’t you have one in most any discipline if you wanted one? If you don’t have a degree, isn’t it because you are like Bill Gates who is doing well in a business that doesn’t require a diploma? Anyway, I couldn’t believe that there were so few people at the CGF who put an x in the rich box on that sociological chart. It is statistically impossible that so many smart people could have been born poor. And I was talking about this with a friend. I said it takes a certain kind of smarts to become wealthy. There were a lot of very intelligent people on the fair grounds, therefore, there must be a lot more people who could have put an x in the rich box who didn’t do so. I said, “Wealth implies intelligence.” And my friend laughed at me.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with me at the CGF. I must have spoken to at least 300 people over the three days and I appreciate your kind words. One girl said she had never written me an email. You know I enjoy your emails --- so I got down on my knees in the dirt and asked her if she’d send me an email. Big mistake. Her husband rushed over to find out what was going on. I got down on my knees again and asked if he would send me a letter, too. Everyone at the CGF had good things to say --- except one girl. I don’t know who she was. All I know about her, all she would say, is that she didn’t have a doctorate and that she was 27 years old. She said she disliked my program, she thought it was terrible. And here’s where I got the greatest compliment I got in the entire three days. That girl who hates this program was able to repeat every funny story I told last week --- with improvements.
My good friend, David Bright, was at the CGF. And I should mention that the CGF is a fair where an air of camaraderie prevails. The smell of fresh flowers, and garlic, is in the air. Warm fuzzy feelings are the order of the day. I know this is true, because when David’s present wife got out of her chair, his last wife sat down and gave him a hug. Because David Bright is famous for his social conscience, I was shocked to see him smacking his lips over a huge plate of steaming scallops. I said, “David, doesn’t it bother you to eat that big plate of scallops when you know that there are people in the world who are going hungry?” And David said, “Not when I consider what I paid for it.”
You saw it on one of those morning TV shows. An expert on the way college kids live was talking about “Hooking up” and “Catching feelings.” From what I remember, hooking up means a one night stand. Catching feelings means let’s do it again tomorrow night. Chomsky would say that they might be employing different lexical items, but the deep structure remains the same. Don’t laugh at young people when they change the language. Every generation does it. When I look at the picture of my great grandparents, I’m amazed that they had any children at all.
I know you want to hear the worst thing I heard at the CGF. Seems as there is a terrorist up in the woods around Fort Kent: All summer been loggin.
You will be glad to hear that the stress test I took at the hospital revealed no leaky heart valves. I went in for the test because I could no longer walk 300 feet without gasping and panting for air. I could not cut a dozen alders with the chainsaw without sitting down exhausted. I could not walk the cow fence without wondering if I’m going to make it back home. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, couldn’t wait for me to get home to report. When she gave me the look, I said, “Do you want it in scientific terms or plain English?” And because the good doctor’s advice might also apply to you, I now repeat what I said to my wife in plain English --- as near as I can on the radio: “Get off your …”
What am I now doing that I would not have dreamed of doing a year ago? I never dared drink because I have good reason to believe that I am genetically an alcoholic. But listen to the results of this study: the risk of prostate cancer decreased six percent for every glass of red wine consumed per week. And, "Among men who consumed four or more 4-ounce glasses of red wine per week, we saw about a 60 per cent lower incidence of the more aggressive types of prostate cancer," said Janet Stanford, senior author of the study. Prostrate cancer is not to be messed with. I’ve got the genes for that, too. So, at a very late age I’ve started in on a bit of preventive maintenance. Every night after supper, I chug four ounces of red wine. Six swallows. And I do chug because red wine is the nastiest tasting --- well, it’s right up there with pea soup and yogurt. At $7.62 a gallon, however, it beats any other medicine you’ll find in a drugstore. By the way, if it ever starts to taste good, I might not dare drink it.
Your buddy humble here. You know that I’m constantly working to make a better program for you. Do I deserve to sit behind this microphone if I don’t give you something to think about as I attempt to entertain? Because I’m always trying to improve, I attended the Public Radio Program Managers convention in San Antonio last week. Did I learn a lot? You be the judge. When I got home and stepped on the bathroom scales, I noticed that my brain cells had gained five pounds.
Did you see the recent interview with Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings? Tom Brokaw said that anyone who watched the commercials on his program would think that there was a plague of erectile dysfunction in America. And weren’t you touched when that person in the audience said that you don’t judge a man by one event in his career? You probably wondered if they were talking about Dan Rather --- or O J Simpson.
Robert Skoglund, your buddy humble here, passing on a bit of what I learned at the Public Radio Convention in San Antonio. Define who you are. That’s what one of the gurus said. Define who you are. You know me, after giving it quite a bit of serious thought I knew I had a pretty good answer, but --- just to be sure --- just to confirm my definition of Robert Skoglund, when I got home --- before I even hugged my wife, Marsha, the Almost Perfect Woman, I smiled and gazed lovingly in her eyes and said, “Who am I?” And she said, “If you’re seeking identity go mow the lawn.”
Because my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, does all our shopping, I seldom get to see the magazine covers that are displayed by the check out counter. So I enjoyed looking at covers in the San Antonio airport. I found some of them hard to believe. If you look at the cover of this month’s In Style magazine, you’ll read: “67 Looks to flatter your shape. Great bags at every price.” If you keep your eyes open in the airport, you can inherit a fairly recent newspaper. Here’s a couple of typical items from the economic news pages: Good news if you earn over $200,000 a year. Fewer wealthy people are paying taxes. Nearly 3400 of tax returns reporting incomes of $200,000 or more showed they owed no Federal income tax in 2001, which was a 45% increase over the year before. Their tax lawyers are getting better and better. --- Then, US Air pilots just agreed to 300 million in annual wage and benefit cuts. The deal also requires pilots to fly more hours a month for the same pay. While getting into a plane at the San Antonio airport I asked a man who was next to me in line why this airline was still in business while so many of the other airlines were cutting salaries and doing away with workers’ benefits. And he said, “Oh, these people don’t have any benefits.”
Robert Skoglund here with music and commentary, just back from my first public radio conference in San Antonio. Like any neophyte, I was baffled by the jargon. There were many terms I find here in my little black notebook that I still do not fully understand. You might help me. For example, does the term “vertical and horizontal scheduling” mean anything to you? I can only guess that it describes the music people can safely listen to when they are in a vertical position, and the kind of music they should definitely not listen to while in a horizontal position. Perhaps you’ve been driving your car, listening to Oscar Peterson and Clark Terry doing something at a real brisk tempo, and looked down to discover, to your horror, that you are going 80 miles an hour. How many people do you suppose owe their very existence to the fact that their parents once listened to the same recording back home in bed? Robert Skoglund, your buddy humble here, with music and observations on things that I hope will interest you. Thank you for listening. I heard it at the public radio program managers’ conference in San Antonio. “And now, without further ado…” Of course that made several of us want to scream. Because what is saying, “And now, without further ado….” but further ado? Why not simply: “Here’s Johnny.” You certainly realize that although Albert Snarf might be a brilliant journalist, it doesn’t also mean that Albert Snarf is also a great public speaker. A genius who has inspired millions with his written words might be incapable of mumbling a few coherent sentences into a microphone in front of 400 people. Speaking is not his thing. To adapt from Dr. Johnson: "Sir, a journalist at a mike is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." That said, I really hadn’t thought about the situation until I listened to dozens of radio people in front of live mikes. Neil Tesser does a program out of Chicago called Listen Here! And when Neil Tesser finished his little presentation and stepped down off the platform, I rushed up to him and grabbed his hand. As I looked him in the eye, I said, “Mr. Tesser. “You spoke so well that I have difficulty believing that you’re in radio.”
Did you hear Garrison Keillor talking about raising tomatoes when it’s freezing outside? I haven’t listened to Garrison Keillor for years, but I was on the last leg of my journey home from the Public Radio conference so I felt obligated to listen. The man is a genius. His writes brilliant comedy. I love to laugh, and I laughed and laughed at his sketch about the car computer giving driving directions to the couple trying to find their way around Saint Paul. And there was something else he did that was hilarious. Brilliant. But I was somewhat taken back by a segment he did about the President of the United States. And just in case you didn’t know who he was talking about, to make sure he reached even the dullest member of his audience, the speaker employed a Texas accent and the President was identified by name. The skit had something to do with not knowing enough to bring in tomatoes before they froze. No sir, he was going to leave them outside ---raising tomatoes had to do with determination and commitment and hanging in there, and he was sure that those tomatoes would ripen if he left them out in the cold and really believed in them. You support your tomatoes and they will ripen outside when it is freezing. --- What do you think about a public radio personality who makes comments about the gardening habits of the President of the United States? And do think about this. There was one Public radio host at the San Antonio conference who was reprimanded by his boss when he read, on air, a little condensed biography about the author of a famous old book that changed the world. From what I understand, he even encouraged his listeners to read the book. You might not believe this, but in this land of the free the host was then forbidden to read on air any letters he received in response to the program and he was told that he should not address that issue or any other issue again. We are discussing a very important thing here, and I’d like your opinion. I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com When Garrison Keillor talks on air about a man who thinks he can ripen tomatoes outside in the freezing cold, does it damage the objectivity and integrity of a station that strives for fair, balanced and objective reporting?
Last week, my doctor says to me, "You're lucky to live here in Maine where there is no stress." No stress here in Maine? I'd like to see that doctor's wife drag him out of bed at 5 o'clock some January morning when it's two below zero. I'd like to see him bundle up and head out to start his 25-year-old diesel tractor --- the one with the plow but no cab on it. I'd like to see him go out through a window, because last night's slush on the doorstep had turned into solid ice when the temperature dropped forty degrees. And after spending an hour freezing his fingers while getting that old tractor started, I'd like to see that doctor try to move three feet of ice and snow in front the garage door so his wife could get out and drive 30 miles to teach school. And then I'd like to hear his wife yapping at him to take an axe and chop the ice off the doorstep so she, who is already half an hour late in leaving, can get out of the house without climbing out the window like he did. And after he'd knocked a corner off his granite doorstep and ruined his axe while chopping away the ice, can't you see his wife stepping into a two foot drift and getting snow down her boots because he hadn't had time to shovel a path? Oh, wouldn't I like to be there right then when he turns to his wife and says, "I love it here in Maine, where there is no stress."
You’ll see me over at the Owl’s Head Transportation Museum’s huge parking lot just about every other Saturday from spring until fall. I spoke to Warren Kincaid at the car show. Warren is a Model T expert and when you are an expert in anything, you collect tons and tons of good and valuable things that enable you to ply your trade. Warren says that he is at the stage in his career where he would like to get into his barn. Of course he can’t, because it is piled with good and valuable things. How do you throw away the rear fender to a 1913 model T when you know that the day after you do, you’ll need it? I also have several Model T Fords and several tons of parts that I bought over 50 years ago, so I can identify with the problem. What I learned from Warren is that the inability to discard useless items is probably genetic. I already knew that it is easier to clean out someone else’s barn than your own. Warren says that his 83-year-old father epitomizes the Maine collector. Listen to what happened when Warren tried to clean out his father’s barn. Father had over 200 oil cans in his barn. My father says, “Let me tell you what I was going to do with those cans. I was going to cut out all the ends and weld them together like a honey comb and put nuts and bolts in them.” Then, Warren says, I tried to throw away a 3 foot length of that cardboard tubing they call sona tube. You put it in the ground and pour concrete into it to make footings. Father said, “Let me tell you what I was going to do with that. I was going to put a clothes line post out in the yard for your mother.” And Warren said, “Dad, mother has been dead for 22 years.”
When Bruce the Goose married the young and nubile Eva, for some reason that I do not understand the Goose asked me if his mother could spend the night with us. This is why Bruce and Eva happened to drop in on us for breakfast the next morning. Although she had been a bride less than 24 hours, Eva already had in her possession a formidable document she called her honey do list. You and I have heard of the honey do list. You might have one in your house but we do not have one here. This is because our marriage has ripened. Our marriage has matured. After 14 years of marriage my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, finally realizes that she will probably never be able to get me to do anything. We do, however, have another list here. It is a list that grows every time my wife points out one of the innumerable strange and unfamiliar items piled in one of my barns, and says, “What is that? Why do you need that?” Our list is called, “I was gonna…”
I took out a second mortgage on our farm so I could go to the dentist. Over the next 30 years Marsha’s kids who will inherit the place will be paying for repairs to an ancient lateral incisor. You know me. I was there early. I was there at 10 o’clock for a 10:30 appointment. Gave me a chance to review several hundred French language flash cards. But after I knew them all with the exception of quelleconque, I noticed that I’d been there an hour. So I very timidly approached the counter and asked if Robert Skoglund had an appointment there that day. Yes, it was at 2:50. Think about this. Haven’t I described an excellent opportunity for street people --- and old folks who lost their homes in the Florida hurricanes --- and others, like me, who simply aren’t smart enough to keep their homes in the present economy? Tired of sleeping in the park? Sit down in the waiting room of your friendly dentist and spend the morning studying the US News And World Report. Before you’ve had time to read even more good news in the Wall Street Journal or Barons, a member of the staff might offer you a cup of coffee.
You might be interested in two things submitted by David Noyes in Gardiner, Texas, who listens to this program on the Internet. David says that radishes can take the place of Roll Aids. I might add that a brisk walk might also prove beneficial to anyone wishing to alleviate an uncomfortable ethereal pressure on their intestines. You don’t hear these things advertised on TV, because although you get instant relief, no money changes hands. And here’s something else David mentioned that doesn’t work for me but you can give it a try. When your wife asks if you took a shower, tell her that you don’t want to dry out your skin.
**You probably know people who can’t face the world --- who can’t face their day, without a big, stiff drink. I can identify with them. I can sympathize with these poor souls, because I am completely worthless without my suspenders. If you look at men who run around without suspenders, you will notice that they are always out of breath. This is because most of their energy is spent holding up their pants and tucking in their shirttails, which are always hanging out when pants are not properly aligned and suspended. I didn’t get a thing done yesterday and now, when I think about it, I realize it was because I spent the day holding up my pants with one hand and tucking in my shirttail with the other. Do you spend hours staring at a computer screen, or shuffling paper behind a desk? In that case, this suspender issue is somewhat of a moot one for you, but anyone in rubber boots who walks a mile of electrified cow fence every day knows what I’m talking about. And of course you have to walk your fence every day this time of year because those sworn enemies of the Maine farmer, the deer, knock it down on their way to eat your garden and your young trees. Women in dresses have never realized the value in a rugged pair of LL Bean suspenders because--- think about this --- a dress is, in itself, nothing more than a very wide pair of suspenders. It hangs from the shoulders. Any garment that contains a built in pair of suspenders is a very efficient rig, which might explain why capes have been popular for thousands of years and why I saw a couple of men wearing dresses up at the Common Ground Fair. This morning I told my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, that I could pose for a suspender advertisement. I could be both the before, with the haggard hang dog look, and the after with the smile of a man who is geared up to shovel out the cow barn. She said, “Yesterday the cuffs of your pants were where they were supposed to be. Today they are half way up to your knees.”
** How do you know when a group of individuals have power? Oh, they can raise or lower the price of gas as it suits political expediency. They can take me to jail if I drive 80 in a 15 mph school zone. They can obstruct scientific research. This is small potatoes, kid. Our political and religious leaders don’t know what real power is. FBI, CIA, Randy Nichols and the Maine State Police? Pah. Nada. Let’s talk about the folks who do have power. “You can’t form a line up here by this lavatory.” That’s what the stewardess said over the intercom. “You sit in your seat and you come up here one at a time.” What do you think about that? No longer can two people stand in line in the forward part of an airplane. Unless you travel by plane, you have not experienced many of the social inconveniences necessitated by 9-11. I’m talking power here. Not only have they caused us to take off our shoes before entering an airplane, but El Quida is now also dictating the movement of our bowels.
**We live in a time that many of us old folks have trouble understanding. We cannot relate to much of what we read in the newspapers. For example, when I was in the first grade in 1941, what do you suppose happened to a bad little boy who wrote poems like this? Just to be bad. Just to push the envelope. “I like Betsy Ross, She sewed so well, She made some bread, and we hollered…” And then he wrote --- “You can find the missing word in Proverbs 24:13.” You see, even back then I was an academic --- liked to look up things. Anyway, you are right. The teacher read the note and the bad little boy was punished for simply implying that in Proverbs 24:13 you would find the word hell. From what I read in the papers, nowadays he could get punished for just saying “Proverbs 24:13.”
** Have trouble understanding who is going to profit by any given piece of legislation? This is how you can tell if it will help you or hurt you: Find out who supports it in the big tribal council. If a spokesman for the rich stands up in a paid television ad and tells you it is a great thing, you know that it is going to make the rich even richer. If a spokesman for the working class stands up in a paid television ad and tells you that it is a great thing, it will probably benefit people on minimum wage. To understand any proposed piece of legislation, don’t listen to what is being said --- simply find out which group is behind it. Find out who is paying for the ads. Isn’t that simple? Now that I’ve had it explained to me I wonder why I didn’t think of it myself.
Perhaps you will help me understand the macho man. The past two macho men I’ve seen in television movies come across to me as incredibly stupid helpless creatures. Is macho synonymous with stupid and insecure? Both plots involved a man who failed in business and then lied to his wife or girlfriend about it. The lie, the attempt to deceive, appears to cause more trouble than the act of getting fired or having a book refused by your editor. Do you see a redeeming value in these films? Are the people making them finally trying to teach us something?
You saw that Martha Stewart is presently serving her six month sentence in a place that resembles an old fashioned college campus. What happened to the good old days when lawbreakers were chained to moldy walls in rat infested cells? Not that I wish that on anyone, least of all a woman whose televised demonstrations on the way life should be captivated my wife’s father for years. But I do envy her present situation because she has time on her hands. How would you, right now, like to spend the next six months free from worldly care in a college dormitory with nothing to do but read and write? Yes, before you hear the next peeper in the swamp, Martha Stewart will have earned another five million dollars for her book on prison cusine.
How many of your friends are Type A’s? As you know, the Type A individual has to run everything. They are the original lemme show ya boys. Two of them cannot exist in an organization or a marriage without destroying it. Type A’s cannot rest until they and only they have the power. Being married to or working for a Type A is like living on the edge of a tornado: you cringe well back from the swirling clouds of dust. They and only they know where pictures should be hung on the walls. They have to arrange the furniture in the house. Ever see man and wife out in the driveway standing toe to toe screaming at each other? Type A’s. Their marriage doesn’t stand a chance. On the other hand, you’re lucky if you work for a Type A because he or she is unable to delegate authority. Nobody can do it as well as he can, he trusts no one to do it right, so he is not only the conductor of the band --- you will also see him playing piano, blowing the trombone, beating the drums, applauding from the audience and then writing a review of the performance. All the other performers have to do is stand in line as he signs their checks --- the secretary can’t be trusted to do it right. The Type A manager knows how many rolls of toilet paper his organization uses in a year, month or day. His computer prints out charts and graphs which he hangs on the wall and collects in thick, well thumbed books. When I was in Orlando last week, I met Charles Ware, who is a healthcare engineer at a hospital in Perry, Florida. I mentioned to Charles that my wife was a Type A and he said that his was, too. I asked him if he knew what my wife did after I made the bed. I almost cried when he said, “She tears it apart and makes it right.” I’d found a soul mate, you see. Charles said that he couldn’t understand why so many men have to be macho. He’s been married for over 30 years and he says that he tells his young friends that it is much easier to swim with the current --- go with the flow. Then he told me that old story about the preacher who had a dozen hens of all colors. He said that he would give one to any man who would stand up and admit that he was the boss in the house. When one man jumped up, the preacher said that he could have any hen he wanted. And there was silence. So he asked again, “Which one do you want?” And the man said, “She says she wants the brown one.”
Do you remember seeing the maps of Europe when you were a kid in school? The pink part indicated the amount of territory any given warlord was occupying at any given time. Here in Maine our boundaries are holding pretty well and although we sometimes hear cries about who owns the lobsters down Kittery way, the lines have stayed just about the same since 1842. Have you stopped to think that Maine remains in one piece only because people in Fort Kent think just about the same as people down in Ogunquit? Of course, we differ on small issues but they are not enough to tear the state apart. For example a person in Fort Kent might not be able to cast an intelligent vote on how many lobster traps anyone should be allowed to set off Beals Island. The town of St. George where I live is surrounded by lobster traps on three sides but, even so, I figure that lobster management is the business of the biologists and the wardens and the people who go lobstering. As long as I don’t hear Jennifer Rooks telling about lobsters crawling up the pilings at Cod End in Tenants Harbor and attacking children, I figure the folks in charge are doing a good job. I’m content to let them determine how many lobsters should be thrown, screaming, into the boiling pot. You might very astutely point out that the same reasoning might be applied to controlling the bear population up in the County. Ask yourself if anyone in Ogunquit knows anything about the best way to control the bear population in Fort Kent. I would wager that very few Ogunquit citizens have been eaten by bears since the Civil War. Is it fair to let our retired New York City friends who live in million dollar houses all along the Maine coast and their lobstering neighbors determine how many bears are allowed to wander through your back yard in Fort Kent? Or should we leave such captivating questions up to our biologist friends who have studied the situation? What do you think? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com
You know that a great many scientific advances have been ridiculed, derailed or crushed by short sighted or jealous people in power who, for any number of reasons, wished to preserve the status quo. “Young people are dying with Lou Gehrig’s disease.” “People have always died with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Let’s not mess with nature.” We talked about this a short while ago and because I stumbled on a classic example this morning, I’m going to unload it on you now. You’ve heard me say many times that I’m like you in that I am interested in learning about most everything. Because the Encyclopedia Britanica is on a wall between my bedroom and the bathroom, for a few delicious minutes every morning I might read about Egypt and Cosmic Rays. This morning I read about silkworms and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis “whose influence on the development of knowledge and control of infection was cited by Joseph Lord Lister, the father of modern surgery,” who said, “Without Semmelweis my achievements would be nothing.” Despite the serious objections of Klein, his boss and the chief of maternity, Semmelweis wanted to find out why young mothers were dying. He figured out that infection was carried on the hands so he got doctors to wash their hands. Women stopped dying, and the outstanding success of this hand washing caused Klein, the boss, to restrict Semmelweis’ activities, underhandedly prevent his promotion to assistant professor, and drive him from Vienna. Semmelweis continued to be plagued by the failure of doctors to wash their hands and thereby save the lives of countless young women. ---- You don’t have anything to do. Why not write a book on the hundreds of scientists whose discoveries were not appreciated by their peers? These people whose creative and insightful thinking has improved our lives were locked up or burnt at the stake or forced to recant. If they were lucky, like Semmelweis, they were simply driven out of town in disgrace. You could call your book: “They were Failures.”
When I went into Goodnow’s drugstore it was with a bit of trepidation. The last time I was in there, I had just been gassed out of my mind by my dentist friend Dr. Gee, who pulled my wisdom tooth, and I don’t remember what I said or did. I was no more responsible for my actions than the protagonist in a Return of the Mummy movie. My brother, who was my designated driver, told me later that I had spoken to the attractive young owner in a very loud and jovial voice, and because she is my best friend’s daughter, I was concerned. But this time I was of clear mind and after my thyroid pills. For years I had been getting something called synthroids, but I had just discovered that I could get a generic pill for about half the price. Not many people ask for the cheaper pill because you need a degree in pharmacy to pronounce it. --- which might explain why some people drink a lot of Bud. Haven’t you ever wondered why they now name pills after some obscure Greek god?. Anyway, in the drugstore I said, rather indifferently, “I’m here after my pills. What’s the name of it?” And the young girl very cleverly countered with, “I’m not allowed to say it out loud. Federal law.” Hah ---The only law that kept her from saying it was a physiological one that deals with articulatory phonetics.
The boys who plow driveways in St. George, Maine, always have their equipment out by the road and ready by the end of October. Most of us who live in Maine know why, because it is not unusual to have several inches of the white horror descend upon us before Halloween. The plowing machines are different this year, however. The boys who design and drive them have been influenced by their neighbor Ricky Craven, the famous race car driver. And they now believe they have a machine that will help them to make their truck payments during these tough economic times. Their plows are moved by 600 horsepower engines. On the open road, between driveways, the units are capable of speeds up to 180 miles per hour. You understand, of course, how necessary speed is, especially in the early fall. Because, if they waste even fractions of a second between their last job and your driveway, the snow at your place would have melted.
Did I mention that when I was up in Presque Isle I met Tim, who listens to this program? It was great talking with Tim. It’s always great to talk with you. I love to meet you. Love to know what you do and how long you’ve been doing it. You will remember that I always ask you for the funniest or the most horrible thing that ever happened to you while you were working. I also want to know the most useful thing you can tell me. What can you tell me that will save me from making the same stupid mistake that you did? We talk a lot about that on this program. I try to come up with scraps of information that will save you grief. Up in Presque Isle Tim told me that he learned Spanish while working at the customs station in El Paso. I said, “Lemme hear some,” and Tim rattled off some Spanish that I couldn’t quite understand. So I said, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Do you have any drugs in your truck?”
Are you one of those old people who keep putting off learning how to run your computer? Don’t put it off. You won’t be frustrated like many of us who fought it out on our own because you have many friends who will guide your key strokes. It’s simple and easy when someone shows you. Do remember that we all have a level of expertise that keeps us comfortable with our computers, and we are all different. The motto of the college up at Potsdam where I flunked out was, “Let Each Become all He is Capable of Being,” and I think that can be applied to computers. Learn as much as you need --- so you can do what you need to do. There are, however, people like Richard Bird who doesn’t want to stop there. Richard Bird enjoys computers for another reason, and he explained it to me. Richard said, “It gives me something in my life over which I have complete and total control.”
If you attended the Common Ground Fair, you might have seen, in a tent, a huge table covered with books. One of the books was titled: “How To Build A Barn.” Would you be surprised if the first sentence on the first page said, “It ain’t going to be big enough.” Oh, the Common Ground Fair. Where you meet friends for the first time. What an opportunity for a weak-eyed old man to make a fool of himself. I almost said to one girl, “I like that big diamond on the side of your nose.”
Are you tired of driving around in the same old rattling and pounding and knocking Volvo that you inherited from your father when he bought a new one? Simply can’t take the noise any longer? Before you trade it in, listen closely and save yourself the bother. When I drove my truck down to the Manchester airport, I was impressed how good it sounded for something with 252 thousand miles on it. No grinds, no rattles, no wind hissing by the windows. When I got there I discovered I’d forgotten to put batteries in my hearing aids.
Can you eat anything? I’m an old Maine man and I’m pretty careful about what I eat. I love chocolate, especially a cup of hot chocolate, but one cup of hot chocolate releases 17 devils in my stomach and even when the pain goes away it can keep me wide awake all night. Back before I met Marsha I even had a warning written in black magic marker on the door casing. Don’t drink hot chocolate. You know that when you are single you can write reminders on the walls if it makes your life more comfortable. I remember getting on a bus with Brad Terry and Phil Verrill 30 or so years ago and playing jazz concerts from Maine to Florida to California. When we were in Texas, the boys pigged out on Mexican food and Mark Perry, the piano player, didn’t recover for months. I survived the trip by eating McDonald’s hamburgers, which are not so deadly --- in the short run. The boys laughed at me until that hot Tex-Mex sauce grabbed them. Now, I’m not just talking here to fill out the hour. Save yourself some grief and pay attention. Daniel Berry told me that he worked with an opera singer from New York who was famous for putting hot sauce on his food. The hotter the better. Dan said that a year after he last saw him, he burned out his stomach and was no longer with us. No sir. I’m going to stick with natural Maine food --- like raw clams. Really no worse than having a bad cold.
I have looked on the Internet but can’t find it. Someone told me that when Tolkien held court with his friends at Oxford, a group called the Inklings, they would draw languages out of a hat to determine which language they would speak that day. But I can’t find it. I did read that Tolkein had an exceptional gift for languages and had mastered Latin, Greek, Old English, the Germanic Languages (including Gothic), Welsh and Finnish. My hero. You probably remember my telling you about the time I saw a man buying a Greek book in a Camden bookstore. And because I’m a very nosey and sociable person I mentioned to him that there weren’t all that many people in Camden who could read Greek. But it reminded me that when I got out of bed that morning I saw on my bedside stand a book in French, a book in Spanish, a book in Swedish and a book in Dutch. And he said, “My word, who were you sleeping with?”
When I go into stores I have the feeling that people are watching me. I mentioned it to my wife, and she said that people are probably looking at me to find out what they should be wearing.
When I go through a checkout counter at the supermarket, I always look at the magazines, because they always have two or three eye catching stories listed on the cover. And usually, if you'll look and back me up on this, one has to do with the royal family of England. Which always amazes me. Why aren't there stories about the prime minister of Iceland or most anybody on Beal's Island? I'm sure that their lives are in every way just as interesting. But I started to say that one article on a magazine cover this week was, "The Simple Life --- How You Can Get It." I'd start by burning the magazine.
I recently spoke to some people who own retail stores down in Massachusetts. Of course I went on the Internet to learn what I could about retailing. According to what I read, a very big problem store owners have, is keeping their employees from stealing. Which would seem to confirm that it's been a long time since most Americans learned anything important at Sunday School. But I read about many ways to keep employees from stealing, and was somewhat shocked to realize that, as a result of my studies, I had also learned many ways to steal. By the time I finished, I realized that, should anyone in retailing want to make a good living, they should sell their stores and come up with a test that will detect dishonesty in poor-risk job applicants.
For over 8 years I produced six or so television commercials every week for businesses in the Rockland and Camden area. The hardest part of selling my service back then was convincing store owners that humor sells. Of course everyone knows that now. The best commercials one sees on national tv now are very funny, but I was ahead of my time so selling these funny tv spots was an uphill battle. You know that I never boast or brag about myself, but you should know that I am proud of one presentation I made. And I think I'm justified in saying to myself, or to you, a close friend for many years --- "Robert, you are fantastic. You really outdid yourself on that one." I'm talking here about my visit with Ann at Tuttle's Shoe Barn. I want you to know that that was powerful advertising. Because --- as soon as my show went on the air, someone who couldn't even wait for them to open, broke in and stole two pair of shoes.
Years ago someone wrote me an emotional letter saying that they were offended by a story I’d told about father so and so. Because I am not in the business of offending people, I was distressed. I was so distressed that I went to see a Catholic priest, I showed him the story, and told him that one of his parishioners was offended by the story. And I asked him if he found it offensive. He laughed when he read it and said that there were many such stories about priests and their housekeepers and that if I wasn’t in a hurry he’d tell me one of his favorites. Once upon a time there was a priest who had a helper-housekeeper. And this housekeeper acted very possessive about every table and chair and stick of furniture in the place. It was "my table" and "my chairs" and "my" this and "my" that, and it worried the priest. So he asked her to please stop acting as if she owned everything, because he was afraid the parishioners wouldn't like it. It wasn't her property. Everything actually belonged to everyone. So the housekeeper worked at it until she finally got it down. Then, one day, the Bishop paid a visit. And in the middle of their meeting, the housekeeper burst into the room and said, "Father, I wish you'd tell me what I can do, to keep the cat from sleeping on our bed."
You probably know by now that one of my favorite topics is taboos. Parents: If you have young children you may want to turn off your radio. You should know that this part of the program contains words that should not be said --- in France. In France there is a list of 3,500 foreign words that can't be used. They include the words cheeseburger, stress, bulldozer, brainstorming, air bag and log on. This from the country that originated the term: Le Jazz Hot. In Turkey, the word cool is banned. I wish it had been banned here 20 years ago, along with
There is a very good chance that you are a genius. Being a genius means that you can immediately see unique and positive alternatives to many situations. Here’s an example. One noon Julian Rubenstein and Lawyer Crandall and I were having dinner at Dave's Restaurant, when a great crowd of sheriff’s deputies and state policemen came in for coffee and filled up the entire counter. Lawyer Crandall looked at all those policemen at the counter, and said that right then would be a very poor time to hold up Dave's Restaurant. Julian said that that was true, but it would be a very good time to hold up a bank in Thomaston.
How do you recognize art when you see it? Somewhere out west, an overzealous crew removing graffiti from public places, inadvertently painted over a mural that had cost the city $15,000. What is art? Doesn't this answer that question? When was the last time you heard that some Maine artist had painted over one of Andy Wyeth's watercolors because she needed the canvas?
You have seen the extra pockets on my pants. You know that there is a little black notebook in one of those pockets so I can write down things that I hear or see --- just for you. Sometimes friends want to tell me a story. One day Blackie knocked on the window of my truck. I screwed down the window and he said, "Do you know how cold it was down at my house this morning?" And I said, "No, how cold was it down your house this morning?" And he said, "It was so cold I saw a rooster going across the road with a cape on."
Down in Florida people don't have the right jobs. I called for an Alamo rent a car. The woman talked like a machine gun and I couldn't understand her because I didn't have my hearing aid on the telephone. She was wound right up like she was selling on commission. On the other hand, I went into a fast Burger place and I ordered a burger. Burgers will keep me alive until I can get on a plane to Portland. I never order anything special because I don't want to wait, so I have even learned to eat burgers with raw onions and catsup. I could see the burger sitting right there waiting for someone to put it on my tray. You don't know what slow is until you've gone into a Burger place on the east coast of Florida and ordered a burger. You've seen them bring a suspect out of the courthouse on video, and then they slow the video down so it looks like the fellow is barely moving so you can get a good look at his face and the handcuffs. That's like a snowmobile race in Fort Kent compared to the way the people move behind the burger counters in Florida. There were five or six people behind the counter all looking at each other or nothing in particular and it was at least five minutes by my watch before one of them got around to reach over, pick up the burger, and put it in front of me. Why can't they get these burger people to answer the phones at Alamo and get the Alamo people to serve the burgers?
My friend lawyer Crandall told me about a woman up in the County who went in one of those little markets and said, "I want something good for dinner. What have you got?" And the butcher said, "Tongue is good today." And the woman said, "Nyaa, tongue? I wouldn't eat anything that came out of a cow's mouth. Give me a dozen eggs."
I am studying French because French is a very important language --- to the French. Did you know that there are only two places on this green earth where the natives do not speak at least a word or two of English? One of those places is a tiny village of tree houses in a rain forest in New Guinea where the men carry spears and wear a bone in their nose, and the other place is France. And every time I go to France I am frustrated because there isn't a man, woman or child there who will speak a word of English. I can't get a room in France, I can't get anything to eat, I can't find out where anything is. So I am learning French. Being a cosmopolitan, you already know that you don't take no for an answer in France. If you come into a restaurant and say you want the table over by the window, and they say that it's reserved for the President, you say I am the president, and you go over there and sit down. I don't see what difference it makes what you say in France if you're simply going to go over and sit at the president's table anyway. You might know that the sounds in French are wonderful. But there is only one sound in French and it is produced with the nose. Difference in meaning is conveyed by the way you wave your arms. I told my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, that I couldn't remember the French word for money. She said, "I think it's moolah." Please make note of this because I’m about to tell you the most important sentence every young man needs to know in any language. It is, "My friend will pay."
Did you see it on TV? Fish are now exhibiting male and female tissue because of some estrogen chemicals that get pumped into the water. The scientist who is studying the situation said that this is the first time he has ever been scared. These sex changing chemicals have been outlawed in some other countries, but they are still being pumped out of sewage plants into the rivers here. Any Senator who voted to outlaw these dna altering chemicals would be blacklisted by every chamber of commerce in America for being anti-business, so they’ll probably be around for a while. Think about this. If fish can be genetically altered to be both male and female, why couldn’t humans? We are talking about something pretty scary here when you stop to think that it would effectively make marriage illegal in at least 11 states.
Back before the days of sea legs when Maine restaurants made real lobster rolls, a real estate agent was asked to sell a house. This real estate agent was 100 percent honest and he knew his business. When it came to selling houses, there wasn't anyone this side of the County who could touch him. One day he got a call from a man in Boston who was going to come up from Boston on the train. He was going to arrive in Rockland at quarter past five, and he wanted to see that house. At quarter past four on the appropriate afternoon the agent had his friends in the fire department come over and pump two tank loads of water into the well. The Boston man was no fool, and he knew that unless wells were spring fed, they very often went dry in September and October. So his first question to the agent as they walked onto the property was, "How's the well hold out in the fall?" And the agent slid the cover off the well and said, "Why not check it out for yourself?"
People from away do not fully understand what motivates Maine people to stand up at Town Meeting and argue for an hour on a $300 item and then appropriate $300,000 for road sand as quick as the moderator can bring the hammer down. Back before we built a big town office, our town meeting used to be held in the Tenants Harbor Oddfellows Hall. Years ago the place used to be jam packed with people standing up along the walls, but nowadays usually only a few folks attend, and most of them just moved to town and want to find out about this town meeting thing. At a recent meeting the handful of natives argued for 50 minutes over $4,000 that would pay a town constable. Some of the people from away said that we needed a town constable and our own police car with a blue light on it. What the newcomers didn’t understand was that the natives who stood up and said that we didn't need a town police man had waited years for a burglar to break into their house so they could shoot him.
Did you read the story in Life Magazine about Billy Stewart taking Andy Wyeth out to Benner Island where he works in the summer? There was a quote in there by Andy’s wife, Betsy, who said that people who buy one of Andy's paintings don't buy any more after they've met him. You, of course, realize that this has nothing to do with meeting Andy. After you buy one of Andy Wyeth’s paintings, you don't have anything left.
Have you ever gone into court just to see what they do in there? If you go in there day after day and just sit quietly and listen, you might see different people, but they all tell the judge about the same story. You get the impression that the judge doesn't even have to listen because he never hears anything new. There is no one smart enough to say anything that might surprise him. He has heard it all before. At least that's what I thought until I asked my friend, Lawyer Crandall, if he ever said anything in court that surprised a judge. And Lawyer Crandall said, "Yes, Skog, I have. I once said, “Judge, my client is guilty.”
There might be a tougher way to make a living on the coast of Maine but I don’t know what it might be. Billy Iliffe took me and my guest for a lobster boat ride out around Southern Island. And when we got on the southeast side of Southern Island, --- there, sitting on the stern of a little boat, was an urchin diver --- tanks on his back --- wet suit. If you've ever seen urchin divers who have just come up after an endless hour on the bottom, you know what he was doing before he even got his tanks and wetsuit off. One look at him told me that
Here's the adult part of the show. I don’t have to worry about offending young ears because you have to be 45 or 50 years old to understand what I’m going to say here, anyway. My friend John said that when his kids were in high school, he told them that they were responsible for three things. One: They were going to have to pay for their own car. Two: They were going to have to get a job to pay for their car. And Three: They were going to be responsible for their own bills. I think that that is the most terrible advice I ever heard. If you really care for your kid, you should say: Don't get a car. If you don't get a car, you won't need to get a job and you'll never have any bills.
I live in St. George, Maine, and if the trees hadn’t grown up, I could look out my living room window and see my grandfather’s house 1500 feet up the road where I was born. I feel lucky to live where I do. In Knox County, Maine about the worst thing that could happen to you is having someone forget to put the meat patty in your hamburger. How bad is that? In one of those fast food places, it could save your life. But when the neighborhood does start to slide where I live --- it can reach rock bottom before you realize it. And you say to yourself you didn't realize that things were that bad right there within sight of where you live. How can you tell when your neighbor's house has reached that decrepit point of rural decay from which there is no return? In Thomaston you see the fire department burning it down. In St. George you see Andy Wyeth painting the boats in the dooryard.
You probably heard about that man they were executing down south somewhere. It seems as they didn't get his little hat on solid and when they pulled the switch, his head caught on fire. Some people were not pleased about the way things went, and caused a fuss. The reporter interviewed someone from --- I can't remember the group --- might have been Amnesty International, or something like that. And this person said, "The argument should not be how we execute somebody. The entire concept is flawed, because it is still the extinguishment of a human life by the state.” This argument will soon be invalid --- they will privatize it.
My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, wanted a mattress for one of the single beds upstairs. That’s when I noticed that every piece of furniture in every furniture store has a tag on it that says something like this: "Regular price $750. Marked down to $450." Why is everything marked down? Doesn't this make you think that the item in question is either not doing as well as it should, or that it was originally overpriced? We’re talking poor quality here. Nobody wants it. Wouldn't you much rather go into a furniture store and see the same item with a tag on it that said, "Regular $250. Marked up to $350?"
If you want to see people turn out at a public meeting, tell them that their kids got just about the lowest scores of any school in the state. At the meeting they will be told that a combination of problems led to the low scores and that the problem can be solved by introducing internal standardized testing to make sure that students are learning what they should be learning at every grade. But let's look at this standardized testing foolishness carefully. Each student has different interests and abilities. People learn at different rates. There is nothing wrong with this. It is part of being human. When you are raising children and not chickens variety is a wonderful and necessary thing. Think what happens when you test every student in every school with the same test. One school, like North Haven, is going to be the top school in the state, and one school, hopefully not yours, is going to be the lowest school in the state. And what is the effect of all this testing and standardizing? Teachers teach for the test. The creative thinking that is central to a real education is stifled. Of secondary importance testing is going to make the parents, who live in the towns where the lowest scoring students live, very ugly. It is not going to make them encourage their children to hit the books for two hours every evening instead of playing ball, watching tv or playing video games. Can this obsession with testing serve a purpose? Yes. It can give the paper shuffling administrators an excuse to cry out that they can eliminate the problem by hiring more administrators and doing even more testing --- which, along with poor or no study habits, is what caused the problem in the first place. The people in the construction business like this kind of crisis. They'll do anything they can to further the impression that there is a crisis in education, because then they can claim that this problem that they've manufactured would go away if the kids had a new school building. Keep your eye on this standardization of curriculum in the state, this communistic effort to make every high school graduate a cookie-cutter copy of every other high school graduate. The ideal school of today would seem to prepare students to carry out mindless low-paying tasks without asking questions. Ask yourself what might motivate any group of people to stifle the individuality and creativity in your kid and their teachers. Yes, whenever you hear these doom-croakers, crying out that there's a crisis in education, sit back, relax, and ask yourself, --- who stands to make money from all this?
humble question. Is there a bank that offers checking and a visa card? The bank I have done business with for 30 years no longer offers a Visa card. They farmed it out to a company named Elan and I mail my payments to Missouri. My bank doesn’t have anything to do with it. They don’t want anything to do with it. The Almost Perfect Woman and I were in Sweden and Holland for 16 days and when we got home and read the mail, my credit card payment was already one day overdue. I don’t even like to use the cussed thing, but how does one order plane tickets and pay for conference fees at a Public Radio Program Managers’ convention in San Antonio without one? And then, how does a man who doesn’t have a secretary go away for two weeks without having his credit card bill be overdue? I’m humblefarmer@midcoast.com and I hope you’ll tell me what you do. I called the credit card company, so I could whine and snivel the check is in the mail good intentions, and although you might not believe it, I pressed the correct series of buttons and listened to several minutes worth of instructions until I finally pressed the correct button and got a live person. My reward. Push one. Push three. Push one. That credit card company made me feel like a chicken pecking to earn grain in Skinner’s Box. I understood the associate to say that my bank could wire them the money and I would then be spared having them write on my account that I was a deadbeat who paid late. I called my friend Molly at our local bank and Molly said, “Not true. Only the Visa Elan can dip into your funds. You have to give them the little numbers on the bottom of your check.” Of course, once they have your numbers, they can tap in there anytime they so desire. I had to do it even though I was torn. Do we not live in difficult and incomprehensible times? Are not even the most elementary transactions becoming impossible? From time to time over the years I have heard an occasional old person say that they won’t mind going on to their reward because they simply can’t function in their great-grandchildren’s generation. When everything they read or see or hear no longer makes sense to them, and they get the impression that over half the population is crazy, they feel helpless, stupid, useless and overwhelmed. I can identify.
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By invitation only, it says on the top of the paper. For three days only the enclosed check is good for $1880 towards a new car. Down below that it says, “Imagine… driving a new car for the same payment… or less than you’re paying now.” It would take someone with a good grasp on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle to come up with a lower car payment than I am making now. Why would anyone who is not making a truck payment want to start making a truck payment? And, think about this. One of the smartest men I know goes to Florida when he wants a truck or a car and he buys a good one for $800 --- $900. No rust, low miles. You do have to look, but they are there, out beside the road, with For Sale signs on them. Fly down. Drive it home. Of course from time to time when you’re around your friends you’ll have to assume a haggard and stressed out look just to suggest that the payments are dragging you down. I do have to admit that these car salesmen know how to write great copy. Even though you might not need a car or want a car, they know how to make the average American’s mouth water. They have spared no expense with their psychological marketing studies. They know what American’s want. Even the most reluctant and conservative old Maine man can be drawn into the showroom by their sugared words. I’ll be there. Right on the bottom of this circular it says, “Just for attending this special event, you will receive an original TV Beanie Baby.”
I feel very good about myself this evening. I don’t know if the alignment of the stars has anything to do with it or not, but I feel very comfortable. I am at peace with the world because I have finally done something that very few people do. I have made preparations for a day in the future. I know that day will come for me, and you know that day will come for you. I will be ready when that day comes, but will you? I have that inner glow --- that feeling of security, well being and contentment that is only felt --- by a man who has taken his new telephone book --- and has pasted, right on the front cover, the hours that the dump is open.
Did you hear that very soon there will be no monkey bars or swings on school playgrounds? Too dangerous. Kids fall out of swings or get hit in the head and get hurt. If you ever took a swing in the chops you can understand that. Kids can fall off monkey bars too. There were swings on the playground at the one room school where I struggled through the first five grades. We didn’t have those dangerous monkey bars. But sometimes the recess bell would call us in when we were 40 or 50 feet up a tree. If your gun was already on the ground, it didn’t take too long to get down. If you’re over 60, does 2004 make any sense to you at all? Take away the swings so they won’t get hurt, and then encourage them to play football, basketball, soccer or hockey. Break your wrist when you fall off the monkey bars and you’re a clumsy little kid. Break your back when you’re playing hockey and you’re a hero. [snap fingers] Like that. Can a kid become a hero by falling out of a tree? Soon there will be no swings or monkey bars on playgrounds. Don’t run. Don’t touch anybody. And take your hands out of your pockets. What’s a kid to do? Stand around and have a smoke.
Did you see that newspaper feature on becoming an Outdoor Woman? My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, was years ahead of her time. Thirty years ago she was teaching groups of 20 or 30 kids how to survive in the Great North Woods. They lived in tents while cold rain poured down. They cooked in cold rain and ate in cold rain and hiked in cold rain. She was still able to smile, after living for weeks under conditions that would have depressed a Neolithic Eskimo. Now Marsha is married to a sedentary, bookish person, so now, when she feels the need for a challenge in the great outdoors, she mows the lawn.
My father got his first television set when I was 20 years old, and one of the first broadcasts I ever remember seeing was a weather report for Maine. The forecaster said that it was unseasonably cold. The entire country was boiling over, 80, 90 and 100 degrees, but in Maine it was unseasonably cold. That was over 45 years ago, and every weather report I have ever seen ever since has said the same thing. Unseasonably cold. People in the rest of the world are still running their air conditioning but in Maine it’s unseasonably cold. Have you ever heard of it being warmer than it should be in Maine? Or have you even ever heard of an average temperature in Maine? No, It is always 20 to 30 degrees colder than average. The grass in your lawn is always a foot high before it’s warm enough to get out to mow it. Any black fly that puts in an appearance before Memorial Day immediately freezes to death. Living in Maine between November and June can be compared to a science fiction movie where the entire population lives in frozen suspended animation for seven months out of the year. As soon as the Almost Perfect Woman is old enough to retire, I’m going to spend the rest of my winters in Southern Spain.
Have you been watching the weather report on TV? The temperature outside might be 15 degrees. When I was a kid, they’d let it go at that. But now, for some reason that I don’t understand, they try to make it sound worse by adding in a thing they call the wind chill factor. So now they’ll say, “It’s 15 degrees outside, but when you figure in the wind chill factor, it’s 10 below.” And then they’ll explain that 10 below is very very cold, and that you should not go out unless you cover your hands and your face. Notice that they don’t say anything about covering your head or ears. They know that unless your IQ is higher than 140 or lower than 80, you wouldn’t be seen dead wearing a hat even in the coldest weather. Of course, if your IQ is higher than 140 or lower than 80, you don’t notice what other men are wearing so you wear whatever is comfortable. But I want to get back to this wind chill factor thing that appeared a few years ago to make our lives more miserable. Before long someone is going to figure out a way to make it even worse than that. And then you’ll hear, “It’s 10 degrees out, but with the wind chill factor it feels like 15 below. And, if you figure in the moisture factor we get from living here on the coast, it really feels like 25 below.” Every time the weather man throws out another factor to describe the temperatures in Maine, all he is really doing is driving up real estate values in Florida.
Did you watch the Olympic games a while back? I was impressed by the athletes but not by the clumsy clocks used to determine the winners. One woman was first by four thousandths of a second, but you and I can think of situations where the clock would need to measure millionths of a second. Your wife has gone shopping. You finish up the little project she assigned you and then decide to have a nap while waiting for her to return. You start to lie down on the couch. Your head moves toward the pillow. When your head hits the pillow a timing device is activated that measures how many millionths of a second it takes your wife to enter the room.
And now a public service announcement. As you know, I love languages. I was stumped by fulgurating in a French book, looked up fulgurating, found it is the same in English, and now I can’t understand why I never heard anyone use it on Monhegan. I’ve also been studying Dutch for years, and I have made myself Dutch flash cards. One day I looked at the word D-E-C-I-D-E on a card, and I said, “What a funny word. Deesiddy. And then I realized that it wasn’t Dutch. I was looking at the English side of the card. You know, if your mind is not fully aware of what your eyes are looking at, it can distort what you see. Try to remember the foremost thing on your mind when you were young and then take another good look at that nice little boy who visits your daughter.
A Harvard psychologist says that every society tends to impute its values upon another. You see an example of this every evening on the news. Another example: We now take it for granted that women have always wanted to become lawyers. We now take it for granted that women have never been happy raising children in the home. But 100 years from now, when the pendulum has swung the other way, when women have fought and won their right to abandon the workplace and stay at home to raise their children, some will claim that women have always wanted it that way, that it was men who forced them to abandon their families and enter the workplace. Women are smart, and I once mentioned to Truman Hilt that all of my wives were smarter than I am. And Truman said, “Where would you find a woman who wasn’t?”
You tell me if this has ever happened to you. I used to get some annoyed at a place in Rockland where I used to buy lobsters. Because the first thing they’d do in that store was put a great big double paper bag on the scale, and both bags would be treated with something so they wouldn’t leak water, and then they’d scoop a lobster out of the tank and drop it in that double bag. And then they’d scoop another dripping lobster out of the tank and put that in. And you’d look up, and there would be a four foot ceiling fan twirling like an airplane propeller over that bag, pushing it down onto the scale. And you’d end up paying who knows what for compressed air and salt water. Now people from away expect that kind of treatment. When they get home it gives them something to tell their friends about the quaint way people do business in Maine. But when you live here like you and I do, you already get more of that kind of local color on a regular basis than you can afford. So one day when the clerk handed me the bag and told me how much I owed, I couldn’t take it any more. I reached into the bag, took the two lobsters out, gave them back to him, and said, “I’ll take them without the bag. Please weigh them again.” And when he did, I found that the difference came to 85 cents. I was expected to pay 85 cents for paper bags, air and salt water. And the clerk told me that the boss would be awful mad if he knew I did that. And I know why, because the man who owned that store used to brag to his friends that he’d paid for his Cadillac by selling salt water.
Did you plan to spend your retirement years far from the roar of the maddening crowds? I live in St. George, Maine which has about the most expensive homes of any town in Maine. I think we are number 15. I read that in a Down East Magazine I found in the Monhegan schoolhouse. Wouldn’t you think that intelligent people who live in million dollar retirement homes on the coast of Maine could at least pretend to be happy? St. George is a peninsula about 3 miles wide and about 15 miles long, which means that many, many of us pay taxes on salt water frontage. I have 500 or so feet of St. George salt water frontage and 80 acres of potential house lots that I’m desperately trying to put into conservation before someone offers me so much money that I forget my good intentions. Salt water frontage in St. George goes up around 33 percent every year. There are many rich kid homes in St. George but, according to a recent news report, some of the people in them are unhappy. Yes. These newcomers to Beals and St. George just discovered that the picturesque lobster boats they were shown in the colorful real estate brochures have 600 horsepower diesel engines. Broom Broom Broom. Big surprise. Lobster boats are not bobbing around out there in the harbor just to give tourists and year-round summer people something to photograph and paint. And, by the way, Andy Wyeth, who has worked in St. George for over 80 years, is clever enough to avoid these trite harbor scenes. Andy won’t paint a boat until it is surrounded by weeds and rotting in your dooryard. Lobster boats are tools that are used at sunrise broom broom broom on the coast of Maine. Then there are the bait trucks that go by your house, which is the coastal equivalent of living next to the mill in Rumford. In case you tuned in late, bait is the dead fish they stuff in traps to attract lobsters. You’ve heard Gary Crocker call it Sushie. Some people from away don’t like the smell of bait but I do, probably because I was brought up with it. Anyway, according to the news report, coastal towns like St. George and Beals are now warning potential shore property buyers that lobster boats make noise at the crack of dawn. Although I didn’t hear it on the news, they should also mention that stern men drive through town a half hour before dawn on their motorcycles.
Guess what happens when your kid gets a week old kitten or puppy or even a horse and then asks you to watch the thing for a week while he or she gets settled in town --- to be closer to work? What? You already know? You’re too smart to have it happen to you, but your neighbors got stuck, didn’t they? Wouldn’t you think that those friends of yours who are older should know better than to let a little kid hook them with this shopworn con? Although this is not the time of life when we should be walking a dog, many of us discover that we are suffering from rotator cuff. That’s what happens to your shoulder when your dog on the leash is smarter than you are and has managed to yank and yank and yank until your arm socket is worn out. You’ve got rotator cuff. Rotator cuff only pains you if you walk a middle sized dog. That is because those lucky enough to walk large dogs were yanked off their feet the first day and knew enough to quit with only scratched palms and a broken elbow.
How often do you sit down at a dinner table with your best friends? My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, and I do it often. This is because Marsha is never happier than when she is preparing a meal for friends. Last summer Brad Terry and some other musicians showed up before a concert and when my wife counted 17 people eating at her table in the dining room she almost cried with joy. There is nothing nicer than sharing a meal --- notice I do use that word sharing in this context --- There is nothing nicer than sharing a meal with friends who have similar interests. On the other hand, --- well, let me tell you. It was last Thanksgiving that our best friends invited us over for dinner. Everything went well until just before the pie which is when friends of our friends turned on their karaoke machine. I would not even want to be in a room where Natalie Cole sang along with a karaoke machine. I don’t know about you, but I would rather take a beating than be exposed to what comes out of a karaoke machine. I whispered to my wife that I was walking home, thinking, of course, that she would get in the car and pick me up before I was down to the end of the driveway. And for five and a half miles I kept looking over my shoulder wondering where she was. By the time I dragged my 170 pounds into the house, I suspected that she was trying to tell me something. Luckily, I had only had one helping and no dessert, so I experienced no abdominal pain. And when you think about it, would it really hurt most of us if we were to walk five and a half miles --- every day? Because of my unique posture there was another benefit --- on the way home I picked up 43 cents in change and a 3/8 socket.
Thank you for spending time with me here on The humble Farmer where we listen to old fashioned music and occasionally talk about strange and peculiar things that are sometimes difficult to believe. My computer guru, Chris, says that his grandfather just moved to Bridgeton, which really doesn’t have anything to do with this story. I just threw it in to give you a frame of reference. Chris is a young man who has a young wife and Chris says that his wife got mad one day. So he asked her why she was mad. And she said that she was thinking what he would have replied if she had ever said such and such to him, and what she imagined he would have said made her mad. Don’t you feel bad for young men who are married to easily excited young women who get annoyed at things they make up in their inexperienced minds? Those of us who are married to mature women know that they don’t need to imagine things to get mad.
You probably remember the song Flat Foot Floozy with the Floi Floi. When I first heard Flat Foot Floozy with the Floi Floi I didn’t even know what flat feet were. Years later I found out what floozy meant. But I just found out that floi means sycophant in Dutch. And just now, while looking up Flat Foot Floozy on the Internet, I read that floy floy is also a slang word for a certain type of venereal disease. But sycophant would work in that context, too. What do you think? While looking that up, I found a web page of bumper stickers. One says: Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive. And here’s one I wish I’d thought up 30 years ago when I was sending personals to the Maine Times: Archaeologist seeks attractive young woman willing to date old thing. And another one I like: Ask me about my vow of silence. Here’s one right out of 1984 that is certainly also applicable today: The beatings will continue until morale improves. I’ll end with one that is very close to home: Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they shall never cease to be amused.
Has Christmas changed since you were a kid? When I was little my father used to haul burlap bags filled with brush down into the cellar and make wreaths. Then some man from Southern Fruit, I think it was, used to stop in and buy them for --- was it $3 a dozen? Good money, whatever it was. Sometimes papa would load up his pickup truck with bundles of wreaths and take them down to Boston himself. Remember that this was back before they improved the roads down there so it was still possible to drive a truck into Boston. --- It’s been a long time since I’ve gone out in the woods and noticed that someone has snipped the tips off all my fir trees and I can’t help but wonder if anyone in Maine makes wreaths today. Wreath makers are probably hampered by the authorities who keep arresting their illegal aliens. Nowadays many trees and decorations are made of plastic. And of course electronic toys have taken the place of home made decorations. You’ve seen the plastic talking tree with the plastic mouth that flops up and down when you walk near it. It has a metallic voice that says, “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas.” Can’t you see these electronic Christmas toys being improved? It is inevitable. How long do you think it will be before the little plastic Barbie doll stares up at its new owner and whines, “Please take me back to Wal*Mart and buy me a new dress.”
What’s this? The Dopeler effect : The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. And this comes from Greg Dorr. I want to tell you about Greg Dorr. I was in a jury pool one time, and you laugh when you hear me say that because you know that I can never get on any jury. --- Because when they ask if anyone might have difficulty being objective if the situation involved alcohol, I have to stand up and eliminate myself. I might not have said that right, but you know what I mean. If you were drinking when you ran down that child, you don’t want me on the jury. If you were drinking when you did anything, you don’t want me on that jury. And about the only reason that most anyone in the world ever gets in trouble is because they were drinking. But I was in a jury pool one time and we were asked if we knew any of the lawyers involved in the case. And, although it was unusual in Rockland, I didn’t. But then the district attorney said, “Your honor, I have played fiddle in a band at the humble Farmer’s annual Free Lobster Picnic.” And then I did remember that there was some young hippy fellow at the picnic in a pair of shorts who was playing fiddle, but he didn’t look anything like that slick and polished district attorney I saw standing there in the courtroom. So I jumped up and in all honesty said, “Your honor, I swear here in court that I have never seen this man before in my life.”
Just about every day I’ve been opening a high school history book and reading whatever was on the page. You’ve heard of Bismark, the Iron Chancellor, but do you know what a lying, devious, power-grabbing, land-grabbing imperialist he was? Today I read that in 1878 when his enemies, the Socialists, were gaining on him, there just happened to be two attempts to assassinate the emperor. Bismark knew that the Socialists didn’t have anything to do with this, but he’d been waiting for an excuse to get them for a long time, so he took advantage of public excitement to accuse the Socialists of plotting the attempts. Let’s get them Socialists. They were behind it. Even the slowest high school student in Maine who reads this history book today can understand that Bismark lied to advance his own economic and political agenda. People were all worked up over the assassination attempts, and they wanted to blame Bismark’s handy scapegoat, no matter how unbelievable it was. The impression I get is that back in the 1870s people would believe most anything a chancellor said. But we’ve learned a lot in 135 years and before you go to bed tonight, you might want to give thanks that nowadays it would not be possible to mislead an educated American.
You heard me say that I have not recovered from my trips to San Antonio, Sweden and Holland. All three of those places are notorious for cream puffs and other sweet things and now the belt that I have worn for over 25 years has no more notches. You probably Google whenever you have a question about anything and I am no different. I found one page on simple, easy, guaranteed weight loss. I read three whole pages until I came to the end without finding out anything other than it would cost me $27 to unlock the secret. But, there was one page that did have the answer. There were little boxes where I typed in that I am five foot seven and I weigh 170 pounds. This brought up an index number of 26.2 which is in the danger zone. You can see where this is going, can’t you? Yes, I then typed in that I was five foot eleven, which made me very healthy, indeed. So the problem is not that I weigh too much --- it is that I’m too short, and I’m now looking for one of those medieval machines that will stretch me out four more inches.
My friend Winky told me that he doesn’t like his daughter’s new boyfriend, Leonard. Leonard works in a medical laboratory, taking pictures of mucus so they can study it under a microscope, and Winky doesn’t want his daughter marrying a film phlegm artist.
Over 40 years ago when we were struggling to pay the $50 or so in tuition it cost us every semester down at Gorham Normal School, I can remember someone looking at himself in the mirror and saying, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” It probably had to do with the value of propaganda when employed in a module of self improvement. Something the student had learned in a class with Jim Whitten or Paul Barker. They always gave you something interesting to think about. Jim Whitten and Paul Barker taught us such good and valuable things it’s a wonder they didn’t get fired. Back then was when we learned that if you wanted to bamboozle the public, get some simple slogan out there and say it over and over and over until a majority of the people honestly believe it. Wal*Mart quickly comes to mind, because I used to buy honey there at around $4 a quart, but after a year or two of Wal*Mart’s slashing back their prices, slashing back their prices, it was costing me more like $9 a quart. Eliminate the competition and you can then charge anything you want. For quite some time now you’ve probably been more than somewhat amused by the envelopes you get from Central Maine Power. Each envelope has something printed on it about lower prices. I presently have one in hand that says, “CMP’s price cuts mean lower rates for you!” I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if I could stand too many more of CMP’s price cuts. But I’ve been digressing ever since I started this rant, because my beef here tonight is with the editor of my newspaper. On the front page of my newspaper it says that residential customers can expert to see a 15 to 20 percent hike in their electric bills. Yes, I read it in the newspaper. Expect to see a 15 to 20 percent hike in electric bills. My question to you is, how can newspapers print a lie like that and still think people are going to believe them?
My neighbor Jimmy Parker, whose years of working in boatyards has made him a keen political observer, says that he’s seen a sure sign that our property taxes are going up again. Three people brought quiche to the last Grange supper.
A realtor friend of mine has been selling real estate out of his Camden office for years. He’s very successful because he works hard to please his customers. He says that the most challenging sale he ever made was a piece of woodland up in Appleton that he had listed for a Rockport woman who’d got it from her third or fourth husband. It hadn’t been surveyed and there were no stone walls either, but the woman selling the property claimed that she knew the boundaries, and said that she’d mark them with rags so he could follow them. Well, he started out by the road where she’d tied part of a red sweater to a bush, and after 50 feet he could see another part of the sweater tied on a tree. The system worked good, and before the sweater ran out it had led him about 200 yards. Then the markers turned into scraps of a red skirt, which were also easy to see, and he was able to follow them for a hundred yards or so. But when the skirt ran out, the markers turned into some very delicate underwear, and my friend says if he hadn’t just attended an excellent seminar on customer service, he probably would have turned around right there and gone home.
You’ve heard people say, “It’s a well known fact that matter can be neither created nor destroyed.” But on the other hand, you have heard of the famous Black Holes, that supposedly eat matter. Anything close to a Black Hole gets sucked in and is never seen again. Science is full of such impossible contradictions. For example, I have discovered the opposite of a Black Hole under my cupboard. It creates matter. I know it’s impossible, and I don’t even believe it myself, but at least twice a day I see the proof, and here it is. At home, I have an empty tube of toothpaste. The brand name is not important. Three or four months ago I used the very last of the toothpaste in this tube, but I put it back on the shelf because I thought there would be one more squeeze left in there. And sure enough, the next day, there was. The same thing happened the following day. And the next. And this has been going on for several months. I know of no published natural laws that would account for this, but every night, on a dark shelf near my sink, enough toothpaste is cloned in this tube to give me one more brushing.
My friend Richard says that for the past 3 years, every time we have had a pouring rain, his kids’ telephone quit. Call in and you get a busy signal. Try to call out and you get nothing. Young girls could live with this for 3 years because the other phone always works. But there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in his home this week because some very important calls from important boys did not get through. Richard was asked to call the telephone’s repair service and get it fixed. After waiting his way through the telephone company’s battery of answering machines, he reached a real person, gave the number of the phone, and explained that during every rainstorm we had had for the past 3 years, it had conked out. The nice woman on the other end asked how many phones were connected to that line and he said 3. And she said, “Did you check to see if one of them was off the hook?”
I just got a letter from Africa asking for my confidential business assistance involving the transfer of family money overseas. This sounded very good and very plausible indeed. As I continued to read I learned that the writer’s father was the military head of the army, who
had managed to accumulate 31.8 million dollars, which also sounded very plausible. I then read that he was among the officers killed by the rebels which I
had no reason to doubt. But then the fellow writing this letter about this African general lost any chance he might have had of getting help from me because
he told a blatant lie. A lie that would even make a child laugh. I quote: “His death was unexpected.”
© 2014 Robert Karl Skoglund