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Rants March 2, 2008

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1. Here is a letter from David Bright who says, “humble, My friend Rommy from Fort Fairfield says the winter was really depressing him until he took the time to shovel the snow out from in front of his living room picture window. He reports he feels much better now that he can see his neighbor's roof.”

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2. Good news for the construction companies and school administrators who want to tear down your present school buildings and build new ones. I was just told that in some Maine towns snow has been allowed to accumulate to a depth of several feet on the top of school buildings. With tons of snow crushing these flat topped school buildings, the supporting structure has naturally begun to crack. When it rains and the snow gets really heavy, the whole business is coming down. Administrators have a choice: either send a crew up on the roof with snowblowers, or let the buildings collapse so you’ll be forced to go along with their plans for new ones. Engineers sent in by construction companies are studying the problem. Shovel off the snow or build new buildings. You can probably already guess the route they’ll be taking in your town.

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3. And speaking of the spring thaw, isn’t it about time for some of our more daring snowmobiling friends to play on thin ice? All through the winter we hear about snowmobiles hitting trees or guy wires next to telephone poles or flipping over at 70 miles per hour, but now is the time of year when snowmobiles go through thin ice. Driving a snowmobile on any pond in March is a sport that many of us don’t understand so I think it warrants our discussion. I remember when I was a little kid --- it was fun to go down to the Frog Pond and walk out on thin ice. It was a game. You might have done it too, when you were little. Crack, crack the ice would go and you could see the little cracks running out on all sides. And while the ice was going crack, crack, crack the game was to try to get off it before the ice broke and you went in up to your knees and had to walk home with wet feet. But can you understand how anyone dares to play this crack, crack, crack game in a snowmobile where there might be 10 feet of water under that thin ice? Unlike the little boy who goes in up to his knees, too many of those who go through the ice on snowmobiles don’t get to tell their grandchildren about it later.

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4. The cover on a magazine I saw in the Newark airport said, “Brittany Looks Pregnant.” But you have to be careful with that kind of statement because if you were to look at the way I dress, you might say, “humble looks rich.” You know however, that I am not rich. But, logic aside, there is good chance that Brittany is pregnant.

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5. From time to time I say something that I hope might help you and because this is one of those times, I hope you will listen carefully. I attend association meetings all over the United States and when I do I sit in on their seminars and learn a little bit about their work and the financial aspects of their businesses. So, if you are a young person who is still undecided as to a career, you might want to make a note of this. There is more money in burying people than there is in healing sick animals.

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6. Last week while fishing with her husband, a woman in her 80s, who is no stranger in our home, kicked a fish off the dock. A spine on the fish infected her toe and the doctor said if she had waited another day for treatment she would have been dead. That’s all I’m going to say about sports today but next week our topic will be baseball.

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7. A friend of mine is a caretaker or legal guardian of a healthy woman who was not considered capable of caring for herself. My friend, however, taught this woman, whom we will call Dickie, how to cook and keep things clean and Dickie now lives alone in her own apartment. Dickie said that last week she heard a terrible knocking at her door. She said she opened the door and there was a blind man there who wanted her to help him. She said, “I can’t help you. I can’t talk sign language.”

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8. I recently attended a seminar in New Jersey. The economist who was clicking the button that changed the slides said that you could double your income by wearing a smile. You know that I do not smile. But when I hear something funny I have the most horrible, room-shaking laugh you have ever heard. My father did not smile and people who didn’t know him thought that he hated them. I have inherited my father’s inability to smile. I can roar at stories that strike me funny but I cannot smile for pictures. You know other people who do not smile. When they try to put on a smile it is obviously insincere. I don’t want to do that. So I did what anyone who can’t smile would do. Look for it on my lapel the next time you see me. The button I ordered says, “My face always looks like this, but I am smiling on the inside.”

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9. While walking through the airport in Newark I saw something that swung me around in my tracks. It was a sign over a pile of shirts that said, “3 for $199.” Three shirts for $199? It was slow so the woman in the store came over and asked if she could help me. I said I couldn’t believe that anyone would pay $199 for three shirts. She said that she sells a lot of those three for $199 shirts to bankers and lawyers and hospital presidents. You know, we could probably cut your interest rates as well as your health insurance in half if we could get bankers and hospital presidents to buy their shirts for a dollar at lawn sales like you and I do.

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10. When I told David that I’d lost a full day’s worth of work on a radio script because my new Microsoft Office 2007 was so difficult, David, who is a computer guru wrote back, “I tried Office 2007 for about a day on a new laptop running Vista. It was so different from the program I knew that I uninstalled it and went back to Office 2000. I guess these companies have to keep coming out with new releases so they can continue to make money. But by making them so different they make it unlikely I'll ever buy a new program. If they said "here's the new version of this program and it behaves just like the old one," I'd be happy to help keep them in business. But when they say "here's the new program and you’re going to have to unlearn everything you ever learned about computers," they should be paying me to make the change.

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11. You heard me say that I learn something new every time I sit in on a seminar at some state or national meeting. One of the most memorable seminars I ever attended was --- I think it was in Indiana or Texas and it was the association of people who own carnivals. You know, you see these people in your town every summer with all their carnival rides that they pull around on their trucks. The next time you see me ask me about this because I don’t have time to talk about it now. The topic of that seminar, as I recall, was, “What to tell the press when the Ferris wheel collapses.”

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12. This reminds me that while appearing on an afternoon program in Indiana with Dr. Sharon Yoder --- an expert on the healing properties of humor --- I learned that many hospitals now have humor rooms. Laughing at funny movies after operations activates some healing chemical and patients go home three days earlier than they did before. The following week Dr. Hall was enthusiastically telling me about unbelievable doings at our own Medical Center. “We can’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “People are getting out of bed putting on their clothes and going home from the hospital three days earlier than we ever thought possible.” I said, “You’ve got one of those new humor rooms.” He said, “No, we doubled the room rates.”

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13. I recently asked a veterinarian why veterinarians had meetings. And he said if it wasn’t for meetings veterinarians would never get to go anywhere.

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14. You tell me. Have I mentioned this before? When I was a kid, we looked out the window at the scenery when we were traveling. Nowadays we look at the Garmin GPS to see where we are.

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