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May 18, 2008 Rants

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1. The people running the Democratic presidential campaign are not very smart. They spend money to promote their candidate when all they have to do to win is sit back quietly and let voters watch the evening news. (BDN letter 2004)

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2. Although I cannot consider myself a cosmopolitan on a level with James Bond, I have lived in Sweden for half a year, I can buy a hot dog in several languages, I’ve slept in a roadside ditch in Denmark in a pouring rain, I’ve routed a knife-wielding mugger in Casablanca, I’ve eaten spaghetti in Borgia’s Restaurant on Sicily, and I can speak as much Greek as I’ve ever heard James Bond use in a movie. Barracalau. In other words, I’ve been around long enough to know better than to look down at the ignorant peasants in other countries who have never seen a newspaper or a television set. But after getting this email from Africa, I’m going to make an exception. Listen to this letter and tell me what you think. It says: “Dearest One, It is my pleasure to contact you for a business venture which I intend to establish in your country. There is this amount of $7,300,000.00 which my late Father deposited for us in a leading Bank … before his death. I have decided to invest these money in your country where it will be safe.” Heard enough? If you had 7 million dollars, would you send it to a country that is waging a war against a faceless enemy for the sole purpose of making a few people rich? Would you send your money to a country where the value of the money drops on a daily basis and where John McCain stands a chance of becoming president? Would you?

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3. Like any other old man struggling to learn new things, I have computers and printers that fight me. To make life even more difficult, my entire office and recording equipment get torn down twice a year, stuffed in a small car, and reassembled 1700 miles away. This is the price I pay for 5 months of free food and free rent in Florida where my wife Marsha and I are caregivers for a wonderful 93-year-old woman from Nova Scotia. I'm still not unpacked or set up from my last winter in Florida, because getting out my radio and television shows every week takes more than a week. I live in a twilight zone bordering chaos. Two months ago I installed a new 2007 Outlook program which offered the promise of very necessary new and wonderful things so now I wait five or six minutes for the computer to find the names so I can do a simple mailing to 30 friends. The old program completed the operation in seconds but every time I start to get out a mailing now the computer thinks about it while I vacuum the floor. This is progress. Today my new printer refused to take the envelopes which, of course, messed up the mailing. Some names were printed and some weren't. I wasn't able to think clearly because I was rushing to get out this week's program in today's mail, which had already gone. Nowadays there is no getting out the day's mail in the afternoon. If your outgoing mail isn't in your mailbox for pickup first thing in the morning, you drive to the post office. Fifteen years ago we had a local post office, but the government shut it down to save money --- certainly not mine --- so now we have to drive 6 miles to buy stamps or post a letter in the afternoon. So here I am today, working against the clock while trying to be nice to my computer. Restarting the program takes another 6 or so minutes and then I have to go through the envelopes to see which ones have already been printed --- and then figure out how to only print the ones I need. But then the printer grinds and slips and slides again on the slippery envelopes and I'm back where I started. Yes, of course it really would be quicker and easier to address the envelopes by hand and put one of those little sticky return address labels with the stars or Christmas trees up in the left-hand corner. But I keep jamming the envelopes into a printer that won't print them, just hoping. Someday someone will invent a printer that prints and a computer that will compile a mailing list in less than 6 minutes. Oh, here's the good news: while waiting for my computer to come up with a mailing list for me today I finally had time to hang my calendar on the wall. I just discovered that the doctor's appointment I've been waiting for for the past three weeks was yesterday.

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4. You’ve been hearing about it on the news. From what I read, several hundred polygamists, who belong to a renegade Mormon sect in Texas, have been separated from their children. You might have also read that the adults must undergo a psychological evaluation before they can be reunited with their children. We are not going to concern ourselves here with what is good or with what is bad, but are simply going to talk about psychological evaluations. Some of us are old enough to remember Chairman Mao and the thousands of Chinese professors who failed their psychological evaluations --- and, as a result, spent years feeding pigs in remote villages as part of their political re-education. And just last winter, for 25 cents, I bought Jane Yolen’s best-selling book --- Favorite Folktales from around the World. I thought it would be a great thing to have on hand when it came time to read to the grandchildren and I’ve been looking for some good old stories in there that would be suitable. If you’ll turn with me to page 212 you will read: it was predicted that a certain little boy would have the king’s daughter for his wife in his fourteenth year. Married at 14? And wasn’t Shakespeare’s Juliet 13? Even if Romeo were not 14 but 17, would he be scheduled for a psychiatric evaluation or even jail if the old man caught him sniffing around today? Nowadays Romeo would be considered too depraved for even the Jerry Springer show. You don’t have to know too much to realize that social customs and the laws that reflect those customs change from century to century. In other words, good and evil are abstract concepts that take on new meanings with each generation. There was a time when appropriating land by slaying utterly old and young, both maids, little children, and women was not only the right and proper thing to do, it was the law. So, if you live in a land at a time when over 90 percent of the population believes in monogamy, the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, you’d better go along with it. Otherwise, you might find yourself scheduled for a psychological evaluation.

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5. If you have a moment, I’m going to ask you a question. You watch the news. You read the newspapers. So, how long do you think a society can exist when common people get only a meager living for themselves because the preponderance of what they produce is turned over to the military? According to my Encyclopedia Britannica, this type of feudal military organization lasted in Eastern Europe for a thousand years.

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6. For years you have heard me say that I thumb through the Encyclopedia Britannica almost every morning. You will recall that Chesterfield wrote some very famous letters to his son. Chesterfield epitomized good taste and good breeding. Speaking of which, today under C I learned that the son to whom Chesterfield wrote the letters was the illegitimate product of an alliance with one of the servants. But although it is impossible to thumb through the encyclopedia without seeing something of interest, there is nothing in there that would make you laugh. --- Unless you read --- under G --- about Count Gavriil Ivanovich Golovkin. To put him in perspective, you should know that the good Count worked with Peter the Great in the Dutch shipyards. Later, when empress Catherine I died, he tore up her will and wrecked the proposed constitution. Oh? The line that made me laugh? I quote, “He was one of the richest and stingiest magnates of his time.”

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7. Even if you don’t know me, you can tell from my voice that I’m an old man. I am 72 years old. I’ve never smoked. I never drank. In the winter time I attend exercise class three times a week in Florida and in the summer, when I can get away from my computer, there is more than I can do outside here on the farm. Although I love ice cream and pie, I haven’t had ice cream or a piece of pie or a cookie or a piece of cake or sausage or bacon since I came home from the Public Radio Program Directors’ San Antonio meeting three years ago. They know how to feed down there on the Riverwalk and I gained six pounds in three days. I’m not overweight --- only because of the wake-up call I got at the program director’s convention. But still, when I walk up from the garden with 18 pounds of rhubarb and the scale in my arms I puff and I pant and I have sometimes said to myself, “You’re old. You’re gasping for breath. Someday, without warning, you are likely to drop dead with a heart attack.” But --- I no longer worry, my young friend, because --- last night there was a doctor on the evening news who said that old men do not die without warning. He said that old and young men alike have a blatant warning sign two or three years before having a heart attack, and that the heart is the second organ to go.

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8. You know that I make a habit of asking you questions. You might also know that the only reason I ask you questions is to find out the answers. I don’t pester you with silly things just to have something to do. Here is a question that immediately came to my mind after seeing a doctor on television say that ED --- I’m so old and prudish I still can’t bring myself to say those two words, which I actually heard on TV and asked my wife explain to me within the past year. Yes, I saw a doctor on TV say that two to three years before a man has a heart attack, he will experience the dreaded ED. The way I understand it, when you smoke, the little blood vessels in your body gradually get clogged up and eventually shut down. And when those little blood vessels get shut down and blood can’t get around in the body like it used to, a man experiences ED. Continued smoking clogs up bigger blood vessels in your body until the big blood vessels your heart are plugged up and you have what we call a heart attack. Now. Just hearing me talk about this might bring to your mind full page ads in magazines for pills which claim to correct ED. Not being a doctor, and not knowing the difference between an artery and a blood vessel, I would have to suspect that all these little pills must do to work their wondrous magic is momentarily clean out or enlarge all those little blood vessels which permits the uninhibited blood to flow where it will. You of course see where I’m going with this. If the magic pill will undo the clogging damage smoking has done to the little blood vessels, is it unreasonable to assume that the same pill will also clean out the big blood vessels in or near the heart and prevent heart attacks? If I’ve piqued your academic curiosity, you are certainly as interested in hearing a medical opinion on the topic as I am --- even more so if you’re a smoker. I’m humble at humblefarmer.com, and if I get any answers, you’ll be hearing from me.

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9. You know that at one time my weekly humor column was carried in over 50 newspapers in the US and Canada. I only mention this to lend an aura of credibility to what I’m about to say. At present my favorite humorist is an unknown retired professor who summers in Camden. Like so many of my friends, I met him through my radio program. Uncle Jack, for that is his pen name, --- Uncle Jack wrote to tell me that he enjoyed my show. And when I read some of Uncle Jack’s stories, I laughed out loud and I was hooked. Now the story. Last week, my wife Marsha and I were up in Camden having supper with Uncle Jack and his wife Susan. Knowing that I have a refined cosmopolitan palate, Susan opened a can of beans for me. The other three ate some French thing that was a bit too far out for an old Maine man. In the course of the meal the conversation turned to haircuts which reminded Uncle Jack that years ago while he was getting a haircut, a smarty-pants 15-year-old kid who was known for his practical jokes walked into the barber shop and sat down. Pretty soon the kid got up and went into the toilet. Well. Right then the barber and Uncle Jack and two or three other customers looked at each other, because it was a well known fact that the barber kept half a bottle of whisky right on the wash stand in that toilet. Can you imagine what that kid did? I don’t know and if you’d like to know you’ll have to ask Uncle Jack, because right then I told him that I was eating and didn’t want to hear any more.

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10. People are hard up for live entertainment. I have capitalized on this for years. People want to see something different. Something they’ve never seen before. How often do you find a television program or a radio program that you really truly enjoy and that you are not watching only because there is nothing else on? Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about here. My friend Uncle Jack not only writes stories that make me laugh out loud. He is also a photographer. Uncle Jack told me --- that he made a film of a little dog digging for crabs on a sandy beach. The last time he looked it had been viewed over 20,000 times.

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11. Gather around kiddies. Your old neighbor humble is going to tell you a story. Once upon a time there was lonely airport way off all by itself in the boonies. The lonely airport was surrounded by great forests and an occasional field. Then, one day, some contractors built houses on the north side of this airport. And people rushed in to buy the houses. Soon after that, the contractor built houses on the east and west sides of the airport and, sure enough, even more people rushed in and bought those houses too. Well, you know what happened next. The contractor built houses on the south side of the airport and the lonely airport that used to be surrounded by fields and forests was now had hundreds of people living around it on all four sides. And no sooner had hundreds of people bought houses all around this airport, when they began writing letters to their legislators and their newspapers, saying that the airplanes that took off and landed at the airport made a lot of noise and they didn’t like it.

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12. I didn’t realize that we were in the midst of such hard times until I opened a junk email that said, “Get the funds you need for college” and saw a picture of a ski mask and a short stick to carry in your pocket.

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