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November 30, 2008 Rants 1. Everybody is sending out emails now. I just got one that said, “I'm a new girl who saw your profile.” Why would anyone who just became a girl be interested in me? (080406)

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2. Here’s a letter from Robert in Brunswick who has things pretty well figured out. You tell me if this also applies to your town. Robert says, “You might not see moose alongside the road, but you will see sofas, mattresses and such. This is because Owls Head now charges a fee to use the landfill.” (080330)

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3. Last winter I sent out an email to some friends, asking them to tell me about the advantages of pre heating my hot water with solar energy before running it through the boiler in the furnace. The roof on one side of my house faces east and the other side faces west. So I said I’d have half of the solar collectors on the east side to catch the morning sun and the other half of the solar collectors on the north side to collect the afternoon sun. My friend Dr. Jerry wrote right back and said, “Thinking about your roof orientation, I would disagree with the idea of putting up one collector facing east and the other facing west: one would always be in the shade, radiating part of the heat that the other one collected, unless you set up a system that would alternate automatically and only accept water from the one that was being heated.” Well --- why not? Why not set up a system that only accepts the water from the side that was being heated? You know, if you don’t know anything, you can come up with solutions to problems that stump experts. I see no reason why I can’t get the maximum amount of heat morning AND night. To be fair, my thinking isn’t original. I got the idea from a story I read about a man who had one wife in London and another one in Paris. (080330)

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4. Here’s a email from George that I had to think about. Please listen closely. George says, “Did you hear about the Massachusetts teenagers who, as a prank, released three pigs in various parts of their high school after labeling them "Pig 1", Pig 2" and Pig 4". It is reported that the administration was able to round up Pigs 1,2 & 4 fairly quickly, But they spent most of the remainder of the day searching for Pig #3.” (080330)

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5. Have you ever seen something on the evening news that made you wonder if there can be any hope for creating a civilized society? Let me give you an example. Tonight on the evening news they showed a woman in the Philippines who had 8 hungry little children. There wasn’t enough rice to go around. The focus of the program was: What can we do to produce more food?

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6. You know that Saturday morning finds me out on the road, looking for bargains at lawn sales, or garage sales, if you will. Last Saturday I bought several good books for a quarter apiece. One was Eyewitness to History. Remarkable first-hand accounts of the events that shaped civilization. I mention this because in this book is says that on August 24, in the year of 79, Pliney the Younger saw Vesuvius erupt and bury the town of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Can you imagine that? Pliney the Younger was there, he saw Vesuvius erupt, and I thought you would enjoy hearing the last sentence in the letter he wrote describing this horrific event: Pliney says, “Of course these details are not important enough for history, and you will read them without any idea of recording them; if they seem scarcely worth putting in a letter, you have only yourself to blame for asking for them.”

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7. You can get great books for a quarter at lawnsales. The best books are found when someone has died and the heirs are simply trying to clean out the house. They have no idea of what the books are or the interesting things you can find in them. Here is a comment from a huge volume called The Little Brown Book of Anecdotes. On page 76, one reads, “Victor Biaka-Boda, who represented the Ivory Coast in the French Senate, set off on a tour of the hinterlands in January 1950 to let the people know where he stood on the issues, and to understand their concerns --- one of which was apparently the food supply. His constituents ate him.”

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8. Here is one of the curious things you can read on line. “For centuries, champagne bottles were a nightmare for French glassblowers. The wine's pressure would reach about 90 pounds per square inch (about the same pressure as a small bicycle tire) and make the bottles unpredictable. Then, in 1828, weather conditions put extra sugar in the grapes, allowing pressure inside these bottles to go well over 90 PSI, causing 80% of them to explode. In fact, during that period, spending time in a wine cellar was considered more dangerous than going to war.

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9. I once saw my wife’s youngest grandchild walking through the room while chewing on the handle of a fly swatter. My brother, who saw this and knows more about these things than I do, said that that was the way children immunized themselves against disease. And when you hear this example of what happens to kids who don’t chew on fly swatters, you might agree that he is right. He mentioned mother’s cousin Will Williamson, who lived up near the corner of Gleason Street in Thomaston. Cousin Will perished with some childhood disease back in the 1920s. I can remember going into Uncle Dell’s house 20 years later and seeing a cardboard doll of Charlie McCarthy on the wall and I remember being aware that Cousin Will had died before his time. But it wasn’t until recently that my brother explained to me what had killed him. His parents, Uncle Dell and Aunt Eva, were protective. They kept him from ever catching anything from other children or anyone else. When the day finally came when he did catch something, his body couldn’t handle it. Cousin Will was kept so clean and pure that without realizing what they were doing, his parents actually washed him to death. (080420)

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10. How many times have you been working on a project when some lemme show ya boy looks over your shoulder and offers advice? If you are not careful, it is not long before he has pushed you aside and has taken the burden of the entire project upon his own shoulders. It is usually about that time that you notice that there is an alarming correlation between a lemme show ya boy’s ineptitude and his eagerness to help you. (080427)

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11. When my father married my mother he was Marianne’s husband. He stayed Marianne’s husband until he became Sonja’s father. For his entire life my father was a non-entity. I thought I had done better than my father until today when I realized that I have fallen lower than Marianne’s husband or Sonja’s father. In fact, I have dropped as low as it is possible to drop in the caste system here in American today. There is a name for American untouchables. We are called --- associates. (080427)

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12. Here I am at the kitchen counter this morning opening pill bottles when my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, says, “Why don’t you let me put your pills in one of those pill dispensers? Then you’d only have to open one thing in the morning instead of three.” I told her I’d rather open the three bottles because, after all, a man my age should be getting some exercise. (080504)

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13. If you have small grandchildren you know how you look forward to their visits. When they are 3 or 4 years old you are always amazed at how much they have grown since the last time you saw them. Even more exhausting than playing with them, is changing your lifestyle --- shifting your bedtime around to accommodate theirs. You know that I’m a creature of habit, so I’ve got to admit that I feel a lot stronger when they’re not here --- so I can get to bed by 6. (080504)

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14. Did you see that man on the TV news who was in jail for 27 years for a crime that he didn’t commit? Even more amazing is that other man you see every day on the TV news who should be in jail for crimes that he did commit. (080504)