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1. Imagine how startled you’d be if you just learned that Johnny Cash did not do time in Folsom Prison. Did the fact that I’m probably not the only person who was misled help Johnny Cash sell 90 million records? On the same page on the Internet I also learned that Merle Haggard wrote Okie from Muscogee as a satire. Everybody knows that song, Okie from Muscogee, and it is only now that I realize why I have heard of Merle Haggard. I don’t see how you could not have heard Okie From Muscogee because it was on top of the popularity charts fairly recently --- 1970 or so. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Okie from Muscogee was a satire, either. Listening to songs by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, is there really any way to tell?

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2. It finally happened. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, looked at me and said, “Take those filthy pants off right this minute and throw them in the wash.” I had to laugh. I said, “I just put them on fresh two minutes ago right out of the bureau drawer.” You know, I’m not able to do it very often, but this morning I stopped her right dead in her tracks.

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3. We hear that the economy is in bad shape. And although I don’t have any answers, I might have the same questions as you do. You might remember that Mr. Nixon did better in the polls than Santa Claus when he opened the doors to China and by so doing put us where we are today. Which is broke. Three generations ago, the dollar bill you gave to the milkman would pass from hand to hand five or six times before it ever left your village. And then it would circulate a while longer in your county and then move elsewhere in your state. Spend that dollar nowadays in a big box store and within a week it is in China by way of Arkansas. Not one of your neighbors gets to see it. Thirty five years ago nobody thought to ask what would happen if you and all your neighbors bought everything you could from China at low, low Wal*Mart prices: toys, wood, clothes, dishes, instruments, and now even food. Yes. If everything we buy in every store in America is made in China does it take an economic genius to figure out what is going to happen to the companies in the USA that made the things we used to buy from them? Right. They go out of business. And when they go out of business, American workers lose their jobs. Of course, this is no concern of mine or yours because American workers losing their jobs is an abstraction --- we don’t know who these people are, and their wages were probably too high, anyway. But being able to buy things made in China at low, low prices is, for you and me, a concrete and necessary reality. So China is now the proverbial Company Store. For all practical purposes, China owns most of The United States. And because every day that goes by they get almost every cent that we spend, day by day they own more and more of the United States. To survive, very soon almost every rural family will have to do what their ancestors and put up preserves from a big garden. They will keep a cow, chickens and a few pigs. How do we avoid this huge, sucking economic black hole? By buying only those products made in the USA so Americans can go back to work? Probably not, because we look for those low, low prices offered only by the Chinese. And there is a good chance that there are no longer on our shelves any products made in the US of A. So, now we are told that the US economy is in bad shape. The past administration whipped up an unnecessary war that has cost you a trillion or so. And while the war commanded your attention, every business was deregulated or privatized so billions more could be funneled down that rat hole. But a brighter day is coming, because is not Mr. Obama going to jumpstart a ruined economy with a trillion or so dollars? You’d better hope he gives it all to the bankers, because if you and I get our hands on it, within a week every penny of it will be in China.

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4. Where do you get your information? Newspapers? Television? Because I can’t afford to buy a newspaper, and because one must carefully consider the source when getting news from television, I just realized that I am turning more and more to the Internet. You know that I already have solar hot water heaters attached to my house and that I am presently building panels that will generate electricity from sunlight. All my bustle and scurry has nothing to do with a burning desire to save the planet. Putting in solar collectors will save me money. So I’m also on a tear to get rid of all the energy hogging appliances in our home. Did you know that the older models of refrigerators gobble electricity and that many of the new ones will pay for themselves in just a couple of years just by being more energy efficient? Of course, you know, too, that over the past 30 years, whenever I’ve learned something interesting, I’ve quickly passed it along to you --- for whatever it’s worth. So, if you are standing, please sit down in the nearest chair and hang on with both hands because I was staggered by what I just read today. While looking on line for an energy efficient refrigerator, I learned, that many of the newer refrigerators will run on next to no electricity at all --- if you never open their doors.

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5. If you are like me, you constantly update your web pages. You put up things that are new and you take down things that no longer have meaning. When this wonderful letter came in from a radio friend in Miami, I put in on my Facebook, my blog and my web page at once. Please listen carefully to this: "Dear Mr. Skoglund, As a Native American, or whatever you want to call us, from my earliest remembrances of growing up in the home of my beloved maternal grandparents, I learned to love and respect my elders. As I grew older I came to the realization that offering to our elders respect and gratitude was small compensation for the wisdom they imparted to us younger people. For this reason I rise early every Sunday morning to listen to your show, more for the wisdom you impart than for the good music you play. As a Native American, I, too, have often wondered why people think they need to have more than one pair of shoes. Thank you for imparting your wisdom each Sunday morning. Have a happy, healthy, and enjoyable New Year.” This letter is signed by a Mr. Myers who has appended on the bottom of his letter:

Treat the earth well,

It was not given to you by your parents;

It was loaned to you by your children.

Isn’t that wonderful. The earth was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. My sentiments exactly. Oh, and while I was on my web page I then removed this other item which doesn’t apply anymore, now that we have a new press secretary in the White House. It said: "You might have seen that best-selling author who made the evening news because he had lied to the American people on national television. --- This was news because he was an author."

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6. Long time radio friend Harris Contos sent me the following news item: “VASSALBORO, Maine --Vassalboro's planning board has approved an application for a coffee shop with topless waitresses despite opposition of most residents who showed up. More than 50 residents showed up for Tuesday night's meeting and most of them voiced disapproval of the idea. Ellsworth businessman Donald Crabtree plans to open the topless cafe within 30 days at the site of the former Grand View Motel on busy Route 3. Planners said the central Maine town has no ordinance to regulate businesses' uniforms -- or lack of them. They say the proposal met the town's 10 performance standards, which are mostly related to safety, parking, traffic and signs.” Of course I immediately replied to this news item from Harris. My obvious question to him was the same question that is in your mind right now. Would their health insurance would pay for any colds caught during working hours? Harris believes that any waitress submitting such a claim would get a form letter back from the company, pointing out that they weren’t covered.

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7. A news item about topless waitresses in a Vassalboro coffee shop, sent to us by long time radio friend Harris Contos, raises several issues. Would an unemployed waiter be likely to picket coffee shops where your steaming hot coffee is served by topless waitresses? As a person who believes that men and women should receive equal pay for the same work, I am somewhat alarmed that any woman would choose to uncover anything perceived as an advantage. And what culture from ages past has so impressed its values upon us that a topless waitress should be viewed worthy of space in a newspaper --- or of a place in a coffee shop? How much would a topless coffee shop have to undercut the competition before you would be seen going in there? And what do you say to the waitress when she smiles coyly and asks, “Cream and sugar?”

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8. Whatever is America’s greatest satirist, Alan Able, doing nowadays? If you can find out, please tell me because I’d like to know. I see that a movie of his life is available and I have snuck it into Marsha’s queued requests on Netflix. The name of it is Abel Raises Cain, and I am told by Netflix there will be a long wait. Thirty or more years ago Alan Able impressed me with his satirical antics and I became a fan. We exchanged stuffed envelopes through the mail, this was long before email, and one day, which must have been around 25 years ago, I found a note from Alan Able on my back door. I missed his visit. The same week I chanced upon a girl from the Pinies in New Jersey, who was wandering about my farm taking pictures of the huge woodpile, the sheep and the piles of junk. Do remember that this was before my wife Marsha moved in and restored order. Anyway, knowing that Alan Able was capable of most anything, I viewed the New Jersey girl with great suspicion for several days, thinking that she might have been set upon me by Alan Able. I suggest that you Google Alan Able, because reading about his capers is a refreshing, enjoyable adventure in itself. Take for example, his Omar’s School for Beggars, a fictional school for professional panhandlers. Or read about the actor he hired to pose as Deep Throat after Nixon’s Watergate scandal. That conference drew 150 reporters. Read about the 7 actors he hired to fall asleep in the studio while Donahue was interviewing gay senior citizens. Or the time he ran for Congress on a platform that included selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Able campaigned to ban all breastfeeding, saying that it manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink and even become gay. My favorite was his Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Their goal was to clothe naked animals all over the world and their slogan was “A nude horse is a rude horse.” It began as a satire on media censorship. Thanks to the satire of Alan Able, there is no censorship of the media in America today.

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9. You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 18 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.

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10. Last week I caught a rat in a mouse trap. Something ate a hole in an orange that was on the floor by the door and I thought I’d catch whatever it was in a mouse trap. I didn’t think whatever it was could be more than two inches long. But the next night, around 6 o’clock right after supper, I was surprised to see a huge rat, upside down with the trap on top of him, with his nose caught in that mouse trap, right there in the entry way that you might as well call the kitchen floor. How a rat got into the house I have no idea, unless it hopped in when someone left a door open. --- What do you do when you see a live rat with his nose caught in a mousetrap? If you scoop up the whole business, the rat might escape and you’d sleep that night with a rat either running across the bed covers or trying to yank them onto the floor. Being a television person, I quickly set up my video camera and took pictures of the rat while I was trying to figure out what to do. You can well believe that when I posted the film of the entire operation on Blip, which some people call the thinking woman’s YouTube, I heard at once from some animal rights people. Well, now, a week or so later, I’m still hearing about this live rat in a mousetrap and more than one person has called my attention to the havahart trap web page. I commend this havahart web page to your attention the next time there are unwanted rats in your kitchen. All it says is, “Rat Traps. Remove unwanted rats the most humane way!” So --- here you are with the unwanted rat in the little humane havahart cage without a word of advice as to what is expected of you next. Presumably you will not kill the rat, because if that were an option, you might as well have set a snap trap, eliminated an interminable unnecessary wait on death row, and had the unpleasant business over with at once. So --- there should now be no question in your mind as to what you must do when you have taken a rat prisoner. Visit one of your animal rights friends as quickly as possible and let the rat out in their kitchen.

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