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January 18, 2009 Rants --- Today is humble's 73rd birthday

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1. If you were a seagull in the town of St. George, Maine, you’d probably think back wistfully to the good old days when we had an open dump. Back then, sports, who’d go down to the dump to shoot rats, would see dozens of happy seagulls hopping around, eating garbage. My father called our dump the bird sanctuary. Of course nowadays, the town of St. George has what you would have to consider a state of the art dump where even a cockroach or a housefly would starve to death. Everything is recycled. There are two different wood piles, one for trees and limbs and one for lumber. There is a metal pile. There are big boxes for glass and tin cans and two boxes for different kinds of paper. There are boxes for half a dozen different kinds of plastic bottles. When you drive into our dump, the first thing you see on the right is Larry’s store, or whatever he calls it, where you can buy, for just pennies, all kinds of good things that people have thrown away. You can back your truck up to the wood pile and take home firewood, or the other wood pile and take home boards, or the metal pile and take home lawn mowers or bicycles. You should understand that some towns don’t allow people to come in and haul off anything they want for free. But the people running the town of St. George are smart. Think about this: every time I haul a good pine board or a kid’s bicycle home from the dump, I am saving the town money in disposal fees. When you see me leaving the dump with more than I brought down, you realize that St. George epitomizes the social experience they call recycling. The only losers are rats and seagulls.

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2. They took away our rural grocery stores and our rural garages. They took away our post offices. These were the places where country people, the community elders, gathered to gossip and simply interact with their neighbors. Winter and summer, we walked to get there. There were comfortable chairs or high stools where you could sit. You knew which chair was yours and nobody would be in it, even if you arrived late. There were hot stoves to lean on, in season. This was where you got the news: Who had gone where and, in whispers followed by throaty chuckles, who was doing what to whom. All of this is gone, but, because human beings have a genetically programmed need to interact with their neighbors, we now meet at the town dump. Here, at the dump, we meet a neighbor who leaves his million dollar home on the ocean every morning to search through the metal pile for wood screws --- or whatever treasure turns up. We are joined by a man who can make anything out of metal, and help him pull out some old bed springs. I throw a child’s bicycle in the back of my truck. It is better than the one I got a month ago, and a little larger which is good because the grandchildren are growing. Half an hour later we get in our trucks and head for home with our treasures --- which really don’t amount to all that much: we just went down there to get the news.

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3. If you were watching the news, you know about the big lobster that was taken out of a tank in a New York City restaurant. Biologists said it was 80 years old. Some people who felt bad for the lobster bought it and took it up to Maine where they threw it overboard in the middle of January. A woman named Jasmine allegedly said, “Let's see, they take an 80-year-old guy, living in a warm, safe place where he's assured of being well fed and people admire him for his age. They pull him out of there and toss him into the cold ocean where he has to fend for himself to eat and constantly be wary of predators.” End of quote. You know, I am at an age where I can identify.”

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4. You could feel the entire planet breathe a sigh of relief when Obama won the election. Let the good times roll, seems to be what we are still hearing. We are experiencing a world-wide heady state of euphoria and nobody seems to be concerned about the millions of people who did their best to bring us four more years of economic and social disaster. But they have not gone away and if you have not yet seen or heard from them, you soon will. Look for them now very close to home, these people who failed to bring your local and state government to its knees with that thing called TABOR you saw though and very prudently voted down a year or two ago. The whole world just watched them bring a once-great economic power to the brink of financial ruin in only eight short years, and now their goal is to ruin you on the local level. You can do nothing and let it happen, or you can keep an eye on the newspapers and then attend a few meetings where decisions are being made. You will recognize them by their hypocritical bleat that town and state government is too big and costs too much. They will look you in the eye and lie through their teeth as they whine that they are trying to save you, the taxpayer, money by cutting back on state and local services. Much like your doctor who hints that a flu shot wouldn’t hurt, I’m only suggesting that you keep your eyes open and your powder dry.

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5. My present topic is wishy-washy people. – I think that’s what I want to talk about --- people who can’t make up their minds. Not a day goes by, but what one of your wishy-washy friends stops by in need of something. They probably think that by being satisfied with anything and everything, their friends will think they are easy to get along with. But wishy-washy people make me scream and holler and wave my arms. Last night my friend Alden came in here and asked if he could borrow a rat trap. I said, “Do you want a new rat trap or an old rat trap?” He said, “I don’t care.” Answers like that drive me crazy, because then, I have to either press a friend to the mat in hopes of extracting a definitive answer, or I have to make the decision myself. If I give him a new rat trap, will Alden say that he doesn’t really want to take my only new rat trap and that an old, used rat trap will do as well? And if I give him an old, cherished, family-heirloom type of rat trap, will he think I don’t value him enough to give him a shiny new one? You run into this kind of thing every day --- someone who can never tell you exactly what it is they want. Ask them if they’d like a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, and they’ll say, “Yes.” And then there was Thelonious Monk, rehearsing one his original pieces with a small group. The sax player said, “Hey, --- is that third note in the second bar of the chorus a b or a b flat?” And Monk said, “Yeah, one of those.”

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6. You hear would-be intellectuals putting down television all the time. Their mantra is that there is nothing worth watching on television. Perhaps it is the redneck in me, but I beg to disagree. This morning I saw part of an educational television program that I would describe as nothing short of vital. It explained how I could keep from getting cheated when I bought rolex watches. If you can think of anything you would rather see on television than how to tell a real Rolex watch from a counterfeit Rolex watch, please tell me what it is. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com. I’ve heard a lot about Rolex watches over the years, but I don’t know what they are and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Have you? And please notice that I said I saw part of the program. That’s because I was so busy taking notes so I could tell you about it that I didn’t see how it ended.

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7. One of my radio friends sends me this: “If you like "young adult" literature, Tangerine, by Edward Bloor is set in a smoky FL subdivision.” What in the world could I have ever said that gave anyone the impression I cared for young adult literature? Let me repeat that so you can hear the sneer in my voice: What in the world could I have ever said that gave anyone the impression I cared for young adult literature? It is true --- I read books that were written for the 13-year-old school girls in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, France and Holland. By definition, a Harlequin Romance written in German is world literature and I peruse this world literature on a daily basis to refine and polish my linguistic skills. Is not a person who can order a hot dog in 9 languages a cosmopolitan on a par with James Bond? F Credis Toe. Geen senap. Because my IQ is low, I will never get to the point where I can absorb the nuances of Voltaire or Cervantes or Thomas Mann or Dante in the original, so I will live out my life trapped on the sixth grade level wherever I go in Europe. Dutch and Swedish are my best languages, but even there I can only understand the most elementary satire and have to have most jokes and the wordplay in advertising explained to me. So, to eliminate the need for any future misunderstanding, I would like, at this time, to state categorically that I consider a Harlequin romance printed in the English language nothing more than trash. To the best of my knowledge I have never read one --- not even to help me read a parallel text in Spanish. I would never, under any circumstances, permit a Harlequin Romance in English to be brought into my home, and, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t have single friend who even knows what they are. Tack ska du har for att listena.

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8. You have heard me say that I go to exercise class. Three times a week I stand before a television screen in the select company of 30 or ladies who were born around 1925 and swing my arms and stretch my legs for an hour. The last time I looked, I was the only man there. But --- I pass many pot-bellied men of a similar vintage on my way in and out of the building. Most of them are seated or standing near a pool table, where one of the company pokes at a little ball with a stick. Even if you have never played pool, you might remember seeing Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats in the movies, which is about all the education anyone needs on pool right there. I never learned how to play pool. The pool hall was 9 miles away in the city of Rockland. It was owned by Phil Sulides who was a good guy. As I recall, there was a chair or chairs in the front of the pool hall where you could get a shoe shine. I can’t remember now why I ever went in there, but I think there were two or three pool tables out back obscured by the amount of cigarette smoke that you would only expect to find at the Elk’s Club today. I was one of those wimpy little kids who never learned how to play baseball, either. Many men would consider my entire childhood a waste. About the only thing I did as a kid was learn how to read.

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9. A radio friend from Washington County sent us this. It is for those who would compare Obama to FDR. She says, “Herbert Hoover, perhaps the most feckless foolish president in history, did NOT include in his "legacy"....two wars, a HUGE increase in the cost of fuel, a military complex that soaks us all, a foolish $700 billion bailout for the banks, a damaged image of America in the world-at-large, or a prison system that incarcerates more prisoners percentage-wise than any other nation.” I would like to thank her for her letter, because until now, all of this had escaped my attention.

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10. Andy Wyeth died this week. I couldn’t do a thing until I spent seven hours writing a short piece about Andy, and only then did I turn to the newspapers to see what they had to say. Most of it was rehashed stuff you read long ago, written by writers who knew no more about Andy Wyeth than what other people had written long ago in other newspapers. Some of it was outright made-up lies. Yes, I’m not talking about opinions here but factual errors in the most famous newspapers in the United States. They are facts that I’ve verified with my own eyes and didn’t read in a newspaper. But a so called journalist writes something that isn’t true about Andy Wyeth or you or me and it takes off and has a life of its own. A week ago I read in a newspaper that I had said thus and so about a prominent person, which was a lie. Anyone who knows me would tell you that I never said such a thing, even if I might have thought it. And I still have the actual tape of that hour broadcast which would prove in court that I did not say what the newspaper reporter said that I said. But there it was, a big fat slanderous lie about me in a Maine newspaper and many people who don’t know me would be likely to read it and think that I was abusing my position as a radio commentator. I suppose if you are a public servant or famous and are used to seeing blatant lies about you in newspapers, you don’t think anything about it. I’ll even bet it even tickled Andy Wyeth to see the newspapers get things about him so messed up through the years, but things like that bother me.

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11. You might have heard me say that back when I got my undergraduate degree, the fully-furnished house and garage on an acre of land that I bought cost as much as my salary from that first year of teaching. Nowadays that very same house is valued at what a teacher would earn in five or six years. In recent years I have wondered how young people could buy even a modest home, unless both man and wife had graduate degrees, no children, and worked full time. I could see a day coming when uneducated Americans would be living with 7 hungry infants under a piece of tin on a muddy hillside. Now we hear that the prices of houses are dropping and panic reigns. If things continue along that path, a school teacher might, once again, be able to buy a home with one year’s salary. My question to you is, is that good or is it bad? A radio friend hearing this comment wrote to say that 37 years ago they bought their house with $3,000 down and a $7,500 mortgage. I also bought my home back then as did Warren Buffett. It would seem that the three of us are lucky to have bought when we did.

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