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February 8, 2009 Rants

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1. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But --- I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next.

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2. You recently heard about the Olympic gold medal winner who apologized for smoking dope. We were all disappointed to hear this, but if you are old enough, you were not surprised. Here’s a little boy who has never had a life. His every movement has been dictated by an adult ever since he could walk. He was told when to get up where to go, what to do when he got there, what to eat and when to go to bed. He has probably never ever had to decide anything for himself. He had never before needed to think about anything --- outside of what to do to become the world’s best. The young man was focused. So if he did something stupid right out of the gate, why should we be surprised. You could easily compare him with the violin virtuoso who, at the age of 11 can play any concerto written. Next year his mother plans to teach him to walk and feed himself.

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3. Last Thursday the sheriff responded to a 911 call from a housewife in St. George, Maine who was being crushed up against her wall phone by an oven that had overflowed with Fudge Brownie Mix. It seems as the woman had been confused by the directions on the back of the box, which have been converted to the metric system. That is, the pan is supposed to be 33 by 23 by 5 cm’s and you will need 110 ml of water and 55 ml of Vegetable oil. The only thing she found in common with the metric system was the 1 egg. It took the Sheriff and his deputy several extra hours to free the woman because, according to the directions on the box, the brownies had to be cut into 4 by 5 cm squares before eating.

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4. Albert Kallio, a football player for the Boston Redskins, made the Guineas Book of Records last week by playing 12 months without a serious injury. He will be awarded a trophy at the sports hall of fame banquet in September for being the first football player in America to play an entire season without having broken knees or cartilage repaired by an orthopedic surgeon. A disgusted spokesman for The Medical Association has named Kallio Wimp of The Year.

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5. You hear me talking about email and how it provides almost as much material for commentary as my morning 10 minutes reads in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Listen to this email that came in this morning. All is says is, “Lets get naked.” To begin with, Let’s get naked is not spelled correctly. In the second place, I have never seen anyone, young or old, male or female, who didn’t look better with clothes on. And, finally, you might wonder if the sender has invested heavily in aspirin or cough drops because it was 20 below zero out there this morning.

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6. Many Knox County marriages that end in divorce could be saved, according to Gramp Wiley, Rockland’s most prominent marriage councilor. “Be content to let your wife be boss,” he advises. “If she wants to cook and clean and scrub, don’t argue with her. If it keeps her happy, don’t complain.” Young people don’t seem to realize that anyone who’s careful in selecting a mate can have an ideal marriage. Suppose that neither of you ever noticed that a wet towel or a wet water glass causes a white water stain on varnished surfaces. Perhaps you both drop your clothes beside the bed or in the bathroom and leave them there until they mold. Or it might be that you each have a cat that walks on the kitchen counters and eats greasy scraps out of your frying pan. Great! You, and no one else, deserve to be married to each other. On the other hand, suppose that each one of you knocks the other down while rushing over to pick up a small raveling on the floor. You wouldn’t be able to sleep just knowing there was an unwashed spoon in the sink. You’d have a wonderful marriage and would probably spend enjoyable hours, grooming each other like monkeys. Do not look in the personal column of the Maine Times for a mate. It will give you the idea that everyone in the world wants to take moonlight walks on lonely beaches. Young folks only run that kind of ad because it looks fashionable. One couple in Friendship wore out hundreds of dollars worth of shoes walking on the rocks at Pemaquid before they discovered that they both hated it. Which brings up the topic of Mutual Suffering. Look around and you’ll realize that Mutual Suffering is the basis for most of the successful marriages in Knox County today. Let’s say that you are going to buy a car that your wife doesn’t want. The Mutual Suffering system allows her to buy furniture that you don’t need or want to balance it out. You understand that it has to be something of nearly equal value. It works the same way with meals. If you have scallops for supper and she doesn’t like them, she eats them without making a face or saying anything. The next night she serves pea soup and tripe to get back at you because you hate it, but you eat it with her to even it out. With Mutual Suffering man and wife each get at least a piece of what they’d like. You want to shingle the roof because the rain is starting to leak in and rot the boards, but she feels a new kitchen stove is more important. You end up shingling half the roof and she buys a second hand stove with only two burners that work. That makes it fair. She cuts her cuticles and says she’s just getting rid of the dead skin, which makes her hands look like uncooked hamburger. It drives you crazy but you don’t say anything because she doesn’t say a word when you bite your fork when you eat. Sometimes Mutual Suffering works two ways at once. Suppose you go over to the Owls Head Transportation Museum to watch Lionel drive around in one of the old cars. You think she wants to go and she thinks you want to go. A week later she asks you to go clamming with her and you say, “But I went to the Museum with you last week.” That’s when you first discover that neither one of you wanted to go. Then you have the impasse where nothing can be done. That’s a situation where nobody owes anybody anything, so you both sit home, sulk and suffer nobly in silence while thinking, “We never go anywhere --- we never do nothing.”

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7. A Maine school superintendent was suspended without pay this week, when he was overheard saying that good teachers are almost as important for a child’s growth and development, as new school buildings and a gymnasium. It will be a long time before Maine teachers read the Wall Street Journal looking for tax shelters. This is because teachers recognize the fact that they are second-class citizens who are willing to work for less than a quarter of what their teachers earned thirty-forty years ago. For example, the same house that cost a year’s salary in 1965 would cost four year’s salary today. Many Maine teachers are trust fund hippies from away who flaunt their downward mobility by working in schools. It’s their way of punishing their wealthy parents. There are a few poor souls, however, who are willing to live in poverty simply because they enjoy helping children. One of these martyrs worked for months with a very slow boy until she had taught him how to read a road map. She experienced her proudest moment when she learned that he’d stolen a car and got all the way to New Jersey.

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8. The advertising community has been cheating American business out of billions of dollars annually. For as long as you can remember, the smiling people who appear in ads have been beanpole thin. All this will change next month when glamorous 350-pound models, who were rejected by The Biggest Loser, will appear in ads. They will be surrounded by 350-pound men who are witty, wealthy and wise. In the background you will see yachts, fancy cars, mansions and a promise of romantic adventure --- if she buys what the ad is selling. Of course most people will never be able to weigh 350 pounds no matter what they eat and drink. But many will be willing to destroy their health trying to look like this new smart set. This has been proven today by the countless women who are starving themselves in hopes of getting down to the anemic 95 pound models shown in ads now. It has been estimated by the advertising community that if each woman in America gained only 20 pounds, they could sell an extra two billion dollars worth of cloth each year. Profits are expected to double in beer and spaghetti. Dry skin, which was invented by Al Peel in the 1950s, will still be promoted, however. Thanks to Al, women all over the country have discovered their dry skin. They now spend billions on creams, salves and lotions to keep their skin moist. Many men don’t want their wives to have moist skin. Here in Maine, we call it sweat.

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9. You will be glad to hear that the last time baseball players went out on strike, it did not affect the price of lobsters. Elsewhere in sports, I read in the expletive newspaper that some basketball teams hire a lot of the good players just so they won’t have to play against them. Then they keep them sitting on the expletive bench so they won’t have to play with them. In preparing this program for you, I learned that if you’re a really good basketball player, you can’t talk unless you use a lot of expletives. I quote, “Too expletive bad.” Expletives will probably soon find their way into Maine speech, because here in Maine we could really use them. For example, the weather is quite expletive for 9 months out of the year. The summer traffic between Belfast and Bath is always expletive. You can follow one of those expletive out of state campers and creep along until you almost go out of your expletive mind. You can’t get out of your driveway because of all the expletive cars going by. But now that the weather’s so expletive that you don’t want to get out and go anywhere anyway, they’re all gone. Expletive.

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10. If you don’t have a computer, you might as well go get a drink of water because what I am about to say won’t mean a thing to you. When you use a computer, from time to time it is nice to have a split screen, so you can look at and work on two papers at the same time. Yes, you can shrink both pages down so you can look at them at the same time, but that is not as good as having a split screen. I’ve seen it and I know it can be done, so today I Googled, “How do I get a split screen?” The first thing I was told was to download a program called Foxfire. If you know anything about computers you might be raising up your ears, because you know you can get a split screen without going to Foxfire. But I already had Foxfire as an option on my computer so I opened Foxfire. Then, it said, “Once your toolbar is in place, just click on “Tools”, “Add-ons”, “Extensions”, and then “Split Browser”. Once the Split Browser add-on is activated, you’re ready to start splitting your screen.” Well, you’ve done this before so you probably know what happened. Yes, I clicked Tools which brought up Add-ons and I clicked Ad-ons which brought up Extensions and I clicked on Extensions which did not bring up Split Browser. So I was stopped dead in my tracks. It is my belief that the people who design these programs own stock in Pepto Bismol.

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11. Did you see the Today Show people sitting around in snowmobile suits? Well, they weren’t really snowmobile suits and they weren’t really bathrobes. My wife Marsha just told me that they are called Snuggies. Their point was that you can keep warm in a cold house by putting on one of these Snuggie things. Doesn’t it say something about our friends and neighbors who need to be told that if they dress properly they will be toasty warm? Ever since I can remember I have worn a snowmobile suit to the supper table on cold days in July and August, because I am a conscientious hedonist. I have never believed in suffering from the cold and I didn’t need to have someone tell me that dressing appropriately can alleviate suffering. As a matter of fact, I am wearing a snowmobile suit right now because it is only about 70 degrees in the room. Any man who can think has habits that make him an eccentric until the rest of the world catches up. When I was in the 6th grade I can remember hearing one of the boys say, “Spring is here --- Skoglund has his earflaps up.”

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12. Here’s a silly story that came by email. In a hospital's Intensive Care Unit, patients always died in the same bed on Sunday morning at about 11:00 am, regardless of their medical condition. This puzzled the doctors. Some members of the clergy even thought it had something to do with the supernatural, so a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate. The next Sunday morning, just before 11:00, they stood outside the ward to witness this terrible thing for themselves. Several clutched small wooden crosses, prayer books, or a rabbit’s foot to ward off evil. Just when the clock struck 11:00 the janitor walked in and unplugged the life support system so he could use the vacuum cleaner.

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