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February 22, 2009 Rants

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1. There is a new way of thinking in this country today and I think we should talk about it. An 80-year-old man who walks with a slight limp is married to a very athletic 50-year-old woman. Some leaves have accumulated on the roof. Which one of them should climb the ladder and crawl across the roof with a rake in hand to remove those leaves? In most industrialized countries in the world today, the woman would scramble up there like a monkey and have those leaves on the ground before you could say broken leg. However, in the United States the old man has to risk his neck --- because --- if she should fall off the roof, she is unemployable. But if he falls off the roof, he still has his pension.

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2. Old habits die hard. Even though I have inherited three grandchildren, you have heard me say many times that I could never afford to have children myself. So --- I still have some pre-grandchildren baggage and we are going to talk about that now. For some reason that I have never been able to understand, an awful lot of people think that their ability to create another human being is something to brag about. Would not a single man sooner boast that he had somehow lived over 50 years without contributing to the greatest problem on our planet today, which is increasing the population? As you know, I’m not arguing a point, but am simply outlining some common social parameters. So --- your friends who have created another unique human being meet you on the street. You are supposed acknowledge the presence of this new person, who might be from anywhere from 5 days to 5 years old. I can’t do it. As far as I am concerned, an entity unable to verbally articulate its sentiments does not exist, (which might explain why I haven’t enjoyed watching television for the past 8 years). You might recall hearing me tell how a new mother was so distressed over my inability to see her new child, that she threw the child in the air two or three times, right in front of my face, just to get my attention. For years afterward I boasted that I saved that child’s life by acknowledging its existence before she dropped it. Anyway --- you do not say anything about their child when you meet them in a store or on the street. That’s when they bring the child into your home and that’s when they’ve got me. Because --- if you don’t say some very nice things about their child the minute they come in the door, they unleash it.

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3. While doing my community service stint in the guardhouse last night, I picked up a dog-eared magazine and learned --- that had our presidential election been held in Holland late last summer, Obama would have received 92 percent of the vote. As a matter of fact, it said that Obama would have received 60, 70 or 80 percent of the vote everywhere in Europe. The article explained that this was because Europe had a “liberal” press. The Reader’s Digest went on to say that in the United States, current polls showed Obama only getting 34 percent of the vote. Obama did well in Europe because of a liberal press? I laughed. You can understand that they knew the people who buy Reader’s Digest wouldn’t be able to figure out that the converse also applied --- their 34 percent figure was the result of Reader’s Digest --- Newsweek, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Bangor Daily News, The Portland Press Herald, The Christian Coalition, MPBN, The KKK, talk radio in general and Rush Limbaugh in particular. Luckily for the world, the election proved that most Americans who can read can also think.

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4. Here’s a letter in response to Mike Crow’s article in Fishermen’s Voice on The humble Farmer radio program. Dear Humble, What an excellent story Mike wrote. I will remind you again that your program was so refreshing for me, so thought provoking, and indeed a comfort when I found myself widowed. I laughed, cried, danced to your music, and of course thoroughly enjoyed the clever … commentary. Thanks for sending this wonderful story about you, and the real Maine. From Allie And then this letter. A while back we talked about the good old days when one would take a high school sweetheart down to the dump on Sunday afternoons to shoot rats. Radio Friend Soni writes, “My old roomate moved when he was 15. He was unpacking and his neighbour, Tom Best - AKA Besty, came over to introduce himself. The first words out of his mouth were, "Hi, I'm Besty. Ya wanna hunt rats?" Thanks for that, Soni. Isn’t it nice to think back to the days before the Internet and cell phones when young people were responsible for their own cultural enrichment?

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5. Winky has given up his five-mile morning run because of the cold fall weather and is now getting most of his exercise by attending square dances. Winky claims he gets more than three times the workout of an average aerobics class because the caller stutters.

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6. A Friendship man, who was trying to chop down the door to his ex wife’s house with an axe, cut himself and had to have 20 stitches taken. Although he was unavailable for comment, his wife said, “He never could do nothing right.”

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7. This week’s Why Is It? department is supplied to us by Steve Waterman. Why is it, Steve asks, that according to the court news, when some hoodlum breaks into a house and robs and beats up an old woman, he is fined $150. But when some clam digger who is working to support his family is caught accidentally digging clams in a closed area, he is walloped with a $600. fine?

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8. Can you tell me why when some people fix something it falls apart within a week? You might be married to this person and know exactly who I’m talking about. There are other masters of the tool chest, however, who are able to make minor adjustments that last forever in their homes. The secret of these home improvement giants is called the temporary repair. When they put something up, they don’t intend for it to last. Because nothing lasts like a temporary repair. Hang a door with nails on one hinge --- just so it’ll hang there good enough until you can find some screws to do the job right, and it will be swinging contentedly there the day you die. If you’d put screws in the hinges, you know, done the job right, the door wouldn’t have fit, and the screws would have worked themselves out and you would have lived with a door that stuck for years until it fell off and dropped on the dog. Knock down a wall in your kitchen and put up some sheetrock. The cat will claw it down before you ever get around to paint it. Put a piece of plastic in your smashed out car window --- just to keep the wind out until you can get over to Stanley French to buy a window to do it right, and that plastic will be there the day you park the old clunker out in the back yard and use the door as a target. If you really want something that will hang in there forever, the rule to remember in Maine is, nothing lasts like a temporary repair.

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9. Perhaps you remember seeing on the news, the rather plain looking woman who was walking down the crowded city street. There was someone behind her with a TV camera who filmed men who happened to look at her. Now, one might argue that it is not unusual to sit by the sidewalk and look at people on the street. There are fat people out there who wish that they were skinny and there are skinny people who wish that they were fat and there are young boys and there are old women. And if you are interested in people, like I am, you look everybody right up and down. So this rather plain woman is walking down the street, hoping that men will look at her so she can catch them on a TV camera, and they show it on the national news. And the part you never saw on the national news was the one nice looking man that she came up to and snarled, “What are you looking at?” And the man laughed and laughed, and finally said, “I’m blind. I’m not looking at you.” And she said, “Nyah, but you would if you could.”

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10. What a thing Hunter S. Thompson was. One of my friends, who is a very clever writer in Portland, wrote a lot of good things about me on her web page. Listen to this old comment that I copied from her web page. “Do you know the Humble Farmer? … He's on Maine Public Radio Fridays at 7 p.m. and he's brilliant. No description of mine will do his show justice, but I'll give it a go…. It's as if Hunter S. Thompson has taken over the airwaves for an hour every week.” Yes, I’m like you. I wondered who this Hunter S. Thompson was, too, so I Googled him. My word. You’ll have to Google him yourself. All I’m going to say is that when Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff, his opponent had a crew cut. And, of course, Hunter S. Thompson did what you or I would do if we were running for sheriff against a man who sported a crew cut. Hunter S. Thompson shaved his head so he could refer to him as, “My long haired opponent.”

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11. You get them all the time. These emails that ask you to vote for one organization or another. The email that came today asked me to help determine the most indispensible food pantry in Maine. We understand that food pantries provide food for the poor and this is good. However, I cast a write-in vote for Maine Family Planning. If everyone supported Maine Family Planning, in a very few years there would be no need for food pantries in Maine. The only people who could possibly oppose the closing of food pantries would be the altruistic souls who run them.

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12. A friend in Portland says, “ I've been having fun with a proposal that has been put forward to allow people in Portland to have up to six hens---no roosters--at their homes, having to abide by some basic regulations, of course. I put up some posts saying that with the volume of chickens expected, they certainly were going to demand some basic rights---"No egg laying without representation", and their own At Large Councilperson, which I found odd since they would have to live in pens and not be "at-large". I foresee demand for conjugal visits with roosters, access to public transportation and the necessary changes to accommodate their needs, "Hendicapped " parking spaces, Clucking as a Second Language to be taught in our schools, all of this with help from PETA and the MCLU. This will, of course, open the floodgates for other animals to demand rights long denied to them, and who knows where it will lead.”

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13. Do you keep anything in your house that eats? Most things that eat have teeth. Most things that have teeth can bite. A while back we talked about the woman who was attacked by the Chimp. This got all kinds of national media attention even though we never hear a thing about the 800,000 or so Americans who are hospitalized every year by dog bites --- or the 30 or so Americans who are killed every year by dogs. If I had time I’d do a Google search to find out how many people died in their home last year and were eaten by their cats before anyone found them.

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14. Google is a wonderful thing. How else would I have learned that some scientists have discovered how to make teeth fillings out of the same polyethylene fibers used in bullet proof vests? If you are old enough, you can remember seeing superman catch bullets in his teeth and spitting them back at the bad guys. Now, with her enhanced technological prowess, your average great-grandmother will be required to have her jaws licensed as a lethal weapon.

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