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Rants December 20, 2009

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1. When I ran into my friend Julian the other day I asked him what he thought of this Tiger Woods thing. And Julian said, “Well, at least now we know why he was always smiling.”

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(2. Yesterday morning I was up before six and rode my bicycle a few miles before breakfast. You feel good when you get exercise in the morning because it can keep you from being tired around noon. You always get a lot more done when you start off a day with exercise. But then, while eating breakfast, I got hooked on a Jack Nicholson movie called As Good As It Gets and I wasted most of the morning watching that. A great movie. I’ve seen it several times but --- this is the first time I’ve seen it since reading a book on autism. When I realized that Nicholson always blurted out the truth, which so often is unpleasant, I said to myself, “My word. He has autism,” so I got a lot more out of the movie this time. Every time I see As Good As it Gets I always enjoy seeing Meryl Streep in the role of the poor waitress. And every time I see this movie I Google Meryl Streep to read more about her and every time I learn that I was watching Helen Hunt.

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3. You have often heard people say that ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, one of the occupational hazards of the professional entertainer is waiting for your turn to speak. And when you wait to speak at dozens of meetings all over the country you learn about the nebulous disasters hovering over every discipline. For example, were you to attend a meeting of the Audubon Society, you might be warned to watch out for Asian long horned beetles. I’d be just as happy if I had never heard of the Asian long horned beetle, wouldn’t you? Pharmacists are told they need a business disaster recovery plan. I suppose if people stopped popping pills, they would consider that a disaster. Foresters toss and turn at night worrying about slime flux and root rot and micro-moths in red spruce. Veterinarians wonder if Dog Digestive Problems Can Be Resolved With Human Food. And guess what they are advised to tell you when your litter box-trained cat suddenly starts doing bad things outside of the litterbox? While waiting to speak at a meeting of carnival people many years ago, I will never forget what I heard in a seminar on crisis. What do you tell the press when the ferris wheel collapses? Everything --- and do it very quickly.

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4. For years every winter I have attended exercise class three times a week with a bevy of seniors. You have heard me say that after years of being faithful I discovered that my arms and legs look just like those of the skinny woman on the screen. You have been told that exercise is necessary to keep you healthy. You have been told that exercise will turn you into a survivor. But today I noticed that there were only five of us going through the motions at exercise class. And I realized that the other 20 or so people who had been in the class last year must have died.

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5. My friend Harris sent me a newspaper article about a Cape Cod woman who got a WWII hand grenade as a Thanksgiving present. When she turned it in at the police department they shut down the parking lot and the adjacent road. While Googling to see if I could find the actual article, I turned up a 156 page book on how to use hand grenades. On page 83 I was told: Never try to reinsert a safety pin into a hand grenade. That is a valuable bit if information which I plan to keep in mind and am passing along to you now as a public service. The newspaper article said that if you were to unwrap an item that might be explosive to leave it in place and contact the police or fire department. If someone sent you a hand grenade as a Thanksgiving present, wouldn’t you be a bit wary if you got another package from them at Christmas?

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6. My friend Harris asked me if I’d ever seen that marvelous 1972 movie "Sleuth" with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. There's a wonderful line that the patrician character played by Olivier says to the upstart Caine character in explaining how he was about to get away with murder, "How was I expected to know who you were? The law will have every sympathy for me. Property's always been more highly regarded in England than people." Harris said that that last sentence says it, not only for the movie, but for our times as well, and he is right. Many years ago my brother called this to my attention. Crimes against the bureaucracy are always much more severely punished than crimes against people.

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7. Are you brought to your knees by ever changing technology? I am. Over 30 years ago I started out writing a humor column for over 50 newspapers. Back then all I had to do was flit about the neighborhood and write down some of the funny things my friends said. This is no more than what scribes have done for thousands of years. Making a record of conversation is a simple process and anyone can do it. But one morning I got out of bed and realized that before the sun went down I was expected to make a radio program and a television program on my computer. Instead of the two or three witty friends who had kept me in business with their colorful conversations, I was now dependent upon a cadre of technical computer geniuses. The mornings I once spent canvassing the neighborhood for a bit of humor are now spent groveling at some guru’s feet, either because the entire system has been “improved” and updated or because I have forgotten how to change m2p to mpg. Simple storytelling has become complicated. Imagine, if you will, a world without the Iliad or the Odyssey, simply because Homer’s hard drive crashed.

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8. Here are some thoughts from our friend Peter who lives up around Stockton Springs. Peter points out that Facebook is a valuable public forum. I never really thought about it and complained that Facebook was not as easy to use as regular email. But Peter says, “"It seems to me Facebook has two very different kinds of users. One, for which this "product" was clearly intended, is the mostly mindless who in the absence of ideas and inspiration of their own, babble and doodle and subscribe to annoying "aps," which are a distraction every bit as diabolic and for the most part totally stupid as what television has always had to offer with its commercials and 99 percent of its content. But the other kind of user is more like the patron of a convivial neighborhood tavern, a society of friends and acquaintances who have at least a reasonably significant set of interests and passions in common. The strength of this growing institution is, unlike humble's email and even his website, [ ] a public venue that invites diversity, engagement and challenge. If ever we are to regain our sense of being citizens rather than [ ] "consumers," we must treasure such forums and work to support them. A final thought, I have long argued from the historical record, taverns were the spawning grounds that hatched the American Revolution!" ---- This from Peter. I’m humble at humble farmer dot com. What do you think about Facebook. And what is this Twitter thing I keep hearing about?

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9. Here’s an interesting quote radio friend Steve sent me. It says that “The liberal left is defined by their belief in the persuasiveness of the rational argument." Let me read that again. “The liberal left is defined by their belief in the persuasiveness of the rational argument." Isn’t that silly? Think about this. In a disagreement on any issue, who do you think would win? Big Money or Rational Argument?

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10. Peter sent me an interesting story about Sid Cullen, who, in 1953 took a picture of me driving my 1919 Model T on South Main Street in Rockland, and published it in the Courier Gazette. Peter said I could read the story to you --- so --- it goes like this: About the time Sid photographed you in the kind of durable automobile I doubt we'll ever see built in this country again, he also photographed and almost electrocuted both himself and that year's Seafood Queen. Did you know about that? Sid wasn't much of a photographer but he loved the equipment and, in particular, he was an avid early experimenter with electronic flash. Such was his prejudice in favor of this technology that in the late '60s when I worked for the CG I was specifically discouraged from taking along to shoots my own circa 1948 but relatively fast-lens 35 mm Leica, which could usually capture good sharp exposures using only what we liked to call "natural" light. Instead, I was required to use the company's gimcrack Yashica two-and-a-quarters with a huge strobe unit attached. In almost every picture the Courier ran for years, the subjects tended to resemble the proverbial deer in the headlights: the newest lineup of nobility at the Knights of Pythias Hall in Thomaston, the officers of the RDHS Philatelist Club, the Rockland Barbershop Quartet (always with Ray Gross), the Future Farmers of America chapter at Georges Valley High School, South Thomaston boatbuilder Dynamite Payson standing proudly with his latest creation, Chief Benner standing dourly with someone's smashed-in auto grill as a backdrop -- it didn't matter, all of them looked as if the angel Gabriel had just that instant blown Last Trumps. I recall running across several boxes of Sid's early equipment, dust covered and shelved away in a storage closet, strange hand-blown loops of glass tubing filled with xenon gas straight out of Baron Frankenstein's laboratory, and powered by immensely heavy battery packs and transformers which boosted the final charge to the tube to near-lethal voltages. Anyway, Sid, who matriculated at the cheesecake school of photography, inveigled this innocent lass into changing into what for the time was a very daring bikini and frolicking gamely in the chilly harbor water down by the Public Landing. Somewhere along the line Sid's enthusiasm at getting the ultimate picture led him to shed shoes and socks, roll up his trouser legs and, battery packs hanging from his waist and crossing his chest like the cartridge belts of a a Mexican bandito, wade into the action. That's when something short-circuited. Sid squeezed the shutter button and both he and the girl were violently knocked off their feet as the water about them became charged with literally millions of volts.

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11. When you put things in perspective, Tiger Woods is really not a bad man. He didn’t take his kids camping at 2 AM.

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