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Rants January 17, 2010

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1. Yesterday morning I pulled the toilet off the floor and put in a new wax ring so it won't leak. If you have never done it, I suggest that you do. Then, if you are ever captured by the Viet Cong and imprisoned in a jungle pigpen, you will be able to say, "I've seen worse."

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2. Three visitors stopped by to visit our gracious employer and were giving her the news from home. What I heard while pouring tea must be true because I don’t think anyone could make it up. One of their neighbors, an elderly retired military officer, felt a heart attack coming on while at a shopping center. Like any old man who is about to drop down dead, he didn’t want to bother anyone so he got in his car with his wife and, because she can’t drive, he drove to the hospital and stopped at the front door. His wife rushed into the hospital and said that her husband was having a heart attack in the car outside. Hospital personnel called an ambulance because --- unless he walked in or unless she dragged him in by the heels, they could not treat him. They are not allowed to go out to the car to help a dying man get into the hospital. Do you think that before spending more millions on research for new life-saving machines and drugs, it might be worthwhile to step back and evaluate hospital administration?

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3. It’s good to laugh and I laughed when I saw this. From time to time you get emails with nothing in them but a few words. And if you Google those words you discover that they come from an obscure or even a well-known book. Here’s the last one I checked out: “water; for though I swam very well”. That’s it. “water; for though I swam very well”. It’s a line from Robinson Crusoe. And on the top of the email is an attached .jpg file that you can click on --- which I have never done for fear of having something horrible happen to my computer. So, can you tell me what these messages are all about? Why is someone sending me a scrap from some book and what happens when you click on the .jpg attachment? If you have a scientific mind and have clicked on the .jpg attachment there’s a good chance you’ll have to use your phone to answer my question, because your computer will probably no longer be working.

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4. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, has been a bit on edge. She heard that the number of people watching Charlie Sheen’s television program doubled after he was accused of beating his wife.

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5. After typing in my bank account number to fill out an on line form to pay my electric light bill, I clicked on the Pay button and was told that the account number was wrong. I didn’t have enough numbers in it. Even the sample bank account number on the page had as many numbers as my bank account number and I couldn’t see where the extra three numbers would come from. But --- sometimes if you shut the page down and start from the beginning, the computer clears out any glitches, so I shut her down and started again. And the first thing I had to type in on the top of the page was my CMP account number. Ah ha, says I. There are two account numbers on this form. The CMP number and my bank account number. Perhaps the one I had wrong was the CMP account number. It was, but of course the computer didn’t tell me that until I had just finished typing in my bank account number. So when I think about it, I can see why I was confused. My question to you is, why are these on-line forms so difficult? Don’t you think that the world would be a much nicer place to live if the president of every company was not allowed to draw a paycheck until he had successfully filled out all his company’s forms all by himself?

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6. I don’t very often tell you what a nice person I am, but I am going to do so today. Like you, I spend more time than I should at my computer. I have to write 12 or so rants each week for my radio and television programs. Sometimes they appear on my computer screen as if by magic. Sometime I work on one for two or three hours and quit and throw it away because it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. From where I sit, I can see everything that happens outside. The double wide across the road is for sale and this morning two people in red shirts were trucked over in a golf cart to look at it. A few hours later in the day they walked back and stood and looked at it for a long time. Just for the fun of it I went out and said, “The value is not in the property but in your wonderful neighbors.” We chatted. They asked no questions and I volunteered no information, but --- having lived in southern Florida for 12 or so winters, I wouldn’t buy a place anywhere in the world until I’d lived in the immediate location for at least a year. Would you? So -- I didn’t tell these people that there are too many days in the year when the smoke from every fire in southern Florida blows through this park and that everything inside and outside is covered with coarse black grit. I didn’t tell them that a place just sold in this park for $10,000. Just the lot rent here is $7,000 or so a year and going up, so --- if you want to sell there’s no profit in waiting for the market to come back. Three years and you’re out over 20 grand. I didn’t tell them that my best friend has a place for sale around the corner and that he’s going to drop the price by a few thousand every other week until it sells because he wants to be rid of it. I didn’t tell them that last year a dead bird the size of a small cow rotted on the roof of the empty place they were looking at and that park management wouldn’t remove it because of some liability foolishness. No, I didn’t say a thing, which I think makes me a very nice person. At least the people trying to sell the place ought to think so.

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7. You have friends who send you trash emails every day and you get to the point where you don’t even bother to open them. You and I also have friends who send us emails that are always conducive to thought and I got one yesterday. The email showed pictures of a fast boat that could be used to combat the much publicized piracy off the coast of Africa and ended up with a “Hooray for the USA.” Is it not interesting that a segment of the population has been conditioned to believe that crime can be eliminated by more police, bigger jails and stiffer sentences? --- Or that piracy can be eliminated by building bigger and faster police boats? It is possible that if young, unemployed men who live along the coast of Africa were able to make a decent living, there would be no pirates? I have gone on boats between Denmark and Sweden many times and we were never attacked by pirates.

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8. Thirty or so years ago I used to get post cards from a young radio friend. They were signed Coe. The other day Coe turned up on someone’s Facebook page so I wrote to ask him what he was doing now. I remember that 15 or so years ago he was in Ecuador. Coe writes: "Thanks for the note Humble. I joined the Foreign Service two years ago now and was sent to Africa. I got back this past fall from a stint at the US Embassy in Angola and now am in DC learning Arabic to head off to Iraq in May for a year doing consular work at the Embassy in Baghdad. Then I'll be off to somewhere else. Hope you had a good holiday and thanks for staying in touch. Coe" I was kind of distressed to hear what Coe had to say, weren’t you? What is happening to our country when American consuls are expected to speak the language of the country to which they are assigned?

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9. My friend Mark says that he’s been reading about the folks running for Governor in Maine this year, and how they are all talking about what they’re going to do to improve the Maine economy. This is because --- if you don’t give it any thought you might equate money with quality of life. Of course, for as long as I can remember, folks have been running for office and talking about how they are going to improve the Maine economy. But very little is ever said about improving the quality of life. It’s true that for about 10 months out of the year, it is too cold to do anything but ski in Maine. Just for the sake of our discussion, tell me what you’d do to bring more business to Maine? Some folks hope that global warming will hurry up so Maine will look and feel more like Florida, but because that’s going to take a few more years my friend Mark says what we really need to do is change the terms used to describe cold weather. You know that nowadays when you invade and pillage another country the term “humanitarian aid” is used instead of “colonialism” --- and by the same token we could change "wind chill" to "wind warmth", which gives you a much better feeling. The expression "below zero" would be banished from the weather forecaster vocabulary by an order of the Maine Legislature. "Cold is the new warm" would become part of Maine’s new economic campaign. "Closer to civilization than you think" would be a slogan at the heart of the campaign to encourage new businesses to relocate here. Banners reading, "Mainers---they'll warm up to you" would convince newcomers that they are welcome, even though the natives know they aren’t. The cadres of illegal immigrants who would be bussed in to work for low wages in the new businesses would receive several sets of polypro socks and insulated underwear when they cross the state line. You might have noticed that when you do improve the economy in a state, people no longer want to live there and they can’t wait to move to Maine. No matter what your candidates tell you --- when it comes to quality of life, the people who can’t wait to move here will tell you that Maine is one of the best places to live in the United States today.

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10 There are computer gurus. And then there are the people computer gurus turn to when they have questions. I am fortunate in having a computer guru’s guru for a friend. He knows everything. While chatting with him the other day he said that when he was a little kid he’d take an alarm clock apart. And even though he’d have one or two parts left over when he put it back together, the clock would still run perfectly. Wouldn’t you think that every manufacturing company in the world would have one or more of these little kids on retainer?

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11. The other day I dropped in on a man from Germany to find him putting new brake shoes on his car. I first met him last year when I stopped in to ask him about the solar panels on his roof. He runs his office and a couple of rooms in his house just with solar power, and he put the whole business together himself. Thinking about this on the way home I realized that there are men in this world who think they can do most anything. They won’t take no for an answer. You can imagine that these men would be very surprised if they tried to do something and failed. There is another group of men who are completely crushed when confronted with something they’ve never done before. We take failure for granted and are always pleasantly surprised when we try to do something and succeed.

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12. My wife and I work winters in a small retirement community in Florida. When we first came here we bought a little trailer, but when Marsha was diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy and couldn’t hold down a regular job we were forced to sell it and move in with our elderly next-door neighbor who employs us as care givers. Most of our neighbors here are well-to-do farmers from Canada or the mid-west who made a lot of money raising soy beans or tobacco. So --- when I went to up to the clubhouse to the annual winter book sale I only expected to see dog-eared paperbacks by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchannan or Joel Ornstein. But --- you can imagine my surprise when I found books by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Plato --- Isaac Asimov. Of course, my first thought was, “Who in this park has even heard of Welcome to The Monkey House or The Dialogues?” I’d like to meet this person --- and I bought three of these great books for a quarter each. When I got home I discovered that they were part of the library I’d left behind when we sold our place.

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