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Rants January 24, 2010

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1. Here is an email letter from a radio friend. It says, “I attended a "Free Lobster Picnic" near Woods Hole last summer. I think perhaps they stole the idea from you. But when we arrived at Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon Island by boat for the picnic, which was sponsored by a course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, we found a completely vegetarian picnic. It was actually Vegan, whatever that is. The Free Lobster? At 2 PM, with great fanfare, they set a captive lobster free in the cove.

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2. We recently talked about old men and even young men who would rather die with a stroke or heart attack than call an ambulance. A long time radio friend who should probably remain nameless, writes, “I know old men would rather die than call an ambulance and that is why there are so many widows enjoying their money after they die because they are too stubborn to call for help. My sister's husband died at 57 because he was too stupid to go to the doctor. He was having a heart attack for two weeks. He was chewing aspirin like candy and suffering immensely. I would have given him a choice of getting in the ambulance I had called willingly or waiting till I shot him in the foot or leg then going. He died the night before he had an appointment with the doctor which he finally let her make for him. I would not mourn a man that stubborn and just plain dumb.” Thank you for that. I have another good letter that I lost about a man who was in the hospital, who was tested and told that he wasn’t having a heart attack, who suffered severe damage from the heart attack that he was having.

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3. Do you buy books on Amazon? I buy excellent books for a quarter at lawnsales, but from time to time I hear of a book I’d like to read and that’s when I bring up Amazon. Today I heard of a man who spent 29 years in solitary in jail before they said that he was “Probably innocent” and let him out. You can think of a lot of people who went to jail: Martin Luther King, Thoreau, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, Thomas More, Oscar Wilde, Solzhenitsyn, Ghandi --- you could think of hundreds more, and it makes you wonder why you never contributed enough to society to warrant a sentence of your own. Anyway, this poor man who was probably innocent wrote a book called, From the Bottom of the Heap and I said to myself, I’d like to read From the Bottom of the Heap. Let’s see if I can find it on Amazon for only one cent and four dollars postage. Guess what? $12.95 plus the four dollars postage. And the same thing happened the last four or five times I looked. My question to you is, why do the books you’d like to read always cost $12.94 more than you want to pay?

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4. You 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 human being who has never had a life. His every movement has been dictated by someone else for as long as he can remember. 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 cannot remember the last time he had to decide something for himself. He can’t remember ever having to think about anything. So if he did something stupid right out of the gate, why should we be surprised? You could easily compare him with a 60-year-old widower who rushes out and gets married.

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5. While Googling “New Lamps for Old” here’s a quote that turned up: “On one side, we have Islamics who have no moral qualms about killing anyone and everyone, babies in shopping malls, children in school.” I didn’t bother to open the link to find out who was on the other side or where anyone could have learned that kind of scotched earth behavior. But anyone who enjoys reading the Bible as much as I do knows that “put to the sword” appears dozens of times in the Bible. In Sunday school, we learned that time after time, under God’s leadership, the Israelites completely destroyed the men, women and children in several cities. Ask any Biblical scholar if he’d rather face Joshua or a drunken Clint Eastwood with a shotgun. Clint was a gentleman and said, “Anyone who don’t want to get killt had better leave.” Nowadays, we don’t use swords, and those of us with any sense of moral responsibility at all use guided missiles instead of suicide bombers when we want to kill enemies. Children who are killed by guided missiles warrant very little press and are considered collateral damage which doesn’t count.

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6. While looking up scorched earth policy, I read that The strategy of destroying the food supply of the children in an area of conflict was banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions. Of course this ban on destroying children’s food only applies to the countries that have ratified it. It said that notable exceptions are Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the United States.

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7. Today we are going to talk about threats. Not veiled threats but blatant in-your-face threats. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is the master of the in-your-face threat. Because I don’t think that the need to make threats is genetically transmitted, she could have learned it as a small child by listening to her mother. And now that I stop to think of it, my wife’s father was the most moderate, laid-back man I ever met. Yesterday morning my wife approached the deposed master of this house, who of course lives with his fingers glued to the keyboard of his computer, and this is what she said. “Will you please make an effort to put in that microwave today? I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning it and I want you to put it in before it gets rusty.” Not a threat, you say. This sounds like a very polite and reasonable request? It is. But, then I said, “Before it gets rusty? You want me to put in the new microwave before it gets rusty?” --- She just paid four dollars for it so it was new to us. I laughed, and it wasn’t a nasty sarcastic laugh, but a real honest that’s-funny laugh and I said, “Do you know how long it takes something that is setting out in the barn to get rusty? You don’t seem to have much faith in my ability to get things done around here.” And that’s when she said, “If you don’t put it in, I’m going to pick it up and carry it in here and do it myself.” And right there you can hear the “If you don’t I will…” threat part. And you know as well as I do that she had been out there washing the breakfast dishes and rehearsing that speech until she had it down pat in its final form and trounced in here for delivery. If you are a husband, my question to you is, does your wife have a similar modus operandi when she wants something done? What? You don’t know because no matter how important and how intricate your project, you always jump up the first time she asks?

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8. I don’t want to do it, controversy does not become me, but because of what my friends are telling me and what you’ve been seeing on the news, I’ve got to talk about the economy. What you want to bet that the billionaire Warren Buffett could get along on my $465 a month Social Security income better than many 35 year old kids could. I don’t make enough to pay an income tax and I’m better off now than I’ve ever been in my entire life. These unemployed people, who are young enough to be my grandchildren, were brought up in a rich kid lifestyle. They pay to go skiing and they go out to restaurants to eat. They buy clothes that they don’t need and they have more than one pair of shoes. You might not believe this, but one day while trapped away from home and forced to buy a dollar chicken sandwich in McDonald’s, I heard the clerk say to a man, “That will be twenty dollars” and something. Twenty dollars to take your wife and a couple of kids into McDonald’s? I couldn’t believe that working class people had that kind of money to throw around. What are people thinking? The fact that a working family can come up with $20 for four plastic containers that contain mostly ice indicates to me that the economy can’t be all that bad. Please remember that you are listening to a man who went to school with cardboard and metal covering the holes in his shoes. If you were to live a week in Haiti you might discover that hard economic times is a relative term.

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9. My friend Julian, who has sold more than a few things in his day, says that the time to sell is when you have a buyer. I take that to mean that even though you might not be thinking about selling your grandfather’s 1932 Plymouth sedan with “floating power, set in rubber”, if someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, he or she owns it. I was thinking of that while out lawn sale ing the other day. Like a woman who knows the price of everything in the grocery store, I know that bicycles are 3 to 5 dollars, books (and we are talking classics or science in hard cover) are a quarter, a handful of Craftsman wrenches are a dollar and pyrex dishes are half a dollar. So when I walk up a driveway and see prices on items that are ten times higher than they should be, I laugh out loud and think to myself that optimism for the economy is alive and well. Thank you for tolerating this digression. Now to the point. We said that the time to sell is when you are visited by someone who wants to buy. You might turn that end for end and say that the time to buy, is when you find someone who WANTS to sell. But if you have been to enough lawn sales, you know that the time to buy is when you find someone who HAS to sell.

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10. You will recall I mentioned a while back about seeing a program that promised to tell me how to tell a real Rolex watch from a counterfeit Rolex watch. I was so busy taking notes, so I could tell you about it, that I didn’t see how the program ended. Radio friend Bill Miller sends this: “Dear Humble, Once, while working for U -Haul a few years back, I stumbled upon a Rolex laying in the under-seat portion of a truck. No one claimed it, and I had, a Rolex Presidential watch. This watch had diamonds on the quarter hour and a gold bezel...Im not sure what that would get me in life but wow...I had a Rolex. For years I wore that watch very proudly as a status symbol..showing I was a winner in life..a ROLEX. Some years later I was working as a paramedic on the beach in florida and had to extricate a young man who had imprudently dove into the water wearing speedos ,showing off to women who wanted gucci flannel pajamas, and had broken his neck. As I reached below the backboard in 4 feet of water I felt that watch unclip and fall off my wrist...gone...forever. That was a life lesson I couldnt have paid enough for. I wear a Timex now. Bill” My question to you is the obvious one: Why would anyone wear a watch that came with a cheap strap?

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11. When I came out of the bathroom one morning, my wife Marsha said, “You were in there talking about what you were going to do today. I think you’re going crazy.” This was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize that I talked out loud to myself. But, as the day went on, I realized that when I was alone I talked out loud to myself all the time. Listening to myself for the first time, I was also somewhat shocked to hear myself employing lexical items that I never use with anyone but must have acquired 30 or so years ago while listening to the Nixon tapes. So --- because I don’t want people to think I’m crazy, I’m going to have to get a dog. People who talk to animals are considered normal.

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12. Here’s another junk email that got my attention. If you are a social commentator, you should be grateful for junk email because you will never run out of topics. This one says: “Your wife need your attention? Solve all your problems with IT.” I don’t know why IT needs to advertise. You and I have friends who no sooner left for work, when IT came in the back door.

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