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Rants March 28, 2010

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1. Are you amazed at what some people know? And what some people assume is common knowledge? I am. Radio friend Rich mentioned Johnny Depp in an email and I wrote back and asked him who Johnny Depp was. I know, I could have Googled Johnny Depp. Everyone turns up on Google. You can even find me if you Google. Well, when Rich got my email asking him who Johnny Depp was, he wrote back, “c’mon, humble… you haven’t been on mars all these past 15 years. Actually it’s the tim burton version of A-I-W, starring johnny depp as the mad hatter.” Well, I finally figured out what A-I-W means because he mentioned the mad hatter, but now I’m up against a stone wall with Tim Burton. My question to you is: have you ever heard of Johnny Depp or Tim Burton? And why would I have ever heard of them if they’ve never had an extra-marital affair worthy of being exposed on the evening news?

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2. From time to time, lobstermen who feel they are being crowded, cut off the offender’s traps. Like any war, this escalates until the ocean floor is littered with thousands of dollars worth of lobster traps and people start pointing guns at each other. Sometimes they attempt to ram the other fellow’s boat or shoot at him. It can get very ugly. Here’s a comment someone posted on a blog about a recent lobster war: "Arson, cutting traps, stealing from traps, sinking boats, attempted murder, must be a fortune out there in Lobsters to commit these types of crimes." Is this not an astute observation? How many people have you heard of who shot at each other for the right to mow some rich man’s lawn?

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3. Please pay close attention because I’m going to read you a letter from our good friend David Bright, who writes: “Dear humble, This morning I listened to your talk about how the health benefits of old men looking at women's breasts was only a myth. In fact, I believe I can provide solid documentation that old men looking at women's breasts can sometimes be harmful. Several years ago I attended my high school reunion. Having graduated in 1966, it's safe to say that many of us at the reunion didn't look the same as we did back in those heady days when we were growing up as children of the '60s. When we arrived, we were all given name tags which not only had our names on them, but also a picture of each of us taken from our high school year book. So as happens at these things, I spent the rest of the night walking up to people, glancing down at their name tags, figuring out who they were and then introducing them to my wife and engaging in brief conversations. At the end of the night as we were leaving, my wife said to me "why every time we walked up to a woman did you glance down at her chest?" "Oh, that's simple," I said, "that was the only way I was able to recognize any of them." My wife hit me.”

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4. One of my friends sent me a picture of the anarchist Wall Street bombing of 1920. I had never heard of it. Because I get frequent mailings from people who would live without a government, I Googled to read up on them. Not a day goes by on this planet but what dozens of mentally deranged people kill someone they don’t like. But crank that up a couple of notches and you get the folks who deploy land mines or bombs which wipe out people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the right time. Quite a bit has been written about this kind of thinking. One book that Google turned up is called, Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.

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5. I had to laugh and shake my head when I read on a web page that that MSAD #55 is facing a loss in state funding in excess of $1.1 million dollars for fiscal year 2011. The school board is now asking citizens for input. Input. If we could back up 50 years, knowing what they know now, the citizens would never have gone into a School Administrative District to begin with. Taxpayers have discovered by painful experience that it is always much cheaper to run your own school in your own town. But years ago many Maine people were suckered into joining school administrative districts. They were told that someone else would pay. Oh, the state will pay the biggest share of running your schools. When you hear someone talking about enhancing the current educational environment, you better believe they know nothing about kids or education. They’re there to pad their pockets by putting up new buildings. Of course getting something for nothing is the premise --- the hook --- of the oldest con game in the world. If you can convince the suckers that they can get something for nothing, you’ve got them. Consolidating the schools was a con perpetuated by construction companies that made millions building new consolidated schools. If you get out of the house at all, you’ll find that construction companies and their highly paid lobbyists are still out there today, still seeking out suckers. So when they come whining to you for input when they’ve pumped the money barrel dry, tell them the truth: “You don’t really want my input: you want more of my money.”

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6. I’ve been talking with you on the radio for 32 years. I started April 6 in 1978. And in all that time I’ve learned one very important thing. You want to be pretty careful of what you say on the radio. You never know when somebody might be listening.

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7. Here is a letter from Heather who says, “… On your suggestion, I watched Super Size me. It was a good documentary…. I had a mini gastric bypass surgery about 5 years ago. … I used to weigh 287 lbs. I have lost slightly more than 100 lbs. I still eat out several times a week but very rarely at Mc Donald’s. I prefer a 6 inch veggie sandwich from subway, with baked Lays and water or a grilled chicken soft taco "al fresco" style (no cheese or sour cream) or a bean burrito with lettuce and tomato and no cheese from Taco Bell. When I do eat at Mc D I have a 79 cent hamburger and a small fry and usually don't eat all the fries. I never drink soda or sugared iced teas... I do however like iced coffee and use real sugar in it. BTW I knew the definition of a calorie and know tons of nutrition information. I knew it all before too. It's all about portion size. American restaurants serve too large portions. Jeff and I often share a meal when we go out or we order and take home enough leftovers for several additional meals. It is my opinion that an "extra value" meal is only an extra value if you are splitting it with several people. If you eat it all yourself it is a diminished value meal because you are not respecting your own body and mind. And it follows the economic law of diminishing return. The first few fries taste good and satisfy your need for salt and fat and the last few are usually cold and taste like wood. If only we would just eat the "bonus fries" (the extras in the bottom of the bag) and share the rest with the whole family. We will order one fry for three of us.... but I know that you eschew fast food much more than we do. … Eating healthy and organic is definitely more expensive. Have you seen the Simpsons episode where Homer is cast as a comic book hero Everyman... it is a good criticism of the expense and the sometimes obsessive and extremes of eating healthy.” --- Thank you for sending that along, Heather. Heather and her husband showed up on our doorstep one day when a grandchild with a splinter under her fingernail was screaming with pain. The child’s parents had been trying to remove the splinter for half an hour. What a time for visitors to drop in hah? Heather’s husband said, “May I be of help? I’m a pediatrician.”

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8. The date on the article was February 10, 1918. It had to do with draft dodgers in Arizona. When the sheriff and his posse showed up at the ranch house, the draft dodgers shot the sheriff --- and the posse. You can see why they really wanted those boys in the army.

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9. In 1912 Galsworthy wrote a story called Quality. To refresh your memory, it was about a boot maker who starved to death because he refused to make an inferior product. John Galsworthy came to mind when a friend told me about a small vegan coffee bar in Joplin that closed after 7 years because they couldn’t make a profit to pay themselves a living wage. They preached the gospel of clean eating but went deeper and deeper in debt because their organic ingredients were expensive and it took a long time to prepare their meals. Also, they had no health or dental insurance. Their customers were health conscious and appreciated a place where they could get normal portions of healthy food. The owners had a slogan written on the fridge. It said, “Slow Food is Good Food.” If there is a moral to this story, it’s probably, “Go ahead, Super Size Me.”

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10. Voters in a small Maine town have fired the town manager and eliminated the annual contribution to a local library. Their cry is, “No more taxes.” But because town governments are required to fill out and mail a vast amount of paper to the state and federal governments nowadays, one might well ask if the voters in that town have any idea of what they are getting themselves into. Only an experienced paper shuffler knows how to correctly fill in the blanks in the most basic form to be circulated today in triplicate. If brought in off the street, even that rare individual blessed with both intelligence and education is not going to be able to do it. And yet, someone is going to have to fill out those papers. If more town managers are fired in Maine towns, and they probably will be, it might answer the question that many of us have asked for years: --- Is our health and welfare dependent upon the shuffling of mountains of paper from one office to another? --- One might also well wonder if this firing of the town manager is the plot of anarchists who want to see the ship of state founder and sink. By the way, Maine taxpayers should keep in mind that when anything goes wrong, the town manager also serves as a whipping boy, and isn’t that worth quite a bit right there?

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11. Did you know that back in the good old days, when a prince was bad, only the king could punish him? Because princes were sometimes bad when the king was gone, tutors or others in authority, who couldn’t lay a hand on the prince, would trounce the prince’s best friend, the whipping boy. If you were to Google “whipping boy,” as I did, you would learn that even a prince seeing his best friend take a beating for something he had done encouraged him to mend his wicked ways. Imagine having to stand there and take it for someone else’s crimes. Doesn’t President Obama come quickly to mind? And, although I didn’t see this in print, can’t you imagine a bloodied whipping boy smiling at the prince and saying, “The next time this happens to me, you’re going to wake up with something unpleasant in your ear.”

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12. I don’t very often say anything of a political nature, but I’m going to do so now. I’m going to give you my definition of a democrat. A democrat is a nice guy who works hard to put a nice guy in office. And when the democrat’s candidate wins, he complains that the man he elected doesn’t have the chutzpah of a republican.

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13. Someone asked if libraries are becoming obsolete. Will a librarian please step forward and tell us if this is true. One wonders if the modern librarian has developed Google skills that are beyond the ken of the common scholar. Although I still read books, in seconds it is possible to bring up most anything on line. Although I can barely remember doing research in the UMO and University of Rochester libraries 40 years ago, it must have been slow going. And that is before you factor in walking through a blizzard to get there. Although you might correct me, I can't see how a modern library could muster any more power than we all have under our fingertips now at home because times have changed. Back around 1970 I drove all the way down to the Yale library to read a paper on the impersonal construction in Old Icelandic. But I just Googled "impersonal construction in Old Icelandic" and within seconds there appeared on my screen more about the syntactic status of the preverbal oblique argument than you or I want to know.

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14. When my friend Winky applied to join the police force, he was asked, 'What would you do if you had to arrest your wife?' Winky said, 'Call for backup.'

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