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Rants April 11, 2010

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1. Every day I get hundreds of junk emails trying to sell me some kind of pill. You probably do too, so you know what a nuisance they are. My friends who host my web page tell me they are doing all they can to cut down on the number of junk emails that get through to me. But today I finally got an ad for pills that you should know about. It certainly captured my attention. It says, “Medications are cheaper in Canada.”

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2. When I was 15 I got $2 or so for playing for dances. I’ve played jazz on Bourbon Street and on the west coast. I’ve told stories and played music on the radio for my friends for 32 years. I mention this so you’ll know that I know it’s nice to have someone say, “Hey, humble --- I like what you are trying to do.” --- Which is why I go out of my way to say nice things to any kind of artist or entertainer. If I can’t look them in the eye and be honest when I say something good, I don’t say anything. The other day I was at an outdoor cookout not far from two dozen cows where entertainment was provided by a long-haired, guitar-playing bearded young man who sang songs. I didn’t know any of the songs, but my wife Marsha, who was born in 1950, said she knew all of them. When he put down his guitar and walked over to get a turkey burger, I approached him and said, “I think you’re every bit as good as the Kingston Trio.” He thanked me and we parted with smiles. It doesn’t hurt to be nice to people. And I did think he was every bit as good as the Kingston Trio. I spent most of the evening in a far corner of the field with the cows where I didn’t have to listen to him.

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3. If you were to get in a boat and travel a short distance from Port Clyde, Maine to an island called Matinicus, you would find yourself in the middle of lobster war. Here’s a quote from the Bangor Daily News that pretty well summarizes the situation: "A surfeit of lobstermen and bait prices that are just too high add to the pressure, he said. As soon as lobstermen started making better money in August, the boat sinkings, shootings and trap cuttings went away, the men said." I thought that was an interesting observation because the same morning two Fort Myers, Florida men were arrested for armed robbery. My first thought was: Wouldn’t it be much cheaper for society to provide these unemployed young men with jobs that paid them a decent living wage than to pay the $50,000 or so a year it will cost to keep each one of them in jail? Isn’t it nice to see that at least few Maine lobstermen have firmly grasped this basic social concept?

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4. I just read that in the November 1999 election Mainers approved the legalization of medical marijuana with 256,000 in favor and 161,000 opposed. Would this not indicate to you that 161,000 Maine voters didn’t watch their mothers suffer through chemo therapy while dying with cancer?

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5. Even though anyone who wants marijuana is able to buy it, it will be a long time before marijuana is legal in the United States. Legalizing marijuana would bring our already struggling economy to its knees. Think of the millions of people who would be out of a job if highly taxed marijuana could be bought in liquor stores. The TV program Cops, would be out of business. Camera crews and everyone who produces television programs about drug busts would be on the street. Half the court systems in the country would have to shut down. Judges, lawyers, psychologists, and social workers without anything to justify their existence would cry out in unemployed indignation. You can’t even begin to imagine how many of your tax dollars go to keep so called drug dealers off the streets and if marijuana were legalized half of the biggest prison system in the world since the days of Stalin would be empty and useless. And what would happen to the incomes of these hundreds of thousands of people who actually sell the weed? A visitor from another planet might write home that he’d found a strange collection of bugs with an economy dependant on putting people in jail for buying or selling something that half of them can’t seem to live without.

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6. Organized crime, and the other folks who put up the money to back new casinos, make more money than bankers. No matter how many dollars or quarters or pennies the suckers put on a table or stick in a machine, the house is guaranteed by law a percentage of it, and win-win is always a sound investment. A while back a woman, who deals cards in a casino, spent a couple of days at our home. She told me that the casino destroyed her town. She barely scrapes by on her card shuffling wages. If you live in a town that has been infested by a casino, you already know that your property taxes go up. If you think about it, it makes sense because your roads need more repair. You need more social workers and teachers and schools to accommodate the many legal and illegal low-income families that quickly move in to your town to take the low paying jobs. More police are needed to settle domestic matters, the increase in petty crime, and code violations when ten or more newcomers crowd into a small apartment. Most casino customers never set foot in town: they are bussed to the casino, buy their meals in the casino, spend the night in a cheap room in the casino and are bussed out broke. This, and the social and economic cost of a casino to the community and state, is never mentioned in the glittering ads they can easily afford to run on TV. Nor is it mentioned by the lobbyists who are well paid to “explain things” to our friends in your state legislature. If there is anything that sucks money out of an area quicker than a big box store it is a gambling casino. Aren’t you surprised that your state doesn’t have a lot more of them?

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7. Do you know about broadband? Radio friend Bev sent me a page that showed that the US is far behind Korea, Finland, Sweden and a dozen other countries when it comes to this broadband thing. I think that the size of the broadband determines how fast and how much you can send over the Internet in a certain amount of time. The way I understand the graph Japan has broadband that is something like 17 times faster. Would you like to have the broadband that they have in Japan? Before you answer this question, take the number of emails you are presently getting from lonely Russian women and Viagra and multiply it by 17.

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8. We read that the insanity defense is on the rise. When a sick young man does his mother in, the court takes note of what the patient has done in the past --- whether or not he’s been compliant with his medication. From personal experience you might know that we wouldn't have so many problems if sick people would eat their pills. A friend of mine said he had to leave home every week or so just to get away from his wife because she drove him crazy when she wouldn't eat her pills. She came to my house one time to see if I could help her get rid of ---- as I recall, some people who were after her. Even though you know the visitor, you watch your back when they appear in your dooryard because you've heard stories and you don't know what they might do. Looking a mentally ill person in the eye while they blathering nonsense would scare the pants off a talk-radio junkie. And here’s the bottom line: you cannot force people to eat the pills that will keep them in touch with reality. And, it is my understanding that some people don't eat their pills because they feel so good when they don't. Many of our friends who should eat their pills will tell us that they are getting along fine without medication and that they really don't need it anymore. So --- is the answer in legislation? Well, if your spouse slipped in and out of reality, would you be in favor of a law that said --- to preserve the sanity of the rest of the family and the neighborhood, he or she could be force fed medication? It is clearly a problem that warrants attention.

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9. You have read that the world was as likely to move out of its orbit as to have Mycroft visit his brother Sherlock Holmes. The same impossible thing happened when my wife Marsha, who knows almost everything, looked up from watching a young man demonstrating little plastic telephone boxes on television and asked me what apps means. She knew I didn’t know, but was telling me to go Google and find out. This is what I read. Apps is short for application program as opposed to a systems program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes. So --- now you know as much about apps as I do. By the way, in the process of executing my commission, I asked Marsha to tell me the difference between cell phones and iphones. She said that iphones are cell phones with built in computers and movie cameras. Can you believe that the kids take all this technology for granted? It seems like just yesterday that Diet Smith put up the money to develop a two way wrist radio for Dick Tracy.

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10. Well. Here’s something that I have believed for over 60 years that is not true. You certainly believe everything your father told you when you were little, so please cut me a little slack because I heard my father say this many times. It is an urban legend that turned up by chance while I was checking out something else in Snopes. You might have read the article that said that 30 percent of the people who live in Texas believe that people and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time. Because it sounds like it came from someone who hates Texans, I didn’t believe it and checked it out on a couple of those urban legends sites. --- Which also brought up the item that I heard from my father so many, many times. It is the story about the man who hosted the children’s radio program, who, at the end of the show thinking that his mike was turned off said, “That ought to hold the little blankety-blanks for today.” It ain’t true. Myth dispelled.

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11. One of the high points of my day is reading the letters on the Bangor Daily News Blog because, like the contestants on Dick Stacey’s Country Jamboree, so many of them are so bad they are unbelievably funny. The name of a regular contributor is that of one of my friends, so it catches my eye often. But the letters are always so bizarre and muddled that I finally had to call my friend and ask him about it. He laughed --- and said that the person who wrote those letters was probably the same person who has written a lot of rubber checks around Bangor. The person with the same name has also taken out new credit cards but never makes a payment. My friend knows this because the police --- and bill collectors --- are often after him. They do have a different middle initial, which might save some confusion if the perp would use it when he signs his name. My friend tells the bill collectors, “I hope you find him before I do.” I’m Robert K. Skoglund in St. George, Maine.

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12. For most of the winter, my wife and I work in Florida. In Maine there might be several hundred feet between the houses, but in Florida you could be working or sleeping only 20 feet away from conversations that are taking place over the clink of beer glasses. You are so close that --- well, for example, last night I said to my wife, “Did you hear him burp?” And Marsha said, “That wasn’t a burp.”

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