+

1. When I asked my friends why I get dozens of email ads for Viagra every day, I was told that the people who send out the ads are cleverly circumventing all attempts to stop them. This week I saw two examples I had never seen before. This new ad for Viagra is in the form of a graph surrounded by an old story, which quickly turned up when I Googled. The story has nothing whatever to do with the product being so surreptitiously and unscrupulously promoted. Would you like to see this kind of advertising banned? Before you speak, remember that the law would effectively keep college boys from asking girls if they’d like to go out for dinner.

+

2. I’m only one of many who is more than somewhat disturbed about the media’s blatant discrimination Maine people witnessed while watching three news items this morning. First, a topless young woman has been walking around Farmington, Maine for a week or so and dozens of other young women are about to join her and march topless through Maine. Second: You already know that last year the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling was attacked by BP and other oil companies that opposed new federal safety regulations. And by now you realize that because an oil company that fought government regulations created an environmental disaster, millions and millions of your tax dollars are going to be used to clean up a wicked big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This also means that the catch phrase, “Drill baby, drill” just changed its political affiliation. Third: Right after the oil spill horror story, we learned that some Maine people are protesting wind turbines because they make noise. Oh? The discrimination part? They only showed us pictures of the oil spill and the windmills.

+

3. I just read that when German citizens buy a new environmentally friendly car, the German government was giving them $4,000 or so for their old car. When you include dealer incentives it meant that a $32,000 car could be bought for only $25,000. $25,000 is more than I’ll get in social security over the next four years. Programs that give tax breaks to people for installing solar panels or give them a few thousand dollars toward a new car are obviously for people who are already relatively well off. Wait. There’s more. A very efficient person in my doctor’s office signed a paper and mailed it in so I could get my pills at about one-third the cost of what I pay in the drugstore. That’s what the girl behind the glass said, “You should save about one-third on your pills.” When the pills arrived, they cost $22 for 90 days, or six dollars more than I pay in the drugstore. After a torturous hour of endless phone recordings to check it out, my diligence paid off and I reached a real live person who told me that every calendar year my savings would kick in after I spent $100. Yes, after I bought $100 worth of pills, they would be only $7 a bottle. But my pills only cost me $64 a year. So I’m in bad shape. I’m too poor to get any of the government kickbacks for putting in solar power or buying an energy efficient car, and I’m not sick enough to get my pills at discount prices.

+

4. Does your spouse spend good money on useless things? Do you hold your head in your hands and groan when one more silly but expensive toy appears in your home or garage? Wouldn’t it be a unique marriage indeed where both parties agreed 100 percent on all expenditures? You see a similar situation in TV commercials at election time. Every candidate promises to cut wasteful government spending, and you will see a picture of the US Capitol with a big black X on it. But one candidate, whose father needs $10,000 worth of medicine every month, might consider a war in Vietnam or Iraq wasteful government spending. And the other candidate, who owns stock in a machine gun factory, might consider universal health care wasteful government spending. Only my friends who have been married to the same person for 50 years, know why it is theoretically impossible to run an efficient government.

+

5. Here’s a letter from Steve who writes, “Hello Humble, Thanks for your thoughts. I'm an Art teacher about to retire at the end of this school year. Trying to figure out which way to go for health coverage is confusing at best, & downright frightening at worst. ??Stay with AETNA out of pocket?? Jump to the VA?? Medicare A?B?Z? My wife & I once lived in Denmark for a couple of years, & there everyone was covered by the national health system. It cost us all of about $5 to join. What sanity & simplicity. I wonder if the usa will ever reach that level. “ That letter was from Steve. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com and I’d love to hear from you.

+

6. Don't you hate elections? They never seem to end. You scream and cry out at the television screen when you see a candidate telling lies that a child would find laughable. And you wonder which insurance company or financial institution or drug conglomerate put up the cash that made it possible. One of the hazards of running for office is weeding out the dubbers who eagerly volunteer to help. There are people out there who think they’re doing you a favor by stuffing the ballot box. And, unless you’re a polished lawyer or are on the US Supreme Court, you are very likely to get caught doing it. If you're lucky, you haven't been contacted by that one campaign worker who doesn't even know enough to identify herself when she calls you the phone. She called me two or three times and played “guess who?” How can you vote for someone who doesn't know how to delegate competent authority? You might remember back when Spiro Agnew went down, not for blatant ignorance, but for accepting bribes while governor and Vice President of the United States. At the time you might recall that Nixon complained that it's hard to find help you can trust.

+

7. You probably know that with the advent of the on-line newspaper and the place below for reader comments, people who have not written a sentence since they were in the eighth grade have found an outlet for their literary aspirations. Recently, a man who was serving as a pastor at a church in Down-east Maine was arrested and charged with kidnapping after his wife’s two pre-teen daughters were found living on their own in a motel. The most interesting thing about this on-line article is that the place below it where people can write their comments had been disabled, and this was a good thing. I know how you think and suspect you would have quickly typed in, “Elmer Gantry lives.”

+

8. We all understand the basic premise of the present Tea Party, but it won’t hurt to run through it once again. Everyone knows that when a family falls on such hard times that it becomes difficult to allocate money for food, the first things to be eliminated from the household budget are tobacco products. By the same reasoning, you and I and the Tea Party folks all know that the day taxes are lowered, the first government program to be cut would be meaningless, expensive wars on foreign soil. Back in the sixties there were a lot of good people who tried to stop a war by carrying signs that said, “Stop the War.” Today there are a lot of good people who are trying to stop a war by carrying signs that say, “Louer our taxiz.”

+

9. People from away don’t understand how we do things here in Maine. I have 150 or so rhubarb plants. I used to give away a lot of rhubarb. But my friends didn’t want to take it when I said it was free, so I started snapping a rubber band around a handful of it and putting it on a chrome plated farm stand out by the road. You get it by the bunch, because if I ever put it out by the pound, even though it might be 8 ounces over, there would come a day when someone would howl that it was one ounce short. But a bunch is a bunch. One day, a man from away was down in the rhubarb patch watching me snap it off, cut off the huge leaf, and put the stalk on the five by five inch top of an ancient blue spring scale that I carry down to the rhubarb patch. Every once in a while I’d snatch it up, snap a rubber band around it and throw the bunch aside. The man watching said, “That scale don’t work.” Of course it works. When I can’t get no more on the top of the scale and it starts to fall off, you’ve got a bunch.

+

10. You know you’re getting old when the bank will only renew your notes for three months.

+