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July 11, 2010 Rants

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1. You might have read about it. The other night some crooks crept into an old man’s dooryard and stole his motorcycle. Keep this in mind in case someday, someone comes up to you and says, “Give me one good reason for keeping a dog.”

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2. Many people find this wind power thing to be rather frightening. When wind generators wear out you don't have to bury them beneath a gambling casino in Nevada to keep poison from seeping into the ground for the next 10,000 years. Lot of people in the concrete and construction industries are going to protest that. If we get enough energy from the wind and sun the US is not going to have to invade oil-rich countries to keep our cars on the road. Lot of people in the military are going to protest that. It will be a struggle find new excuses to start wars. Lot of patriotic Americans who like to put on a uniform and march in parades are going to protest that. Corporate America is not going to get delightfully rich off wind power. Lot of very rich people are going to protest that. Which leads us to conclude that if God had wanted us to use the wind and sun to generate electrical energy She would have figured out a way for a lot of people to get rich doing it.

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3. You’ve heard me say that Swedish and Dutch newspapers very often don’t use the same kind of language in reporting the news as we do. You are more likely to see a tongue in cheek, or whimsical style of reporting in their papers --- something that will make you laugh. Up until today my all-time favorite example of this phenomenon was this column from a Dutch newspaper. The translation is mine. It said, “Three bludgeons, sixteen knives, twelve steel and wooden clubs, eight screwdrivers, garrotes, brass knuckles, eight cans of teargas and an ax. That was what Zaandam county police netted in a raid last week in a disco named, The Fun Factory.” But, here’s what we just heard on the news in St. George, Maine. The sheriff’s department says that last Tuesday night two men ended up with stab wounds after fighting over a woman at the Family and Friends Campground.

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4. One of the annoying things about being old is being able to remember more than a few of our most recent enemies. The days when a St. George man could get paid and decorated for shooting Englishmen and Spaniards was before my time, but as a kid on my way to school I walked past a life-size dummy of a German hung by the neck from a gas station sign. Then, when there was no longer a reason to hate or fear the Germans, the commies stepped in as public enemy number one. We need enemies. We need to be told that should we let our guard down for an instant, our enemies will rush in here and seize everything we hold dear. Everyone knows that if it wasn’t for being told that we have enemies, trillions of your tax dollars would no longer be swept into that rat hole known as the defense budget. You might remember when the media had us fearing and hating the Russians. Then, a bit over 20 years ago when Gorbachev setting the Soviet Union on a new path and away from its rivalry with the West, one of the top people in the Russian government said to us: "We will do the most horrible thing to you; we will leave you without an enemy." Boy, was he wrong. Never underestimate our military industrial complex when it comes to manufacturing plausible enemies.

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5. Do you know of one repair man you can count on? And who came to your mind when I said that? Your computer guru? Your auto mechanic? How do you know that you are getting the best service from the best person available in your area? Do you discuss the relative merits of service people with your friends? After listening to your best friend tell about the wonderful price and quick service he got on a brake job, are you sometimes tempted to drop your mechanic of many years and take your business over to your friend’s place? This service business came to mind yesterday when my computer ate up my financial records for the past three years. Everyone I owed was gone. Although the computer tells me it backs up my information every day --- on another hard drive --- I couldn’t find hide nor hair of it anywhere. So I sent my computer guru a real whiny and snively email that outlined the problem. He called right back and after telling me to click here and tweak there, had me up and running in about five minutes. And right now I’m going to tell you what I told him before I hung up the phone. I said, “How can I respect anyone who can fix a computer problem in five minutes when almost any other computer guru worth his salt would have found an excuse to mess with it for two hours?”

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6. Can you tell me what these five things have in common? The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Cape Cod Canal, Stonehenge, the stone heads on Easter Island, and the Parthenon. Are they not all excellent examples of what intelligent young people can accomplish when not distracted by TV or video games?

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7. Little public service announcement here to make your life easier – if you live where January brings three feet of snow. For over 25 years my lawn would always be full of little driveway rocks. Do you know about driveway rocks? Every time you mow your lawn you hear little driveway rocks hitting the mower, chink, chink, chink. I’ve seen flying driveway rocks put out a window. People have been stuck by flying stones. You know how that happens. You put crushed rocks in your driveway so your car won’t sink into the mud when the ground thaws, and every time you plow your driveway in the winter you push half a ton of those little crushed rocks around and when the snow melts they’re on your lawn and you hit them with the mower, chink, chink, chink. And if they’re not on your lawn they’re someplace you don’t want them to be. Anyway, here’s how you can eliminate that rock problem so please listen carefully. If you never again want to see a driveway rock plowed up on your lawn, shut down your house and work in Florida from November until April.

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8. Have you ever read something --- and then, all of a sudden, something that has puzzled you for years suddenly fits into place and makes sense? I read in the Maine Farm newspaper that it is illegal to place manure on fields between December 1 and March 15 of the following year. Doesn’t this pretty well explain why, when you drive past Steve Dennison’s farm around Christmas time, his cows are always wearing such a pained expression?

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9. You have probably heard that Maine officials hope to sell Maine’s carbon credits so that other densely populated industrialized areas of our great country may legally continue their unabated pollution of our planet. Selling heroin to children in a far-away state is generally frowned upon, but now we are supposed to compartmentalize our thinking and recognize the carbon credit sellers as economic wizards. You must admit that the concept has potential. For example, here on the coast of Maine on any sweltering July day, the temperature might climb to 68 degrees. If weather were a marketable commodity like pollution, the chamber of commerce in Philadelphia could buy a week of Maine’s July weather to make their Independence Day celebration a bit more attractive to potential visitors. --- Of course the price would be negotiable, as Port Clyde residents would probably throw in two days of their famous fog. Education? No longer do children in manufactured housing areas need to get lower scores than their counterparts in affluent Kennebunk, Falmouth or Cape Elizabeth. Grade scores are no more than numbers on paper and could be traded like pork bellies and other commodities. Crime? Unfortunately there is not enough money in Detroit to buy Bangor’s safe city credits, but with the proper marketing, a buyer could be found. So, the next time someone mentions selling carbon credits, tell them that if they’d like to buy a few of your gene pool credits, your grandfather is 102.

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10. You might have heard that although the amount of power generated by the wind doubled in a recent three year period, the wind is still only providing around 2% of the world's electricity. Would it be fair to compare our present wind power technology to that enjoyed by the automobile in the early 1900s when only 2% of your neighbors had a car? Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Germany seem to be the world leaders when it comes to converting wind to energy. Even though they don’t say so, the oil companies know that there will come a day when the oil is gone. Until then, solar and wind technology will continue to improve and proliferate, probably in Europe, in spite of economic and social hurdles presently imposed by most of corporate America and the inevitable flock of naysayers. What do you suppose most Americans plan to do on a not too distant day when the wind blows, the sun shines, but the oil is gone? Two of my St. George neighbors have wind turbines in their backyards. And just so you’ll know that solar panels ain’t just toys for rich kids, the water in our home is heated by 8 flat plate solar hot water heaters which I built. Think about it. Check it out. If we can do it, you can, too.

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11. Is it true that a bank in Maine is considering a no hats, no hoods, no sunglasses policy to thwart robbers? Suppose you came into the bank when it was raining and you forgot to put down the hood on your raincoat? Suppose the sun were shining and you forgot to take off your sun glasses when you walked into the bank? I always have my hat in my hand when I enter a bank, which makes me look more like a sniveling mendicant than a depositor, so I’m pretty safe with the hat issue. But wouldn’t you feel awful foolish if you forgot to take off your sunglasses and were grabbed by a security guard? How long would it be before you transferred your two million dollars to another institution? Imagine, if you will, the scene in a bank where an embarrassed mother wheeling in year-old twins who are is seized by guards when she forgets to pull down their hoods. If your bank is in a high crime area, there are other solutions. You might know that you can wear anything you want when you go into a bank in Sicily because you enter a little chamber and the door locks behind you. You can’t get out of the bank until the cashier gets good and ready to open the escape hatch --- which is a puzzling and somewhat creepy experience the first time you do it. I don’t know about you but I think that the security cameras in Maine banks and stores are already doing a good job. Even when I’m in the grocery store in a deserted aisle behind the Wheaties there are places I don’t dare scratch.

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12. Charisma is important in an election and our former Independent governor Angus King has it. He is one of the two best speakers in the state of Maine, and that's worth a couple of million in TV ads right there. Many voters will vote for the party their grandfather supported no matter how incompetent their candidate. The very few voters who go beyond name-calling and understand the issues will vote for the candidate who is likely to put the most money in their pockets. But the voters who very often determine the outcome of an election will vote for the most articulate candidate sporting a nice smile.

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13. Radio friend Pete, who lives up in the county, sent us this in an email. It might have been Churchill who was asked learning Latin were important The reply was that it was sufficient to be able to boast that you have forgotten it.

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