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Rants September 5, 2010

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1. One day when I was sitting in a French class, a woman told us about her friend who was wearing a very short mini skirt in one of those middle eastern countries. She said that people threw stones at her. We’ve all seen legs like that in Maine, but most of us have learned to control ourselves.

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2. We read that the Maine Better Transportation Association announced a winner in their Worst Road In Maine Contest. This is an example of compartmentalized thinking that is skillfully navigated/exploited by vested interests with money enough to run television ads and hire paid lobbyists. Ask yourself which party the road construction industry magnates tend to support at election time: tax and spend --- or borrow and bomb. You and I know that it is your taxes that repair roads, support schools and your fire department. I would have to talk out of two sides of my mouth at the same time to complain about poor roads and oppressive taxes. You already knew all this, but here it is for the young folks who haven’t been around as long as we have. By the way, David Cole and his Maine DOT recently did a fantastic job on the road in front of my house, adding a three-foot bicycle lane that is enjoyed by hundreds of bikers every summer. The DOT also greatly improved my property by cleaning up the mess that was left here the last time they were here in 1938, so I’m happy. Tax away and improve my neighbor’s road, too.

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3. It was one of those blistering hot mornings that you might only see once or twice a year on the coast of Maine. Already 77 degrees with promises of 84 in the afternoon, and I was hanging the morning’s wash on the clothesline, dressed in nothing but shorts and a straw hat, and thinking that with a machete in my hand I was rigged out to harvest sugar cane. And --- as I struggled to hang out a bed sheet with an elastic band around the edges, I thought of my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, who earlier had asked me a lot of questions I couldn’t answer. Some radio friends had written to me and asked to spend the night with us and my wife wanted to know how many children they had, where they lived, what they did for a living, who their friends were and on and on without end. Is this insatiable thirst for information about personal things that don’t matter a woman thing? Is this what sells people magazine, and, come to think of it, too many newspapers in the United States? I don’t know. I’m asking you. Are you familiar with this type of behavior? When someone comes to visit I think to myself how nice it will be to have a visitor sitting at my breakfast table who can tell me about raising rhubarb or the sneaky psychology employed in advertising. --- Or who can tell me about their travels in China or Cuba. --- Or who might suggest that I read some particular book that has been untouched in my library for 40 years. --- Or who might tell me a true funny story that I could pass along to you. Is there a difference between the way men and women approach friends that they have never met before? I’d like to know. You tell me. I’m Robert Skoglund in St. George, Maine.

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4. Be careful when you buy advertising. The kids have a camper they want to sell so I listed it on line with a company in Boston that purported to be an affiliate of a powerful and well-known newspaper. But after I posted the ad, I couldn’t find it on line. So I realized I’d flushed the money down a rat hole and forgot about it. But they just sent me an email that says that this ad, which I thought was going to run for a year, had expired after 3 months and I should send them another $100 or so if I wanted to continue running it. I replied to their email several times but kept getting the same form email in reply. Then --- I got an on-line form to fill out which didn’t work when I wrote a letter and tried to reply with it. So. They are out there. You might know this from first-hand experience and you’re your own horror story. Because in years gone by I’d run property rental ads in this big newspaper in Boston, I figured they were legit. But now I suspect there are some crooks out there who have appropriated a name, which as far as I know, is still good, and are raking in money under their banner. So be careful when you think you’re buying advertising on line. You might not be dealing with the people you think you’re dealing with.

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5. This morning we read that a Maine man --- who wants to be governor --- is talking about: "Linking teacher pay to student performance rather than teacher seniority." There you go again. Sounds like someone here is against working people and their unions. Or perhaps he’s just saying what he thinks uninformed people want to hear so he can get elected. To begin with, ten years ago too much had already been written about the failure of linking teacher pay or school funding to student performance. You certainly remember what happened in Houston where drop-outs were kept on the books to make their system look like a model school. Houston School Superintendent Rod Paige was given credit for the schools' success by making principals and administrators accountable for how well their students did. Once he was elected president, Mr. Bush named Paige his Secretary of Education. The 60 Minutes show on what happened to assistant principal Robert Kimball when he blew the whistle on the falsified dropout rates --- perpetuated by the two aforementioned characters --- is still on line. Read it again. And you will see that linking teacher pay to student performance has led to wholesale fraud. --- Which is why almost anyone who has taught for 20 years laughed when they read about "Linking teacher pay to student performance rather than teacher seniority." You might not want to hear this, but there is such a thing as IQ and there is also such a thing as innate ability. Some students who might turn out to be great basketball players or artists or teachers might not be able to remember chemical formulas. Anyone who has taught grade school for 3 decades will tell you that some years you might have a whole raft of talented students --- when it comes to getting good grades --- and the next year the entire class will be a bunch of dubbers --- when it comes to getting grades. So the first year you’d be greatly rewarded and the second year you’d get fired. And how can anyone tell how much a student has learned until one has had him or her as a next door neighbor for 20 years? True education is a lamp to be lit --- not a bucket to be filled. And how do you measure honesty, kindness, compassion, consideration, thoughtfulness, generosity? --- These are the things that measure success in life. One of my students ended up in the Maine State Prison. Another one of my students, Eben Ostby, shared an Oscar for making a movie called Toy Story. You might have seen a full page picture of his work on the back cover of National Geographic and you can read that he is a VP at something called Pixar. Let me tell you about Eben. Over 40 years ago my sixth grade students were assigned to be a person on television. They took turns sitting in a big cardboard box with a hole cut in it for the TV screen and read the script they’d written. Eben got in the box, twisted some paper and string around a small package, looked up, and said, “Well, that wraps it up for tonight, folks.” So. --- Should I be fired and driven from the teaching profession for permitting one of my students to end up in jail? Or should I be Teacher of the Century for setting one of my students on the road to an Oscar? You want teachers to forget about instilling the joy of learning into young students --- you want to encourage fraud --- you start linking test scores to teacher pay.

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6. There are people who can’t live a normal life without medicine. When they don’t eat their medicine they are capable of driving you and everyone around them crazy. One of the unfortunate things about people who can’t live a normal life without medicine is that you are very likely to hear them say, “I don’t need my medicine.”

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7. Quantum Mechanics. You might have heard me whisper quantum mechanics at the end of a show or somewhere in between. I say quantum mechanics because I know that a topic so dear to your heart would get you excited about my program without your really knowing why, much as the legendary 1/500th of a second spots of popcorn on the movie screen were supposed to make people want to rush out and buy a box of popcorn. Which obviously brings up the relationship between zero percent fat free milk and black holes. Wouldn’t you like to hear what Stephen Hawking has to say about fat free milk? Would you be surprised to learn that according to the strange world of quantum mechanics it is theoretically possible to have minus 15 percent fat free milk? If you have ever overdrawn your checking account you know that minus figures do have a place in the real world and that Stephen Hawking would tell you that minus 15 percent fat free milk is theoretically possible. The thing that I can’t bring myself to picture in my mind, however, is the look on the faces of the Oakhurst Dairy cows when they are producing it.

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8. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention but we no longer seem to have funerals. Back in the good old days, my ancestors would put the deceased on a boat and then take turns ravishing his slave girl before throwing her aboard and setting the whole business on fire. Even I can remember when people wore black ties and veils to funerals. You remember that Sarah Orne Jewett, who lived and wrote for a while here in St. George, described funerals and what people talked about when they were sitting up all night with a person who had died. I can remember hearing about two of my neighbors who were sitting up with a man who died, and when one of the watchers went out of the room for a minute, the other fellow lit his pipe and stuck it in the dead man’s mouth. You can imagine when the first man came back in the room it about scared him to death. But nowadays we attend a service to celebrate the life of so and so. I’m an old man and I do not understand this --- we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of - thing. I don’t know who started celebrating lives or where it came from, although if you can tell me I’d like to know. I don’t want anybody celebrating when I die. I want a good old fashioned funeral with wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Of course, I hope that there will be old fashioned music and funny stories at my funeral. But no celebrating. I want Hoggy, my oil delivery man, to be able to stand up at my funeral and say, with tears streaming down both cheeks, “When Robert Skoglund died he still owed me $900 for a tank of fuel oil.”

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9. For years my neighbor Jimmy Parker built boats with the Dennison boys and anyone who has built wooden boats on the coast of Maine with a man named Dennison has bathed in the font of wisdom. I have seen Jimmy Parker take a pile of oak planks and turn it into a --- I don’t know --- a 30 -- 40 foot boat? --- right in his front yard. I stopped in to see Jimmy one day because I’d just picked up an oak plank on the dump and I wanted him to have it. After giving it a professional once-over, he said, “It’s a good thing that the road to the dump goes two ways.” And while I had his attention I showed him the pine boards that I’d picked up at the same time by knocking apart a large pine shelf that might have just come out of the Port Clyde general store and I told him I was going to use them to build shelves in the little shed where I store my gardening tools and cow fence posts. But Jimmy said something that made me change my mind and now I don’t think I will build those shelves. Right now that building is so full that you can’t get in the door. And Jimmy very astutely pointed out that if I built shelves and put everything away, it would create a very inviting huge empty space on the floor and unless I changed my way of thinking and doing things it wouldn’t be long before I’d cart home more junk to fill up that space and I’d need even more shelves. You can see that I’d be in the same situation as a state that builds more prisons. Even before your friends in the construction business who built the prison have time to contribute to your next campaign, you discover that there is a waiting line to get in and you need yet another prison. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com and if you can explain why nature abhors an empty space, I’d like to hear from you.

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10. A man came up to me at the Common Ground Fair and said that his name was Harold and that 28 or so years ago he used to work behind the desk with me in the Navigator Motel in Rockland for our good friend, the late, great Paul Devine. And Harold asked me if I could remember working with him and I said that I couldn’t. And I said to Harold, “How in the world, after 28 years, can you remember me?” And Harold said, “You used to hang your underwear out to dry in the lobby.”

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11. While looking through Dateline’s webpage, this is what I read. I quote without permission: “The earliest known ancestors of modern humans might have reproduced with early chimpanzees to create a hybrid species, a new genetic analysis suggests. …Scientists can't say how long the hybridization carried on, but the final speciation occurred around 5.3 million years ago, possibly because the two species' genetic codes were too different to mix, or because the animals were simply physically unappealing to each other.” Wow. Would this not also indicate that back then they didn’t drink alcohol?

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