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Rants March 6, 2011

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1. We read that "Last year, 179 people died of drug overdoses in Maine..." We hear that people die trying to smuggle drugs that are concealed in deep dark damp places that no one ever sees. Bring back the good old days when you'd simply send prisoners a cake with a file in it. You never heard of anyone dying after ingesting a file.

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2. Every week for over 30 years I’ve made a one-hour radio program just for you. Wouldn’t you want to hope that I am better at making programs now than that 42-year-old kid who started in 1978? If you’ve been hanging in here with me for any amount of time at all, you will remember hearing me make mistakes in almost every program. I’d push the wrong control buttons and you’d hear me muttering about pushing the wrong button or messing up in one way or another. But then you noticed that as the years went by, all this changed. And now you no longer hear me whining and sniveling about making mistakes. This is because when you make a mistake when you’re old, you don’t even notice it.

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3. We read that Chinese exchange students are coming to Millinocket. Is it not fitting that Chinese students get to see where so much of their tuition money came from? Welcoming students from all countries not only educates hosts and visitors but is now a boon to our economy. At 16 my wife went to school in Chile for a year or so. Later she worked for Time Incorporated in Amsterdam. The education didn't hurt her a bit and my only complaint is that she always corrects me when I try to talk Dutch or Spanish. Many of our neighbors agree that it doesn’t hurt anyone to knock around in the world a bit just to see how other people live. And don't go to just one other country. Spend six months or a year in a country where the standard of living is much lower than ours. It will make you appreciate what we have here and you'll be oh so glad to come home and tell all your friends how lucky we are to live in the good old USA. Then spend six months or a year in a country where the standard of living is much higher than ours. Your eyes will open wide and when you come home --- if you are foolish enough to get into a conversation about nice homes or paid vacations or new cars or healthcare with someone who has never left the back 40 --- you’ll be considered an anti-American socialist nut. Any person planning to study abroad should be aware of the inherent risks in a good education so Chinese students, caveat emptor.

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4. I don’t remember where I read this or I’d give them credit: Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

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5. We just spoke of fast food and how much it is going to cost us down the road. I was visiting my friend Alden Bent from Dover Foxcroft last night when three young kids came by. No kids live anywhere near here but a few show up at vacation time to visit relatives. There was some problem with a bicycle they’d rented. My friend sells and rents bicycles. Yesterday he bought a boy’s bike that had been made into a girl’s bike by simply sawing out the crossbar. I was with him when we got this bike from an old woman who had been riding it and I even rode it down to the car. Nice bike. Had two neat rubber caps, like the little rubbers you put on canes, over the two sawed off stumps. Made a boy’s bike into a nice girl’s bike. As I said, last night three children came by with a bicycle problem. Three very young kids had rented three bicycles. And everything went well until the one who weighed 250 pounds got on the boy’s bike with the crossbar sawed out. Any girl’s bike would have held her but a boy’s bike with the crossbar sawed out is not made to hold a 250 pound child and she wheeled back the crumpled frame with the crankshaft dragging on the ground. I’m going to get some pictures of the bike to illustrate the next column I write on fast food.

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6. I have read that although for an extra $6 some hotels welcome your pet, there are often size restrictions which limit pets to 25 pounds. I don’t understand this, because I have seen 10 pound dogs chew down doors and I have seen pigs that are housebroken. What do you think about that weight limit on pets? What do you think would happen if Union Fair had a rule that said that nothing weighing over 300 pounds would be allowed on the grounds unless it were wearing a halter? There would be much less crowding around the fried dough booths.

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7. For five or so winters my wife Marsha and I have been caregivers for a wonderful woman who is presently 96 years old. You should understand that we live on a small island that contains 300 or so units, so it is a very quiet and a very tight community. On Sunday morning our elderly friend collapsed just like the Wonderful One Hoss Shay and was taken off to the hospital by ambulance. On Monday morning, before I went off to exercise class, which is made up of me and 20 women on both sides of 70, I said to Marsha, “Today I am going to be interrogated at exercise class. Every woman there is going to gather around and pump me for all the gory details. But --- when I came home an hour later I admitted to Marsha that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was: not one woman had sidled up to me and said, “How’s Doris doing?” Two days later at exercise class --- same thing. Not a peep from any of them. Even though it was old news by Wednesday I couldn’t figure out how they controlled themselves so well because there must be one small tidbit or detail that I could add to round out what they already knew. But --- on Thursday the phone rang and a voice that I recognized as belonging to the woman who exercises on my left said, “Tell me about Doris.” Of course I asked her why she hadn’t asked me on Monday or Wednesday when she’d been jumping up and down right beside me. And, with a breathless voice, she said, “We just found out.” Get it? They didn’t try to pump me dry because they didn’t know about it. I don’t know what you would have said to her right then, but I said, “I want to thank you for restoring my faith in women.”

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8. Someone asked me about getting a rebate for installing solar collectors on your house. As I recall, getting rebate money is a catch-22. It's like buying a car that runs on electricity or gets 60 miles to the gallon --- you have to be rich to buy the car or put in solar or wind power to begin with. Or borrow the money to do it like I finally did. People with no health insurance who can barely buy food and make the mortgage payment would naturally hesitate to put themselves in debt for such a long-range return as they’d get from solar panels on their house. With the way it’s set up in this country now, you’d have to be rich to even consider it. Anyway, you'll have to get current particulars from someone more familiar with the rebate aspect of the situation than I am. If you have a really good memory you might recall seeing me in the original Maine solar power TV commercials back in 1988 but I’ve always lived from hand to mouth and back then I couldn't see how I could put them in myself. It took the machinations of a GWB economy to push me over the edge. My reasoning then was that the price of oil was going to go through the roof within a few years, so the amount of return couldn't be predicated on the present cost of oil and electricity --- one had to figure that the price of oil and therefore electricity were going to shoot up as soon as the gas companies thought they could get away with it. So many of my friends who weren’t thinking 10 years ahead said that the solar things weren't economically feasible and that the solar toys, therefore, weren't worth the bother. But they weren't figuring that the oil companies were going to squeeze us to the point we'd be glad to be living in Germany in 1923. I hope I’m wrong. I hope that gas at the pump continues to sell at $1.26 a gallon, don’t you?

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9. You’re smarter than I am so figure this one out and explain it to my. My friend Tom says --- well, here it is in his words: At Notre Dame I learned one simple thing about human behavior: faith, belief and conviction will part you from your money quicker than most anything else. I would single out a rabid supporter of (any ball team) A and get, say 3-1 on his team. I then went to a rabid supporter of Team B and got the same odds. Whichever way the game went, I paid out one and took in three. Everybody happy: Tom pays his debts, immediately, even before he collects from the reluctant losers - good PR. If you want to see that in print so you can think about it, you can ask to get my weekly newsletter, The Whine and Snivel, which contains most everything I say on this program. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com.

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10. Wouldn’t you think that the words of a friend with a face and name are much more credible than a press release put out by an organization? You might know that recently I’ve been hearing from an organization that is signed with the name of the organization and not the name of the person who is sending out the propaganda. This is why evangelistic preachers rake in more money than our friends at Move On. We ought to have more friends on TV who wave their arms. I’ve told Marsha many times that if I had to do it over I think I'd be a famous preacher like Elmer Gantry. I know I could do it with a straight face. You can holler and wave your arms and say absolutely nothing and people think you're wonderful. If there are two things on TV that make me laugh it is Jerry Springer and preachers in $2,000 suits. The fun part would be in seeing how far I could push the envelope. I don't think there's any limit to absurdity, do you? Think about this. If you say things that are absolutely true on radio or television, you will have fewer and fewer friends until you die all alone as a forgotten pauper. But if you actually make a game of seeing how much wool you can pull over people's eyes, you will be a wealthy, respected charlatan who either eats dinner at the White House or at least tries to take up residency.

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11. And now, if I can have your attention, is The humble Farmer’s tip for today. Please listen closely. When you stop to think that pensions are the result of a lot of rabble rousing on the part of those pesky unions, you might agree that it would be un-American to pay them. So --- a week before a state or federal employee is to retire, why not have a young thing two days shy of her 18th birthday muckle right on to him. Take pictures. He could say he was set up, but no one would believe him. His pension is history, saving you, the taxpayer, hundreds of thousands of dollars in this one case alone. As a bonus, you get his house when he can’t make the payments. It’s a win-win situation for everyone --- almost everyone.

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12. Evidence has been found that William Tell and his family were avid bowlers. Unfortunately, all the Swiss league records were destroyed in a fire, and so we'll never know for whom the Tells bowled.

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