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Rants, October 23, 2011

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1. I just got an email that said, “I'm a new girl who saw your profile.” Why would anyone who just became a girl be interested in me?

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2. Are you hearing words that you never heard before? Well, this can happen from time to time if you’re in graduate school, and perhaps every day if you’re even younger. But now even some of us older folks, who can still remember when Americans could get decorated for shooting a fascist, are hearing words we never heard before. These words usually pop up in the 30 second breaks that infest our favorite tv shows. They are compound words or multi-syllabic words. And when you hear people saying these words, colorful butterflies on the screen flutter around in flower beds. You have already guessed that these words describe diseases. They are diseases that you had never heard of before, but now when they list the symptoms your jaw drops and you know your days are numbered. So why do they open the door to this pantheon of unprecedented afflictions? Only by inventing a new disease can they sell you a pill that will cure it.

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3. Here’s an email from Andy, who writes, “It just occurred to me that, if you were a terrorist who was stopped by an alert Homeland Security operative, you'd be the Fumbled Harmer.”

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4. You might have read about the Boring Conference. One of the subjects is the history of dust. Another is the purpose of vending machines. At this conference they also plan to discuss the power of the placebo effect in medicine and on human behavior. At this convention they will discuss the power and value of placebos, especially when one is critically ill. Which could then very well bring up the topic of religion. And speaking of dust to dust, it isn’t until one installs a blue carpet that one discovers that most of the dirt in the world is white.

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5. Heat loss in the home. When your wife packs up and leaves. I’m going to work on that one.

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6. People in Maine are often accused of being provincial, but between us Marsha and have lived in Europe and South America and since then from time to time we’ve visited friends and relatives in Sweden and Holland. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to go again because in the past six or seven years the dollar has dropped like a rock in value. According to the chart I once consulted, in a recent year the dollar lost 13 cents against the European dollar which I think they call the Euro. I don’t know what we’ve been doing to drive down the value of the dollar, do you? You might have even seen Jim Cramer on that television show Mad Money, advising people to invest in a bank in Peru. I think that’s what he said. As I recall, he said that the government in Peru is different from ours: they pay their bills, and he advised American citizens to look to Peru for an investment opportunity. What has happened to make all these other countries lose interest in the American dollar? I don’t know. If you can figure it out please tell me. Oh, I should mention that one of the things I enjoy the most about Sweden is that no one says, "Have a nice day."

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7. Here is a very interesting word that I got in an email from my friend Soni. It may warrant rumination. You have heard of vegetarians. But today I learned that some people are opportunivors. I like that word because I am an opportunivor. Single men are probably all opportunivors. When I lived alone between the ages of 34 and 54 I was a full time opportunivor. People who have never had to prepare their own meals for 20 years have no idea of what a great feast a peanut butter sandwich is to an opportunivor. Opportunivors will always be welcome in my home. I would be the first to admit that they should even have their own special week every year.

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8. My friend Tim recently observed that "humans have been steadily pumping out more and more humans." Isn’t this a necessary condition if a plethora of working people are to be kept in constant competition for sweatshop wages? Has it escaped your attention that the members of one political party are adamantly opposed to anything that will decrease the population of our already overcrowded planet? You might agree that war kills a lot of people and that some folks eagerly use any shopworn excuse to fight a war. You have heard them bleat, "We have to fight them over there to keep them from coming over here." Many people who have never heard a news broadcast that actually broadcasts news have heard this mantra so many times that they might really believe it. If you think about it you know that the right kind of war can wreak enough havoc in an infrastructure to make people breed like rabbits. If you attended the show at a gallery in Maine recently, you saw pictures of African refugee women, each of whom were struggling to feed from four to eight hungry children. Over 50 years ago sociology professor Paul Barker down at Gorham State told his students that sending food to starving people in an unsustainable system only enables them to continue the never-ending cycle of even more starving people. Was Professor Barker right? Do you believe that sending hungry people food only produces more hungry people? Do you believe that if hungry people were encouraged and enabled to practice birth control, in 20 years a sustainable society could be created where there would be no hungry people?

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9. Years ago my cousin Truman Hilt applied for a job staging fight scenes in the movie Mel Gibson filmed in Camden. When they asked Cousin Truman if he'd had any experience, Truman replied, "Well, I was married for 6 years."

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10. You probably don’t want to know who told me this, but I recently heard that in some engineering building at MIT, they have clear plastic sewer pipes so the students can see the effect the amount of pitch in the pipe has on what is being flushed through it. When I mentioned clear plastic sewer pipes to my friend Chris he said that all sewer pipes should be of clear plastic as it would also let you see when and where a pipe was clogged. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com. Can you think of any other advantages to having clear plastic sewer pipes?

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11. You’ve heard me say that I haven’t been able to go to the movies for years. 25 or so years ago I went to the movies with Julian and his wife Peggy and every time some character would say something important, they’d bring up that background music so neither Julian nor I could hear what was said. We’d both ask Peggy and she’d repeat it first on one side and then on the other, and I’d very likely laugh and look up just in time to see someone being strangled. Why do they put that background music in movies so you can’t hear what people are saying? Now you might have noticed that some producers are putting background music behind the stories they tell on the radio. If I want to hear people telling a story that I can’t understand because of the music in the background, I’ll listen to La Bohème.

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13. If I were you, I would watch out for people who aspire to garner the hearts and minds of men. Because --- only by garnering your heart and mind can they get their greasy hands on your wallet.

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