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Rants November 6, 2011

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1. Any married man will tell you that there are many things he doesn’t know about his wife. Don’t ask don’t tell originated in a dark cave over a million years ago. This morning we were standing by the bed when my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, squealed with excitement, unzipped her pants and quickly dropped them on the floor. I do know that my wife has muscular dystrophy. What I didn’t know was that beneath her pants she had an icepack on her hip to numb the pain and the ice pack had slipped and dropped down her pant leg.

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2. My cousin Truman Hilt tells me that there are so many people named Jimmy Smith that they even have a Jimmy Smith convention down in Virginia or North Carolina. Hundreds of people show up. You know, that could be awful confusing, unless everyone wore a name tag.

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3. May I proselytize for a moment? I'm so excited about the savings in heating your domestic water and even your cellar floor with free solar power I've got to talk about it. Ever wonder why commercial radio and TV stations don’t have too many programs on how you can save money with solar power? Aren’t all those stations sponsored by oil and gas companies? You might know that I also have Photo Voltaic unit plugged into CMP and that little PV unit is helping me save around $16 a month on my electric bill. But we’re going to talk about the hot water solar collector here and we’re going to do it very quickly before someone pulls the plug on me again. May I suggest to you that anyone who clearly understands how solar energy works and how cheap it is to install would consider putting in at least solar hot water, once they learn how easy and inexpensive it is to assemble out in a garage --- after someone like me, who has done it has passed along some instruction. Please don’t tell me that you’ve read that it would cost $10,000 or more for a solar hot water heating unit, because you can do it by yourself for much less. And please don’t try to build one yourself by asking only one or two people or by reading how-to-do-it pages on line. Yes, some of these pages are invaluable, but you should get your hands dirty on at least one system that belongs to someone else before you break out your wallet. You can profit by their mistakes. I can always find an excuse to build another solar hot water heater at my house and I’m always eager to learn more. There’s a lot I could also say about generating your own electricity with energy from the sun which as I said I also do, but I know more about how to build the hot water heaters. Please remember that I’m saying I can show someone how to build them. I do not understand the science involved with the operation. I’m sure that I’m a long way from having collectors in the shape and size that would make them the most efficient. But I do know how to assemble and hook up the things like a rude mechanical and I am very pleased with the way my electric and bills have dramatically dropped. It’s all about saving money. Save money, save money. You don’t hear me talking about reducing the carbon footprint or saving the world for your grandchildren. You hear me talking about something that is nearer and dearer to our hearts which is --- saving money, saving money, saving money, today. You should understand that we now actually heat our hot water with electricity. We used to heat it with oil. So we’re saving on our oil bill, don’t ask me how much. But where I really see --- and can show you the savings on paper is my electric bill. Please listen carefully. Even though we’ve added the expense of a hot water heater, and are no longer buying oil to heat our hot water, it looks like our yearly electric bill is about $192 less. We have an 80 gallon hot water heater in the cellar that is set to 126 degrees. May I stress again that the solar is just a backup. This means that instead of ground water going into the bottom of our electric hot water heater at ground temperature which might be 52 degrees it might be preheated by the solar system to 120 degrees which is a big savings. Whenever we can, we use the dishwasher and clothes washer when the sun is shining on both solar and hot water panels. Whenever I think of it, I take video footage of myself building something. I use this footage as cover over the music in my music television show just to prove that you, too, can build solar collectors or put radiant heat in your cellar. Oh, please look at your watch. That’s the only thing that can get me to stop suggesting that you can save money by preheating your water with the sun.

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4. My friend stopped in Sanford --- the one in Florida --- and had new belts put on the motor of his huge motor home. He only went a few miles before the belts came off and the engine overheated. A patient, resigned soul, he sat by the road and calmly waited for the shop to send down a crew to fix the problem. Obviously, someone at that shop didn’t know what he/she was doing. Wouldn’t you have to believe that top management heard about it by the end of the day? Should we suspect that as a result of inconveniencing a customer someone was severely reprimanded or fired? On another economic level of society, a man went to a bank to make his yearly payment on his safe deposit box that contains his grandfather’s watch. He has a dormant checking account with that bank. For a few years he’s used that checking account to pay the $10, $15 and now $25 yearly box fee. The pleasant young man behind the counter was unsure of how to process such an unusual and difficult transaction. Indeed, he messed with it so long that the customer smiled and said he’d be back and went across town and talked with his friends who provide his Internet service. Hooray. By the time he returned the young bank man had been able to deduct the $25 from the checking account and pay off the box fee for another year. You might not believe this, but a month later the customer received a notice that it was time for his $20 payment on a $100 overdraft loan that had kicked in when he withdrew $25 from his checking account to pay for his box fee and another $25 to pay for the withdrawal. In other words, wouldn’t even a half-blind and deaf old man easily suspect that the young bank clerk had pushed an extra button. A couple of telephone calls were enough to correct the problem ---- the customer was told. He now has $17 and a few cents in his dormant checking account and the extra $25 and the $100 overdraft kick-in and attendant 17% or so interest were confined to the flames of the Memory Hole --- he was told. Obviously, an employee at that bank didn’t know what he was doing. Wouldn’t you have to believe that top management heard about it by the end of the day? If you’ve read a newspaper over the past 4 years wouldn’t you suspect that as a result of his adroit financial manipulation the young man is now the bank’s vice-president?

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5. My old neighbor Gramp Wiley is a typical, stubborn Maine man who wouldn't dare drive his own car without buckling up his own seatbelt. But --- he doesn't like to be told that he has to wear it. Gramp Wiley says that the automobile seatbelt is the greatest safety device in the world today. He won't even let his 16 year old great-grandson borrow his car --- unless the kid promises that every minute he and his girlfriend are in it, they wear their seatbelts. I said, "Does he drive much?" and Gramp Wiley said, "No, he parks."

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6. One morning while watching the news we heard that we were about to see a video of a man strapping his daughter. I quickly turned to Marsha and said that I bet he was from Texas. Guess what? We soon learned that I was right. But whatever would make Texas pop into your mind if you heard that a man gave his daughter a strapping? Well --- isn’t it a lifestyle? Doesn’t breaking out your belt go along with Bible thumping, no child left behind and the famous Texas Miracle? You might remember that one. Didn’t Rod Paige, the Houston, Texas School Superintendent hold his principals and administrators “accountable” for how well their students did, so that they falsified their records just to get advancement and merit pay? Didn’t all this lying and deceit in Houston schools become the model for GWB's big No Child Left Behind con? And wasn’t Rod Paige, who turned the Houston school system into a joke rewarded by GWB by being asked to head up the No Child Left Behind scam as Secretary of Education? So. Let’s be serious here. If you heard that someone dragged a man behind a pickup truck until he died or that you we were about to see a man strap his daughter, why wouldn't Texas immediately come to your mind? We read that the strapper, a judge, draws an annual salary of $138,055. He dealt with at least 349 family law cases in the past year, nearly 50 of which involved state caseworkers seeking to determine whether parents were fit to raise their children. A problem arises because acceptable levels of discipline differ between Texas and the liberal Northeast --- the age-old inescapable dichotomy between socio-economic and educational classes. The fact that a sociology professor at UNH and one of Harvard’s clinical instructors of psychology agree that the good judge was pushing the envelope when it comes to child punishment, should be enough to make child strapping de rigueur in Texas. The question now will be: Should this man lose his job for punishing sin? Be careful. If it were to set a precedent, there might be a lot of unemployment, not in only in Texas, but anywhere “He who spares the rod hates his son” is taken as a literal commandment from God. If anything good comes of this, the strapee will certainly accept a lucrative book offer. --- And perhaps also a few marriage offers from those good Texas men who appreciate a woman who is not only willing to take her punishment but will even set up a camera to film it.

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7. I went to the annual convention of The Medical Marijuana Caregivers of Maine. Even though I’ve long believed that marijuana should be legalized --- if for no other reason to eliminate the great strain on our prison system --- it was an eye-opening educational experience for me. Back in 1970 when my mother died with cancer, we didn't know that smoking marijuana would have eliminated her throwing up and made her final days much more comfortable. Since I learned this, I’ve been a strong supporter of the use of medical marijuana. Within the past couple of weeks I saw a good friend die with cancer. His last days were rendered tolerable because for the past year he’s been legally allowed to grow and smoke his own marijuana. I could give you an endless synopsis of the medical marijuana meeting and a skyped in talk by a Harvard professor named Dr. Grinspoon, but am only going to strongly suggest that you spend a few hours on line reading about Dr. Grinspoon and his work. Professor Grinspoon studied marijuana in the 1960s to “define scientifically the nature and degree of [the] dangers" of smoking marijuana. He thought that marijuana was a terrible weed that was going to destroy the youth in America. But as he read the existing literature on the dangers of marijuana he discovered that he and the general public had been “misinformed and misled. “ So he wrote a book Marihuana Reconsidered. I tried to buy a copy for 1 cent plus postage on Amazon, but it was ten bucks which is out of my league, so I’ll read what I can about medicinal marijuana on line. I was surprised to hear that marijuana is a medicine that can even help autistic children. Grinspoon stressed that marijuana cures nothing. He said it over and over. Marijuana cures nothing. It only makes living tolerable for many people with psychological or physiological disabilities. My wife has constant pain in her hips from her muscular dystrophy. Although I am so Puritan New England I would divorce my wife she smoked a joint, had a sip of beer or glass of wine, I am going to ask one of my marijuana caregiver friends some very important questions.

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8. A few years ago I think I read in the newspaper that 300 or so bags of heroin went past my house every week. I didn’t even suspect this. I was shocked because I live on a peninsula which means Route 131 that goes by my house is a dead end road. It is my understanding that young fishermen use heroin. Although I’m a bit fuzzy on the exact numbers now, the way I understand it, they go out for a week or so and work 20 hours a day. Yes, here it is in my notebook where I wrote it when the fisherman told me: “15 days $36,000… 38 hours work straight… 3 to 4 hours sleep.” What would you do if you were 20 years old and you found out you could earn $36,000 by working for 15 days? Anyway, after the 20 hours they spend an hour or two cleaning their catch, sleep for two hours and do the same thing over and over again for several days. The drug keeps them on their feet for the 15 day’s work on the boat which, as the fisherman told me, can pay them as much as $36,000. It is tremendously punishing on the body, but at their age it is the tens of thousands of dollars they can make in a season that drives them --- and their captains. Which motivates crewmembers to use a drug so they can work impossible hours. I guess the season is short so ship captains feel they have to spend every minute they can of the allotted time in the fishing banks. The present system guarantees that there can be no time allotted for sleep. On the other hand, if there were no seasons on the fish, they’d soon scrape the bottom empty and there would be no more fish. Kind of a lose-lose situation the way it is now. As you know, we have plenty of lobsters on the bottom of the Maine coast because, outside of bank bailouts, the Maine lobster industry is the closest thing to socialism we have in the U. S. Every tiny aspect of the lobster industry is controlled by government regulations. Take away the government regulations on lobsters and the lobsters would soon go the way of the cod. Take away Roosevelt’s government regulations on financial institutions and you have Fannie May and Goldman Sachs.

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9. One hears that 25 million or so people in Africa have died from aids and that almost that many have the disease. Given a choice between dying from aids or hunger, it might be hard to choose. Luckily, there is a third choice in a simple inexpensive apparatus that, if distributed, would cut down on the number of starving children in Africa even as it helped contain the spread of aids. But --- then one recalls the Pope’s visit to Africa with his message of hope and cheer --- and condemnation of that one device that would save and prevent lives even as it automatically raised living standards for millions of people. The good news is that the church no longer attempts to cleanse souls by burning political opponents, and there is no doubt but what this ungodly device will be accepted --- in two or three hundred years.

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10. When I went into the doctor’s office, the doctor asked me if I had noticed the man who just left. I allowed as how I had seen a man leave but I hadn’t paid too much attention. The doctor said, “That man is 107 years old, and he plays golf every day.” Wow. Isn’t it sad to see a man who is still strong and active at 107 who’s lost his mind?

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