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Rants November 13, 2011

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1. One morning Marsha was telling me about Black Friday. She says that Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. I said that I couldn’t believe that people gear up and go to town for the sole purpose of buying Christmas presents, but quickly qualified my statement by saying that I suppose that she had to do it. She had to buy gifts for her grandchildren. I was surprised to hear her say that she didn’t. She said that she simply sent them each a 20 dollar bill and told them to buy something and have fun. Can’t you just see a smiling 9-year-old child coming home with a fifth of gin?

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2. And it came to pass one day that Betty Cody was 90 years old. And there came a day when I did a show in Lewiston with Betty Cody. She sang Please Throw Away The Glass. I cried when she sang it. Later, another man of my vintage told me that he did too. Bruno used to sing this song all the time in 1953 so for almost 60 years Please Throw Away The Glass has been firmly implanted in my mind. I couldn't believe I was hearing it again by the person who had recorded it. When I was 17 Betty Cody was one of the most popular country and western singers in the country and worked with all of the people in that genre who are now considered legends. As someone who has stood before hundreds of audiences, when I saw Betty Cody on stage I realized I was in the presence of a master. At 90 she had the most powerful stage presence it is possible to have. All she had to do was walk out there and she commanded the room. You can read on line that in the early '50s Betty Cody signed with RCA and did a series of recordings. Her "Tom Tom Yodel" became a hit in 1952. Betty Cody sang on a coast-to-coast radio program for ABC and toured with Kitty Wells, Chet Atkins, Hank Snow, and other country music legends. Cody and her husband, Lone Pine also became a regular member of the WWVA barn dance, the Wheeling Jamboree. The night I saw Betty Cody on stage she did a thing that she called a triple yodel. I can't find that on youtube but it would be impressive coming from any woman, let alone one who is 90 years old. When she came out on stage she electrified the room. There is a lot out there on youtube by Betty Cody’s sons, Lenny Breau and Denny Breau. You might know that Denny Breau is on my television program every week.

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3. My friend Mark sends us this email that says he’s reconnected by way of Facebook with a lady that he went to grade school with. According to this email Mark sent, his friend has had two husbands and a long term boyfriend die on her. She said, “the only way a guy gets away from me is in a pine box!" Mark says she gets frequent dyer miles at the funeral home, guys are just dying to marry her, and when she gets married she says it is until your death does us part. Mark told her she should have been nicer to him when they were in the sixth grade. She said if she had, he’d probably be dead by now.

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4. Do you remember hearing that Herman Cain was a Republican candidate for the presidency? One morning my wife Marsha said she saw Herman Cain pause for a long time when asked to assess President Obama’s policy toward Libya. Many people considered his hesitation to be an awkward pause. But anyone who knows Herman Cain realizes that he was praying for an answer. If you heard the debates you might remember that Bachmann and all the other candidates were very prompt with their empty platitudes. With them, a reporter's chief challenge was to direct the candidate's breathless stream of canned babble back to the question that was asked. So, if you were a Republican, wouldn’t you have been tempted to support Herman Cain whose words came directly from God?

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5. Someone mentioned that the suicide rate was high in Sweden. On the chart I saw, Sweden is 18th from the top. The U. S. is in 39th place. We’d probably be right up there with Sweden if it were not so much more likely that you would starve to death here before you could make up your mind.

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6. Don't knock Facebook. For over a year I read newspaper items in the Bangor Daily News daily blog. Since my computer crashed several months ago I haven't been able to post on their site and haven't had time to figure out how to do it. So I miss those newspaper items because they were valuable to anyone wanting to know what a certain segment of the Maine population was thinking. At first I thought the letters appended to the bottom of the articles were written by unemployed young high school dropouts who had nothing better to do than sit at home and drink beer and vent illiterate anger. But after a few months I realized that these letters were written by Maine adults, and perhaps a few scribes who were paid by some government hating billionaire to constantly stir the pot. Anyway, although I miss reading their letters which gave me a springboard for my observations, I've now simply moved up a couple of rungs or two on the socio-economic ladder to Facebook where lexical items are very likely to be multisyllabic. Writing in Facebook enables me to see on the page what I’ve been thinking, and you'd better believe I'm not going to spend 15 minutes writing something and not pass along at least a part of it to you.

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7. While wolfing my dinner before the TV I saw a program on CNN that was headlined: Stealing Your Retirement. I sat up and increased the volume, naturally thinking, like you naturally would, that it was going to be a documentary on the Republican party.

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8. You hear them saying it every time you turn on your television set. You can save, save, save at our sizzling summer sales, winter sales, spring sales, fall sales. Don’t stop to think about it, but hurry, hurry, hurry. We only have four or five warehouses full of these things but you can still get one while they last. --- Have you noticed that everyone wants to help you save --- at least that’s what they tell you. They spend billions of dollars every year on television ads that tell you how you can --- come in and save on a new car. Come in and save on furniture. It is probably unpatriotic to say so, but you know as well as I do that the only way you can save --- is to stay home and listen to the radio.

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9. Do you ever get emails that make you laugh? I got one that said, “The natural way to lose 15 pounds.” I know the natural way to lose 15 pounds. I’ve done it. Want to know how you can do it, too? For over 7 years I have not had a dish of ice cream, a piece of cake, a donut, a cookie, a piece of pie, a slice of bacon or a sausage. Not one. No exceptions. If your grandmother was dying and her last wish was to see me eat one of her molasses cookies, I wouldn’t do it. And I love your grandmother and I love molasses cookies. As a result of my fanatical, ridiculous austerity, I can bend over and tie my shoes. Anyone can lose weight the natural way. Don’t eat the wonderful cakes and pies that your friends shove in front of you and insist you take just a taste of. Don’t even take a taste or you are lost. You should not expect to this infallible weight loss method advertised on TV, though, because nobody’s going to make a cent when you do it.

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