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Rants December 11, 2011

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1. Here’s another junk email that got my attention. If you are a social commentator, you should be grateful for junk email because you will never run out of topics. This one says: “Your wife need your attention? Solve all your problems with IT.” I don’t know why they need to advertise. You and I have friends who no sooner left for work, when IT came in the back door.

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2. My friend Winky was one of a dozen or so kids and they all lived in a tiny house. One day I asked him how they managed. Winky said, “It was easy, after we started to take in boarders.”

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3. If you own a newspaper or magazine, you are obligated to print the kind of stories that your readers want to see. Because --- if you don’t you are likely to get a letter that says: “You did so and so… cancel my subscription.” Here’s a typical example. According to what I read in my AARP magazine, 80 percent of 1300 people surveyed said that they believed in miracles. Forty one percent said that miracles happen every day, and 37 percent said they have actually seen a miracle. We are not told where AARP found the 1300 people they consulted for their report. Some, who were still available for the survey after being treated by a dozen doctors, said that was miracle. But I’ll bet you could get an altogether different percentage should you poll university professors who teach physics. Even if my best friend were to win a lottery where the odds were 100 million to one, I would not believe in miracles. If I were to win a lottery where the odds were 100 million to one, I probably would believe in miracles, because I never bought a ticket.

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4. It doesn’t take much to make me laugh --- even if I haven’t had a cup of coffee to jack me up. One morning I laughed when I deleted some of the emails in my junk email box. One said, “Looking for a Fling?” What is a fling nowadays? If I had been pressed to define a fling, I would have said that a fling is running off to some near-by town for two or three days. But not until today did I ever wonder if yesterday’s fling is called a flang or a flung. I just Googled “Looking for a Fling” for a current definition. According to Google, the affliction known as “Lonely Wives Looking for a Fling” is now pandemic.

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5. Imagine how startled you’d be if you just learned that Johnny Cash did not do time in Folsom Prison. Did the fact that I’m probably not the only person who was misled help Johnny Cash sell 90 million records? On the same page on the Internet I also learned that Merle Haggard wrote Okie from Muscogee as a satire. Everybody knows that song, Okie from Muscogee, and it is only now that I realize why I have heard of Merle Haggard. I don’t see how you could not have heard Okie From Muscogee because it was on top of the popularity charts fairly recently --- 1970 or so. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Okie from Muscogee was a satire, either. Listening to songs by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, is there really any way to tell?

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6. When I called my wicked step mother Sally she said that one of our neighbors had fallen on the floor and perished. She stayed right there and languished on the floor because they didn’t find her for a day or so. She had one of those magic buttons to wear around her neck, I think they call them Lifelines, but she didn’t bother to put hers on that day. So when she dropped, she was helpless. You know, there are days when you can go out in the woods and scramble to the top of a 60 foot spruce tree and I remember those days well. But I told the wicked one that I knew I was at the age where it would be foolish to go out in the woods unless I told someone where I was going. The wicked one said that she was at the age where it would be foolish to go out in the woods.

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7. When I married my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, she had a summer job as queen bee in a summer camp way out in the Maine woods. What I mean by queen bee is that she ran everything and thereby ensured the survival and profitability of the camp. When she quit to marry me, they had to hire five people to replace her. Any man who is married to a Type A woman knows very well what I am talking about. Because of the constraints placed upon Type A women by classical Newtonian mechanics, your Type A wife cannot possibly do things you have seen her do, such as simultaneously making the bed and washing the dishes, because it necessitates being in two places at the same time. The fact that you have seen her make the bed and wash the dishes at the same time was explained by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which proved that Type A women are able to jump at random from one frenetic energy state to another. Because it is impossible to predict where a Type A woman might be scrubbing or cleaning at any given time, if you don’t want a rug with all its composite electrons to be suddenly yanked from beneath your feet, men married to these women have learned that it is best to simply retire to the workshop and stay out of the way.

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8. She told me that her nephew was working in an office where they were giving out bailout money to the banks. And because he had gone to the University of Maine at Orono, the young nephew felt uncomfortable because everyone else in his office had fancy degrees from Harvard, and Princeton and Yale and Dartmouth. But one day he threw back his shoulders and said to himself, “I’m not going to be intimidated by all these people just because they went to all those wonderful schools. After all, I am the boss.

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9. Whatever is America’s greatest satirist, Alan Able, doing nowadays? If you can find out, please tell me because I’d like to know. I see that a movie of his life is available and I have snuck it into Marsha’s queued requests on Netflix. The name of it is Abel Raises Cain, and I am told by Netflix there will be a long wait. Thirty or more years ago Alan Able impressed me with his satirical antics and I became a fan. We exchanged stuffed envelopes through the mail, this was long before email, and one day, which must have been around 25 years ago, I found a note from Alan Able on my back door. I missed his visit. The same week I chanced upon a girl from the Pinies in New Jersey, who was wandering about my farm taking pictures of the huge woodpile, the sheep and the piles of junk. Do remember that this was before my wife Marsha moved in and restored order. Anyway, knowing that Alan Able was capable of most anything, I viewed the New Jersey girl with great suspicion for several days, thinking that she might have been set upon me by Alan Able. I suggest that you Google Alan Able, because reading about his capers is a refreshing, enjoyable adventure in itself. Take for example, his Omar’s School for Beggars, a fictional school for professional panhandlers. Or read about the actor he hired to pose as Deep Throat after Nixon’s Watergate scandal. That conference drew 150 reporters. Read about the 7 actors he hired to fall asleep in the studio while Donahue was interviewing gay senior citizens. Or the time he ran for Congress on a platform that included selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Able campaigned to ban all breastfeeding, saying that it manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink and even become gay. My favorite was his Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Their goal was to clothe naked animals all over the world and their slogan was “A nude horse is a rude horse.” It began as a satire on media censorship. Thanks to the satire of Alan Able, there is no censorship of the media in America today.

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10. My brother says that one day while far from home in the state of Maine, he found himself in a town where lived an old family friend. And because he thought it would be nice to drop in and catch up on the news he drove to the house and knocked on the door. A shy boy with a lot of feet and arms answered the knock and upon saying that he had come to visit, my brother was invited in. They chatted of this and that until my brother asked where Diane was off to that afternoon. And the boy said, “Who?” “Your mother, Diane.” “Diane isn’t my mother. That family moved away. They haven’t lived in this house since last year.”

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11. You hear would-be intellectuals putting down television all the time. Their mantra is that there is nothing worth watching on television. Perhaps it is the redneck in me, but I beg to disagree. This morning I saw part of an educational television program that I would describe as nothing short of vital. It explained how I could keep from getting cheated when I bought rolex watches. If you can think of anything you would rather see on television than how to tell a real Rolex watch from a counterfeit Rolex watch, please tell me what it is. I’m The humble Farmer at gmail dot com. I’ve heard a lot about Rolex watches over the years, but I don’t know what they are and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Have you? And please notice that I said I saw part of the program. That’s because I was so busy taking notes so I could tell you about it that I didn’t see how it ended.

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