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December 18, 2011 Rants

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1. It finally happened. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, looked at me and said, “Take those filthy pants off right this minute and throw them in the wash.” I had to laugh. I said, “I just put them on fresh two minutes ago right out of the bureau drawer.” You know, I’m not able to do it very often, but this morning I stopped that Type-A scrub and clean woman right dead in her tracks.

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2. Just about every Saturday in the winter I go lawn-sale-ing. Although I’m very much like you in that I already have much more than I need in wives and worldly possessions, the possibility of finding a Craftsman chop saw for five dollars is a powerful motivator. People are willing to sell good things for pennies on the dollar because they are like everyone else: they have more than they need and only by practically giving away what they already have, can they make room for more. When I put radiant heat in my cellar and put up new insualated cellar walls I used many $15 boxes of sheet rock screws that I’d paid a quarter for at lawnsales. And, yes, by the way, I did find an antiquated Craftsman chop saw for five dollars, but it lacked the little left hand thread 8 millimeter bolt that holds on the saw blade. Did you know that unless you go on line and order one from Sears for over 11 dollars, you can’t buy this bolt? I spent days and over a tank of gas looking because it stood to reason that somewhere I could buy that bolt for 98 cents. Even the unleashed power of the Internet availed me not. Please notice that I didn’t say I couldn’t find one. I said that I couldn’t buy one. After days of searching, I stood before a nice young man with a warehouse full of goodies behind his counter, who told me that he couldn’t sell me a bolt to hold on a saw blade because of liability. Yes. We have come to the point in this country where a grown man who has been stone cold sober for over 70 years cannot buy a bolt for his saw because the man who has storage bins filled with these bolts is afraid of a lawsuit. We live in surreal jungle of our own making. Does not a situation like this transcend commentary?

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3. My friend Winky used to play golf but gave up because he would hit the ball off into the woods and never be able to find it. Now he goes bowling, and because the balls are much bigger he has only lost two.

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4. Where do you get your information? Newspapers? Television? Because I can’t afford to buy a newspaper, and because one must carefully consider the source when getting news from television, I just realized that I am turning more and more to the Internet. You know that I already have solar hot water heaters attached to my house and that I have them hooked to not only my domestic hot water heater, but to the cellar floor. All my bustle and scurry about using solar power has nothing to do with a burning desire to save the planet. Putting in solar collectors is saving me money. I can’t afford to buy electricity and oil. So I’m also on a tear to get rid of all the energy hogging appliances in our home. Did you know that the older models of refrigerators gobble electricity and that many of the new ones will pay for themselves in just a couple of years just by being more energy efficient? Of course, you know, too, that over the past 30 years, whenever I’ve learned something interesting, I’ve quickly passed it along to you --- for whatever it’s worth. So, if you are standing, please sit down in the nearest chair and hang on with both hands because I was staggered by what I just read today. While looking on line for an energy efficient refrigerator, I learned, that many of the newer refrigerators will run on next to no electricity at all --- if you never open their doors.

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5. Long time radio friend Harris Contos, whom you might have met at a lobster picnic or birthday party at my home years ago, sent me an ancient newspaper clipping that said: “VASSALBORO, Maine --Vassalboro's planning board has approved an application for a coffee shop with topless waitresses despite opposition of most residents who showed up. More than 50 residents showed up for Tuesday night's meeting and most of them voiced disapproval of the idea. An Ellsworth businessman plans to open the topless cafe within 30 days at the site of the former Grand View Motel on busy Route 3. Planners said the central Maine town has no ordinance to regulate businesses' uniforms -- or lack of them. They say the proposal met the town's 10 performance standards, which are mostly related to safety, parking, traffic and signs.” Of course I immediately replied to this news item from Harris. My obvious question to him was the same question that is in your mind right now. Would their health insurance pay for any colds caught during working hours? Harris believes that any topless waitress submitting such a claim would get a form letter back from the company, pointing out that they weren’t covered.

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6. You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 20 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.

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7. And it came to pass that I caught a rat in a mouse trap. Something ate a hole in an orange that was on the floor by the door and I thought I’d catch whatever was doing the eating in a mouse trap. I didn’t think whatever it was could be more than two inches long. But the next night, around 6 o’clock right after supper, I was surprised to see a huge rat, upside down with the trap on top of him, with his nose caught in that mouse trap, right there in the entry way that you might as well call the kitchen floor. How a rat got into the house I have no idea, unless it hopped in when someone left a door open. --- What do you do when you see a live rat with his nose caught in a mousetrap? If you scoop up the whole business, the rat might escape and you’d sleep that night with a rat either running across the bed covers or trying to yank them onto the floor. Being a television person, I quickly set up my video camera and took pictures of the rat while I was trying to figure out what to do. You can well believe that when I posted the film of the entire operation on Blip, which some people call the thinking woman’s YouTube, I heard at once from some animal rights people. Well, even later I heard about this live rat in my mousetrap and more than one person has called my attention to the havahart trap web page. I commend this havahart web page to your attention the next time there are unwanted rats in your kitchen. And here we might ask if unwanted rats is redundant. All it says is, “Rat Traps. Remove unwanted rats the most humane way!” So --- here you are with the unwanted rat in the little humane havahart cage without a word of advice as to what is expected of you next. Presumably you will not kill the rat, because if that were an option, you might as well have set a snap trap, eliminated an interminable unnecessary wait on death row, and had the unpleasant business over with at once. So --- there should now be no question in your mind as to what you must do when you have taken a rat prisoner. Visit one of your animal rights friends as quickly as possible and let the rat out in their kitchen.

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8. If you were a seagull in the town of St. George, Maine, you’d probably think back wistfully to the good old days when we had an open dump. Back then, sports, like the great Maine artist Wilder Oakes, who’d go down to the dump to shoot rats, would see dozens of happy seagulls hopping around, eating garbage. My father called our dump the bird sanctuary. Of course nowadays, the town of St. George has what you would have to consider a state of the art dump where even a cockroach or a housefly would starve to death. Everything is recycled. There are two different wood piles, one for trees and limbs and one for lumber. There is a metal pile. There are big boxes for glass and tin cans and two boxes for different kinds of paper. There are boxes for half a dozen different kinds of plastic bottles. When you drive into our dump, the first thing you see on the right is Larry’s store, or whatever he calls it, where you can buy, for just pennies, all kinds of good things that people have given to Larry or have thrown away. You can back your truck up to the wood pile and take home firewood, or the other wood pile and take home boards, or the metal pile and take home lawn mowers or bicycles. You should understand that some towns don’t allow people to come in and haul off anything they want for free. But the people running the town of St. George are smart. Think about this: every time I haul a good pine board or a kid’s bicycle home from the dump, I am saving the town money in disposal fees. When you see me leaving the dump with more than I brought down, you realize that St. George epitomizes the social experience they call recycling. The only losers are rats and seagulls.

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9. My friend Sal is exactly like you and so many of my other friends: he can do things that I, and perhaps you, can’t do. He is a specialist in his field. Sal spends summers down the road a bit from me in Port Clyde, Maine and winters down the road a little bit from me on the Florida Keys. Oh, the one thing that you and Sal have in common is the stories you tell me, and this is one of them. Every January there is an antique car and tractor fair in Fort Meade, Florida. It is such a large fair that one rents a golf cart at the gate for $65 just to get around. One year Sal arrived at the fair too late to rent a golf cart. Alas! Every last one was gone. But when he walked onto the grounds he saw a small tractor for sale. Sal said, “I bought it for $400 and rode around on it all day.” I said, “But what did you do with it after the fair?” Sal said, “I sold it for $2600.”

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10. My present topic is wishy-washy people. – I think that’s what I want to talk about --- people who can’t make up their minds. Not a day goes by, but what one of your wishy-washy friends stops by in need of something. They probably think that by being satisfied with anything and everything, their friends will think they are easy to get along with. But wishy-washy people make me scream and holler and wave my arms. A while back my friend Alden Bent came in and asked if he could borrow a rat trap. I said, “Do you want a new rat trap or an old rat trap?” He said, “I don’t care.” Answers like that drive me crazy, because then, I have to either press a friend to the mat in hopes of extracting a definitive answer, or I have to make the decision myself. If I give him a new rat trap, will Alden say that he doesn’t really want to take my only new rat trap and that an old, used rat trap will do as well? And if I give him an old, cherished, family-heirloom type of rat trap, will he think I don’t value him enough to give him a shiny new one? You run into this kind of thing every day --- someone who can never tell you exactly what it is they want. Ask them if they’d like a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, and they’ll say, “Yes.” And then there was Thelonious Monk, rehearsing one his original pieces with a small group. The sax player said, “Hey Monk, --- is that third note in the second bar of the chorus a b or a b flat?” And Monk said, “Yeah, one of those.”

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