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Rants January 1, 2012

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1. When I mentioned that I’d like to see some pill advertised on TV that couldn’t lead to death or possible abdominal bleeding, Nancy quickly pointed out that you sometimes also get the option of liver failure. And then Janie took me to task for not mentioning the skin rashes and temporary blindness that might strike you down should you eat the advertized pill X. Please --- before you call or write to mention your favorite affliction that is always mentioned as a caveat emptor along with your favorite pill, let me say right here and now that I was only making a point when I said that by eating some advertised pill you ran the risk of death or possible abdominal bleeding. Had I attempted to provide you with a comprehensive litany of possible attendant ills and afflictions I’d be shut off before I finished because this program is only one hour long.

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2. Speaking of litany, it is a word I like to use in its popular context. It is my belief that in recent years the word litany has taken on a new meaning and I like to use it in its modern context. You will recall that the word “momentarily” also took on another meaning when Dan Rather started to say, “We’ll be back momentarily,” and now we can all use momentarily in that context. I mention “litany” because I perked up my ears when I heard someone use the word the other day on TV. This morning while putting up a web page to ask about the business practices of the folks who sell the Expstudio Audio Editor who won't help me install the program I bought from them, I saw my link to Stephen Muskie's Outtakes was outdated. So I updated it. If you choose to look at the pictures of me and Martha Stewart, you should know that when a psychiatrist friend saw that picture of me, she said she had never before seen a photograph that contained so many phallic symbols. That clothes pole has been replaced, but I still have the original in the barn and plan to glue it back together and use it to hold up the clothes line again in May. The car still looks the same. When I went to Germany to pick it up in 1974, I knew as well as you do that a rich man buys a Chevrolet and trades it every three years. A poor man buys a Mercedes and keeps it for the rest of his life. You can't argue with the economics. Of course, diesel fuel now costs more than gas, but we'd never heard of global warming or GWB in 1974. This car has never been on a salty road as I've put it up every fall. I no longer need this car as much as I did when I was 37, but how do you get rid of something like a salt-free 1974 Mercedes? Let's hope that the granddaughter doesn't roll it over the first time she takes it out on the road in 2022. Perhaps there won't be any fuel for it then, anyway. When Steve Muskie came to photograph me for Yankee Magazine, I dragged him down to Martinsville to get pictures of the stone house Craig Wilgus and Jay Cook built for Ross Levett. That stone house is a work of art. On one of the corner stones on the north east side, you can see a date carved in the stone. I put it there in great pain the day I broke up with a girl, knowing that at a not too distant date, I'd look at that date carved in the stone and wonder what all the fuss was about. No, I didn't climb the building, hammer in hand. The rock was in my back yard 30 years ago and was probably part of the old barn foundation. I might have given the other half of that nice piece of granite to Steve Lindsay, the stone carver. Oh, the only reason I know that date can be seen on that stone house is because one day Ross told me that a man from Japan was studying the house and he wanted to know why the date was carved in the stone. In 100 years some anthropologist will claim that it was the date the house was built.

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3. On my way to exercise class I wear my insulated long underwear over my short pants. This morning, just before I went into the building, I checked to see if I’d zipped up my fly. I was relieved to discover that my fly was, indeed, still unzipped ---- because it meant that I had remembered to put on my pants.

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4. This might not be for you if you have never read a science fiction book or seen a science fiction movie, but I’m going to throw it in here anyway because it is so off-the-wall that I think any fan of Mel Brooks would like it. If you were writing science fiction that entailed space travel, would you have the courage to create a planet called Scarsdale and name your protagonist Peter Smith? If you could ever get your tale published, imagine the reaction Peter Smith from Scarsdale would have on an experienced reader of science fiction who is familiar with the space travel formula. The space ship touches down, the hatch releases blue vapors as it slowly slides open, and then, the slowly emerging figure moves down the ramp, arms outstretched. Of course, at this point the reader expects the visitor to say, “My name is Zar-El and I come from Kalgar.

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5. Although man no longer has an uncontrollable urge to climb trees and drag his knuckles on the ground, his day to day life is still driven by the powerful genes of his hunting forbearers. If we can believe anthropologists, men once spent their days sharpening spears and planning new hunts --- when not actually killing and carrying home food for their little families. Today this need to venture forth in search of life’s necessities manifests itself in the Saturday morning garage sale. I’m addicted to the hunt. I go every Saturday. Even though there hasn’t been room for a man’s pickup in his cluttered garage for years, vestiges of primeval adrenalin drives him out before dawn with the knowledge that today, for sure, he will find a grieving widow who will sell her husband’s brand new set of sockets or his chainsaw for two bucks.

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6. Under a newspaper column that listed a raft of diseases humans can get from kissing animals, an animal lover wrote: “Ya, another credible study that will have too get $Millions in grants from OUR Government to do further study for about 10 years and then will finally conclude that it isn't as bad as first thought.” This is interesting. Kissing dogs “… isn’t as bad as first thought.” How cold do you suppose it had to get in that lonely cabin in the Maine woods to bring our adventurous friend to that conclusion? One can only wonder how many long-suffering Maine coon dogs have thought to themselves, “Looks like another long winter.”

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7. And it came to pass that the pastor man visited an elderly gentleman with whom he discussed his most pressing afflictions. For 52 years he’d pastored away without pausing to breathe but now he was having trouble with his heart and the prognosis was not good. His elderly neighbor, a life-long hypochondriac, quickly allowed as how in recent years his heart had improved since eliminating from his diet cookies, pie, cake, ice cream and all the other tasty desserts that made life worth living. He suggested that by following his example of cutting out sweets, the pastor would also eliminate his huge protruding gut and by so doing be allowed two or three extra precious years on this planet. The pastor bristled and said that his doctor told him that his present rotund shape was not the result of diet but genes. He had big bones. When I heard this story I wondered, as you surely did, how many doctors the pastor had to visit before he found one that agreed with his own diagnosis. Because --- don’t we all shop around until we find a doctor who tells us exactly what we want to hear? I heard of a distressed woman with examples of severe bipolar disorder in her family, who consulted an entire phalanx of doctors, social workers and psychologists until she found one who pronounced her to be absolutely sound. So here we have two unfortunate people in denial who don’t want to feel better: the pastor who should not eat ice cream and the woman who should eat some pills.

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8. I didn't think I'd ever hear it on a national news broadcast but one morning a political commentator admitted that we'd been kicked out of Iraq. For years we've been supposed to believe that we were there helping the natives ---instead of making a small segment of our population even richer with George W. Bush's expensive and unnecessary war that undermined our economy. Now that we are no longer a third party to this civil war, they tell us that two of the more predominant religions in Iraq are in the process of blowing each other to bits. Here in the U. S. the mega-rich have found it much more efficacious to destroy their middle and lower class enemies by controlling the media and Congress. One of the interesting aspects about any religion is that its advocates will tell you that God, and everything she stands for, is completely and wholeheartedly on their side. Was it Al Capp who said, We are the Lilly Whiters, Brave and pure and strong. We are the really righters, Everybody else is wrong. Any time the members of two rival crime syndicates or two religions kill each other for money or God, it reduces the number of greedy or fanatical people in the world. And when the smoke clears is the world then a better place for anyone who happens to survive? Anyone who reads even a brief history of Iraq might wonder how, after all the wars of imperialistic invasions over the past couple hundred years, things aren't even worse there than they are. I think we should be proud to live in civilized America: A man hasn’t been dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Texas for at least 13 years.

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9. I once read some advice for young men that I think warrants further circulation. It said, “Be aggressive. Let her know you're interested. Tell her I’ve been wanting to go out with you since I read that stuff on the bathroom wall two years ago.”

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10. Here’s a silly email I got that says, “I would like to give you some advice about drinking and driving. The other night after having a few drinks with friends I realized I shouldn’t drive my car so I took a bus and arrived home safely. I had never driven a bus before and am not sure where I got this one.

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11. Here's good news. Kids are cutting down on their smoking and drinking. They are now using marijuana instead of alcohol. After listening to a psychiatrist from Harvard give an hour lecture about how for 70 or so years we have been lied to about the dangers in marijuana, I’ve kept my ears and eyes open on this topic. Hopefully marijuana will be legalized before another generation of cancer patients will have to apply for a permit before using it. If you are interested, you should check out the statistics between the relative dangers of alcohol and marijuana. Not all that many kids are driving their cars off the road while under the influence of alcohol nowadays, and have chosen instead to hit trees while texting.

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12. Do horrible things happen to you when you when go around trying to mind your own business? I called three oil companies to get the price of fuel oil. One was two cents a gallon more and one had an answering machine. I told the answering machine that it was too bad that they weren’t there because I wanted $400 worth of fuel oil. Because they weren’t there, I went to the oil company with the lowest price and gave them $400. They were awful slow but I noticed that at last the oil appeared before we ran out. A few days later Marsha said the oil company where I had paid the $400 called and said they were having problems with the delivery. Marsha said the oil had been delivered. They said they hadn’t delivered it to us but to another Skoglund who lives 20 miles away. Then Marsha dug out the paper the man on the oil truck had left and finally realized that it was not a receipt but an actual bill for $400 from the company that only had the answering machine. I didn’t know I had ordered it from them. I just told their answering machine that it was too bad that they weren’t there because I would liked to have ordered $400 worth of oil. So I had to go to the oil company that had my $400, get the $400 and give it to the oil company that delivered the oil. Life should not be this complicated. Now that I look at the bill I see that the people who delivered had the cheapest oil of all three. If you don’t think $3.44 per gallon is a good price for oil, watch the price skyrocket when our military-industrial complex attacks another country that has some oil in the ground.

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