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Rants May 20, 2012

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1. We have an elderly friend who is forgetful. One morning she called to ask if Marsha remembered that she was going to take her to the store, even though Marsha’s car was already parked in her driveway. Another day she spent quite a bit of time looking for a flag that she had just rolled up and put in the corner while complaining that she couldn’t understand who kept taking her things. As unfortunate as this sounds, the problem is even more acute along some sections of the Maine coast where women in their early 30s go into town for the evening and forget that they already have husbands.

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2. When Marsha watches the morning news in the other room it is hard for me to write because she keeps hollering -- “Oh my gosh.” She’s sticks her head in where I’m working just long enough to tell me that she’s watching Mitt Romney’s financial adviser who keeps saying, “uh, ah, um.” She says she can’t concentrate on what he is saying about Mitt Romney’s finances because she finds herself counting how many times he says, “uh, ah, um.” These people are not fools. If he did not say “uh, ah, um” people might be listening to what he is saying about Mitt Romney’s finances. She says I’m missing a lot of good material by not watching the news in the morning. She tells me that Henry Kissinger got a complete pat-down at an airport because he was sitting in a wheel chair. Meanwhile, they discovered that an illegal alien from Nigeria had been working at the airport for two decades using the identity he had stolen from a dead man. What challenges are there nowadays for a humorist who only has to stand before a microphone and repeat what he hears on the morning news?

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3. I have here a letter from a listener. He says, “Why do our wives always know where our lost household items are? I’ve checked with my male friends and they tell the same story. Whenever I am missing the car keys or the book that I’ve been reading, my wife rolls her eyes, throws up her hands and exclaims that men are helpless creatures. Then she asks the obvious: “Have you looked for it?” [I’d like to interject here that I’m familiar with the throwing up of hands. I call it the Maw Green syndrome.] “Of course I’ve looked for it; how would I know that it’s lost if I hadn’t looked for it.” She feigns a sort of indignation, suppressing a condescending smirk; then she says something like, “Have you checked the kitchen table next to the fruit bowl?” I ask her why she put my book on the kitchen table. I know I didn’t put it there. I always put my book on the coffee table next to my reading chair. And so it goes. Almost every day another item lost by me and miraculously found by my wife. Actually she doesn’t find things; she just knows where they are. I believe that women have secretly been taught by their mothers to passively ensure their husbands’ dependency by hiding their stuff and then finding it for them. They get up at night, not to go to the bathroom, but to hide something that we will need the next day. They practice sleight of hand so that things appear in places that we know we’ve searched only minutes earlier. Robert, does this scenario ring true to you?” My reply has to be, Yes, it does. Not too long ago I couldn’t find the butter, which is an unheard of thing in my house because in years of marriage the almost perfect woman has never run out of anything. I took many things out of the refrigerator. I looked on all the counters because I knew that she is infallible. But I couldn’t find it --- because I was looking for the little yellow tub. Now I know that butter also comes in little blue tubs. And, by the way, I call anything butter if it is yellow grease that one puts on toast. Thank you for reminding me of this with your letter.

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4. Did you hear about the girl in Friendship who flew to Los Angeles to spend a weekend with her boyfriend? I’m sure that there are girls in Los Angeles who flew to Maine last week to see boyfriends. Why should travel be the only solution to spending a weekend alone? Isn’t there an agency that could have made all four of these young people happy without needless travel? Only the airlines would oppose it. This idea is not original. You can probably think of many of your neighbors who realized the opportunities in similar programs years ago.

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5. You might have seen this ad. It says, “He’s Got the Libido of a 20-Year-0ld Cambridge scientists have developed a game-changing testosterone booster that will skyrocket performance in the gym and desire in the bedroom.. Learn More” Think what having “the Libido of a 20-Year-Old” means. If I may quote my mother, it means that "you have no more brains than God gave geese." Most of the time you are running in mindless circles, much like a mother cow who has just been separated from her calf. Every night you’re out on the town, going places you shouldn’t and getting stuck in your car or running out of gas, walking 15 miles to get home from the top of some unknown mountain or some mosquito infested bog , or going to dances at The Blue Goose or Simington’s Corner. All of which ensures that you barely have strength enough to get to work the next day. When I was 20, when my ship was in Baltimore, I’d hitchhike home for a weekend --- in January. Are you listening? I’d walk off the ship in Baltimore at 5 PM and hitchhike 503 miles at night in January. Probably get home around noon on Saturday because I might be standing on the George Washington Bridge or the Maine turnpike for two hours. Go to a dance Saturday night, and on Sunday morning hitchhike from St. George, Maine back to Baltimore. All of this is recorded in intimate detail in my diaries which, when they are published (because of the mandatory spicy affairs with a cleaning wench, written in Swedish) should put me right up there with William Byrd and Samuel Pepys who also read several languages and wrote in code. I’m 76 years old. Been there, done that, and I’m going to say “Thank you,” --- I’m going to pass on having the Libido of a 20-Year-Old. That would be just like giving someone permission to stick a tube in your left ear and then suck the entire cranial cavity dry. If you don’t believe me, read a few pages from the diary you kept when you were 20.

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6. Every year hundreds of Maine people are fined in court for not having license plates or inspection stickers on their cars. Most of these people are horrified and embarrassed when brought to justice. And yet no allowance is made for their absentmindedness. On the other hand, if a man murders his mother, the first thing the lawyers want to know is, was this man sane or was he crazy when he did it. You see, for this type of crime, your state of mind makes a difference. If you can prove that you were crazy when you killed someone, you can’t be held accountable. A man in Martinsville who could never remember if the cat is in or out, put a little sign by the door that says IN and OUT on it so he will know. But he can never remember if he remembered to flip the sign when he lets the cat in and out. Instead of fining the people who can’t remember to do things, why not simply assign them to a keeper?

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7. My friend Tom Dennen went to Gorham Normal School with me over forty years ago. He also went to Europe with me one summer on one of Gorham’s Alliston’s Smith’s tours and we rode mopeds from Sweden to Paris. Now Dennen lives in South Africa and writes Libertarian-like newspaper articles on economics. In one of his pieces he names the countries that have stopped using the dollar as their reserve currency or have dropped their currency's peg against the dollar. Among them are China, Japan, Russia, Switzerland and a whole raft of others. On top of that there is a list of even more countries that are thinking about abandoning the dollar as their reserve currency. I don’t know a thing about economics. But even a fifteen year old kid can remember back to the good old days when people all over the world loved Americans -- and American money. After we were attacked on 9-11 by some fanatics from Saudi Arabia, we had the sympathy of almost every person in the world. We were the injured party. But then, without fanfare, something very quietly happened to change all that. Now we are arguably the most disliked nation in the world and we have to have guards in bus stations and at the doors of courthouses because some people in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t like us. I am only one of many Americans who can’t figure out why bad things are suddenly happening to us. Can you explain this to me?

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8. A while back a retired English professor in Ohio heard one of my rants on the Internet and gave it a five star review. He said that both the sound and the sense of this interstitial are well worth hearing -- and licensing. Of course, no one has decided to play it on the air. But I still agree with him --- I think that many of the stories I put together for you are well worth listening to. Did you know that Anne Frank’s diary was rejected by 15 publishers before a house finally took a chance and published it? I read that more than 30 million copies are presently in print. It is one of the best-selling books in history. Why is it so difficult to get published? Or aired on the radio and television? I read that a publisher turned down Pearl Buck’s novel “The Good Earth” because Americans were “not interested in anything on China.” Another passed on George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” with the excuse that it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” Think of all the good things out there that people have written that have never been published. If you think about this for a day or so, can’t you bring yourself to believe that there might well be as many good unpublished manuscripts out there as there are published books?

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9. Have you ever seen anything on television that didn’t make sense? I think I heard someone on the news say that some famous Washington lawyer got debarred because he lied to Congress. What a waste of talent. A lawyer who gets to testify at a Congressional hearing is probably one of the best lawyers in the business. You know he’s got to have contacts right up there at the top. If you needed an attorney, would you want one right out of law school who expects to pay off three years of tuition with his first case? Or --- wouldn’t you rather have a lawyer you could talk with about obstruction of justice by lying to Congress who could stand up tall and, with shoulders thrown back, say: “Been there. Done that?” True --- you could tell me that he’s going to be so busy working out million dollar book deals with publishers that he wouldn’t be able to give you the time your case deserved. But you listen to me. Even if he can’t practice, this fellow would be worth his weight in gold as a consultant. You’ve got to admire a lawyer who can lie to Congress and serve less time than Paris Hilton. Unless he wants to become a Congressional lobbyist for some big oil company and speak out against global warming, there’s really not much left for him now.

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