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Rants September 23, 2012

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1. My office is now in my solar heated cellar. My little chair on wheels rolls easily about on a smooth Jim Kinney concrete floor. There is an overhead light and three windows that face north, east and south. The main house is on the north side so there is no window there. There is a large cellar door facing east. That door is double pane glass and I got it on the dump for a dollar. If you can’t get stuff rich people have thrown away on your dump where tens of thousands of dollars of good stuff can be recycled instead of buried, you live in a very backward town. Anyway, I started to say that when the sun comes out I open the cellar doors so the great outdoors can pour its beneficent cheer in upon me. And one morning it happened. The sun came out. I jumped from my chair, opened the glass door in the cellar wall, walked up two steps and raised the two folding doors. And discovered that it was pouring.

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2. I am waiting for a day when I can sign an on-line petition to help veterans or some needy group without being hammered five seconds later with an email that says, “Thanks for signing the “Jobs for Veterans filibustered by Republicans” petition hosted on SignOn.org. Now can you chip in $5 to help keep SignOn going?” No, I can’t. A man might just as well be married to these people. No matter what you do for them they are never satisfied.

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3. One of the reasons I looked forward to moving into my solar radiant heated cellar is because when I work at my desk, winter or summer, I often have cold feet. Ever since I started building my solar heated cellar I looked forward to putting my cold feet on a warm piece of concrete. I’ve only been in my solar heated cellar for a couple of days but I’ve already learned a bit about how a solar heated cellar floor works. If the floor, the heat sink is 80 degrees I think it will bring the temperature in the room up above 70. But if the floor is 80 degrees, it will not warm your cold feet if you put your feet on it because it is 16 or so degrees colder than your body. The floor would have to be 110 degrees or so, I think, before you’d get any comfort out of it when you put your cold feet on it. But if the floor were 110 degrees, it would drive the temperature in the room up to 80 or so and then you couldn’t breathe and it would be too hot to work. When the temperature in the is room is 72 degrees I am very comfortable working here --- because I am wearing insulated long underwear and wooly slippers.

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4. The newspaper headline said, ?"Brownville woman arrested after trying to hire someone to murder her husband of 30 years, police say" I say, if you want something done, do it yourself. When he read this post on my Facebook page, my friend John Hammer contributed this, “I’ve got some wonderful news, dear! I entered this ‘Win A Trip With A Celebrity’ contest, and you’re going duck hunting with Dick Cheney!!’”

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5. We read in the paper --- it seems that I wouldn’t know anything this week if I didn’t read the paper --- We read in the paper an article about people who bring their pets to work. Think about what could happen if you brought your pet chicken to work with you on the DeCosta poultry farm. Of course pets in the workplace is nothing new. You will remember that it was over 170 years ago that Mary had a little lamb that followed her to school. Clyde, who works in a garage on route 80 in Fort Myers, brings Percy, his pig, to work. Percy has been a welcome guest on my television show many times so I have seen firsthand how pets can provide comfort to their owners in a workplace. Visitors to the garage have the opportunity to share their sandwiches with Percy who is always appreciative. I know what it's like to get to love a pet you have raised so I can understand being able to enjoy their company in the workplace. Over the past 40 years I've had 20 or 30 pets I got to know and love. When they got big and fat I ate them up.

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6. One of the most valuable courses The humble Farmer ever took was from Raymond Flagg who taught him how to weld. Knowing how to stick two pieces of metal together is an invaluable skill on any Maine farm. But luckily for humble, he didn't decide to get rich as a welder because the fumes of molten steel are not all that conducive to longevity and even the hood doesn't fully protect your eyes. If you’re old enough, you might remember that at one time there was good money to be made putting asbestos into Bath-built ships, too. With nine years of a liberal arts college education in his curriculum vitae, humble is probably the most under remunerated person of anyone with his amount of education in the state. So a recently publicized cartoon of the welder vs the kid with the liberal arts education was right on the money as far as The humble Farmer is concerned. A good education does not necessarily enable you to trade in your pickup every 4 years. It does, however, make you wonder why some of your neighbors vote as they do. Perhaps the most valuable thing one learns in college is that one shouldn't believe everything one hears on the radio or on TV or reads in the newspaper --- because the media is usually owned by your employer's friends. They all have a vested interest in getting you to vote against your own economic interests. Because you learn these and other interesting things in a liberal arts college, nowadays corporate America puts down college and instead encourages young men to make good money either as a soldier or a rude mechanical who will live happily with Titania forevermore in a rose-covered rented double-wide. humble loved going to college. The other night he whispered in his wife's ear that he wished he was 19 again. She said, "Why, so you could go back to school?"

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7. While working in my solar heated cellar office one day, I was listening to a CD radio friend John Powers sent me from Hallowell. As you might know when you get old enough to think, there are deep, dark social implications in even song titles. I wonder if anyone has ever finished the beguine?

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8. An irate newspaper reader who doesn’t like the way things are going in Maine, posted this comment: "Most of this crap can be blamed on legislators who will do anything to get a vote." Now, we must ask you --- why blame legislators for doing what the people who put them in office want them to do? If, during his campaign, a Senator gets a good piece of campaign cash from the folks who own a huge chicken farm, can you expect him to turn around and stab the rich people who gave him the money in the back by voting to give the workers on that chicken ranch higher wages or better working conditions? Be reasonable. Blaming most legislators for anything he or she says or does is like blaming a puppet in a Punch and Judy show for moving this or that way or for saying this or that. It takes money to put a person in the legislature and we know who has the money. If you don't move the way the strings are pulled, corporate America's media will come down hard on you the next time you run, and if you want the bucks for those essential TV ads, you'd better vote for the interests of the people with the money. How many years do you suppose you could support an entire Maine school district with just the money that's being spent hoping to defeat Obama? If working people --- teachers -- small business owners want legislators to represent them, let them go out and buy their own.

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9. You might have heard that there was a recent to-do in Bangor about helping school kids get better test scores. I have no idea of what happened in Bangor. But everyone in the country knows what happened in Texas when teachers and administrators were rewarded or punished on the basis of GWB's standardized test scores and "no child left behind." If you've forgotten the "Texas Miracle" it wouldn't hurt you to read what CBS news had to say about teaching for the test and what happened to a whistle blower who saw through the scam. What a sad state of affairs we have in America today when the education of our children has been abandoned and replaced with a finger-pointing craze for accountability.

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10. According to a magazine report, researchers have based most of their ideas about evolution on investigations of the most recent 500 million years. Before 500 million years ago, species appeared and stayed. Since then, however, evolution has been fairly rapid. Most species now last no more than 8 million years. You can imagine that this has shaken up a few of our local environmentalists. A few environmentalists from Washington County are now setting up a long range habitat for the black fly.

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