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November 25, 2012 TV Rants

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1. When my friend Winky was very young, he went to the senior class prom with a girl who was wearing a low, low-cut off the shoulder dress. And after a while curiosity got the best of him and Winky said, “What is keeping that dress on you?” She said, “Only the onions on your breath.”

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2. My friend who handles the insurance on my Model T has been mentioned in the same newspaper story as a prostitution business and it is not nice. To begin with, I feel bad for him and his family. Also, I can no longer wear the baseball cap he gave me without getting winks on the street and knowing digs of the elbow as I amble the aisles of Rockland’s big box stores. That such a classic manifestation of Ayn Rand capitalism should warrant mention on the national news week after week surprises me. What might surprise you even more is that a former pastor of the Church of the Nazarene is listed among the dozens of johns who will probably appear in court. What has happened to that good old time religion that Sinclair Lewis described so graphically? Can you think of any man wearing a collar who doesn’t have more options than the tattooed leader of a rock band? --- With any age or gender of his preference? That a man of the cloth should have to wander outside of his own little flock to find self-actualization at any level of Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that we are indeed living in changing times.

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3. I just heard it on television from a man and a woman who were touted as “experts in the field.” When going out on dates today, the man still pays. You can imagine how this must enrage women whose sisters have fought for equality for generations. I have neither experience nor an opinion on the matter because a 15 year old child probably knows more about dating than I do. When I first became aware of girls, all the kids in the neighborhood, 10 or 15 of us, would walk a well beaten path through the fields and woods down to the shore and go swimming. We’d go at a different time every day because the icy cold salt water was warmest after it had just come in over mudflats heated by the sun. In the winter we went skating on Jerry’s pond out back of father’s house in the middle of the woods. I didn’t date in college. On top of being shy, awkward, and socially inept, every bit of the ten dollars a week I got for playing in a dance band at the Blue Goose went for room rent and food. When I got married at the age of 29, it was to a girl whose father had anchored his yacht in Tenants Harbor. When she and her siblings rowed ashore to absorb local culture, I happened by and gave them all a ride in my funny old Model T truck. And because it was a chance meeting, you can’t really call that a date. Some time later, after she left me to marry a better man, I lived alone in my battered old farmhouse for 20 years. I won’t say I didn’t provide any service to the Maine community during what should have been my most productive adult years, but I wouldn’t consider it dating, unless you think a man can date without leaving the comfort and privacy of his own home. And right after I met my wife Marsha in the cellar of a church in Camden where she was the kingpin in a coterie of widows and divorcees who had taken it upon themselves to provide meals for hungry single men, we spent evenings in my home stuffing envelopes addressed to meeting planners. Yes, I missed out on this dating experience thing, but I realize now that all turned out for the best. You know, it isn’t until a man sees his friend’s grandchildren in jail, that he gives thanks he was once a socially inept, poor boy with bad breath.

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4. 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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5. 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 thehumblefarmer 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 was already in there.

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6. I was telling a friend about the Common Ground Fair which is held every September in Unity, Maine. For three days there is more IQ on those few acres of ground than you’ll find on any comparable space this side of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everyone enjoys watching the little dogs that herd the sheep. My friend said, “Ugh. Don’t ever get a border collie.” He said that he was once with a bunch of dog walkers out in the woods and without noticing what had happened the border collies had herded all their owners together. They were all so close they were touching --- shoulder to shoulder and chest to chest. I hope you lonely young people in Portland are listening.

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7. When somebody tells you they don’t know nothing about it you know you’re going to hear something good and this is no exception. All I know about this is what I heard, and it seems as some fool got blind drunk and then staggered off, bare butt naked, and tried to start a fire on the floor of a nearby woodshed. Upon hearing this I quickly whipped out the little notebook you’ve seen me carry on my right pant leg. I wrote down the following salient points. Please listen closely. The property owner heard the commotion outside and dialed 911. By this time, the drunk’s friends had found him and put out the fire. Meanwhile the drunk had run off into the woods, still bare butt naked. Later, a fireman reported seeing him out on the main road so the property owner once again called 911, this time to alert the sheriff. And what do you think the dispatcher said when she was told that a naked man was staggering down the road? “Can you give me a description?”

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8. It can be statistically proven by a bell curve that people come in three sizes: large, average and small. Because most of the women used in television commercials are no more than skin stretched on very small bones, the American woman has been conditioned to place herself in the large category. You can’t look at a television commercial without realizing that someone is trying to make women dissatisfied with the way they look, smell or feel. This is why even the most sensible woman might be tempted to lose weight --- to diet. Have you ever lived with a person who eats nothing but salad? After a week you beg her to wolf brownies or at least put enough chocolate sauce on her lettuce to make her sociable. A St. George man told me that his wife dieted faithfully for three weeks without losing a pound. She got so cranky that he started avoiding her --- he even fell asleep drinking his nightly hot chocolate in front of the TV and stayed on the couch all night. And night after night, his wife lost weight. It was two or three weeks before a doctor figured out why. The television ads for weight loss had made his wife so sensitive to calories that she’d been gaining half a pound every night just by smelling the hot chocolate on his breath.

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9. We read that two employees of a Bangor TV station have resigned because “the balanced journalistic approach they use for all their stories was sometimes frowned upon.” To hear that an on-air personality is pressured by management should brings tears to the eyes of any patriotic American. In a letter below the article we read that, “The left hates Fox News because they report the truth. Nielsen ratings also shows that fox ( national ) news has been number 1 in ratings for the past ten years.” Being the number one football coach proves that Sandusky did not cuddle little boys. Owning the number one television station proves that Rupert Murdoch only reports the truth. Are you surprised that up until a recent hour Murdoch has not been awarded a Nobel for his integrity? Some say that owning the media is no more than a license to manufacture any truth that suits you. Harboring these suspicions, do we not have to question much of what we read? Could it be that the problem at the station is not how the news is reported but the intolerable pressure of micromanagement? --- The need of the manager to run the whole show from writing the ads, printing the tickets, raising the curtain, performing on stage and then selling popcorn at intermission? Even if every person at the station shares the same political philosophy, wouldn’t jumping through hoops trying to please a micromanager boss soon wear thin? If this is so, we should be surprised that the folks who quit lasted as long as they did. And --- it might well be that one or the other was to be fired the following week. Who would know from reading the paper? Perhaps the news at that station is not slanted. And if that is so why do we read in the New York Times that “the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when ‘Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories.’” “Until then,” he added. “No more.” This is encouraging. Because when lobster catchers are setting traps on the top of Cadillac Mountain we can expect to have objective journalism from Fox in Maine.

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10. Someone stood up at one of our Grange meetings and said that eggs are now laser-etched with an expiration date and a code. This code which is printed on the eggshell traces the egg back to the Maine farm where it was packaged. The process could even be refined to the point where you could tell which hen at the farm laid the egg. This quantum leap forward in recording the origin of a hen’s egg is truly encouraging in a state where a few good people still don’t know who their own father is.

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