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Rants December 30, 2012

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1. Here’s some humble wisdom. Write it down and let me know the next time you see an example of it: Knowing everything doesn’t keep you from being crazy.

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2. Did you read the newspaper story about a young man who in 1947 sailed from Washington County, Maine to Portugal in an old wooden boat he’d fixed up for the trip? The article said that he tried to have the account published in various magazines, but was turned down on “humanitarian grounds.” Editors told him that publication of such an experience would be “liable to encourage other novices to take even greater chances with unsound boats.” Does that kind of editorial innocence make you laugh in this day and age of toddlers who blast away at anything that moves in video games?

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3. The other day I looked up the word iPhone. I quickly learned that an iPhone is a combination of an iPod, a tablet PC and a cellular phone made by Apple Computer. In other words, I learned absolutely nothing. All these new inventions and the plethora of names that swarm around them are incomprehensible to some of us who were brought up in homes without telephones, refrigerators or even flush toilets. Do you understand what I just said? In 1936 I was born in a house that had no telephone, refrigerator or flush toilet. I recently asked my brother to go into the living room and retrieve an extension phone the kids had bought for us. He couldn’t find it. --- Because it looked like a TV clicker. --- It didn’t look like anything that he had been brought up to recognize as a telephone. He said, “How would I know that was a telephone?” Anyway, I’m amazed that many people seem know the difference between an ipad and an ipod. They not only know how to identify these strange and unfamiliar items, but they take the depth and breadth of their knowledge for granted and think that everyone else knows these things, too. If you are one of the elect, how do you do it? Do you and your friends sit around discussing ipads and iPhones and ipods until the terms and their definitions become clear and you can toss them about in polite society without thinking? Do you have pictures of these ipod-ipad things that you hand back and forth while discussing them so you can identify a real one when you see it? I have never had a meaningful conversation with anyone that included any of these terms. And here I must admit that much of my recent correspondence has been with retired university professors who carry on about other things. Yes, of course I’ve heard of ipads and ipods but how in the world does anyone remember the difference between them or whatever it is that each one of them does? My wife has a little toy computer that her rich brother gave her. It is about 8 inches square and could easily be mistaken for a cutting board. But I have no idea if it is an ipad or an ipod and if someone told me, how in the world would I be able to remember which was which and what difference would it make if I did? Just so you won’t think I’m a complete luddite, I think I now know what IPS is because McGee is always talking about IPS on NCIS. You get a lot of terms thrown at you right there on NCIS and that has contributed greatly to my understanding of the booming technology in our present world. I know what a DVD is because I use them to send friends copies of my television program Ugh. Got that off my chest.

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4. Radio friend Ken sends this quote which he says he found in a local newspaper. It is fraught with inconclusive but pithy meaning and sounds like something I’d write: Here it is. Quote: "What is this world coming to? I'm so glad we don't live there anymore."

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5. From time to time I accidentally stumble upon one more way that people brag that they are rich without actually coming out and saying that they have more money than they can spend. A classic way to boast of wealth is to complain about the amount of income tax you have to pay. You might be one of my many friends who would love to pay a huge income tax. Dave Barry once wrote a song that said he’d like to pay an income tax like Stephen King. Several other ways of boasting about your great income without actually saying that you have more money than you can spend will probably come quickly to your mind but here is one more that might have escaped your attention. Advocate a flat tax. A flat tax means that everyone pays the same percentage of income tax no matter how much money each one makes. You can quickly see why a flat tax would only be advocated by the rich if you will take out your little hand-held computer and compute a 50% income tax on $250,000. And then compute a 50% income tax on $25,000. In a flat tax society which one of these two people do you think will be able to make their mortgage payment and buy food and heating oil after April 15th? Radio friend Pegg pointed out that the "Same argument applies to a universal sales tax to replace the income tax." Both hit the poorest people the hardest.

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6. Have you been thinking about what I just said about having a 50% income tax on everybody, rich and poor? I’ve been thinking about it. If everyone paid a 50% income tax, there would be so much tax money generated just by what would be paid by the top one percent, that it would easily take care of everyone’s education, healthcare, the infrastructure and even our continual wars. There would be so much money out there taking care of all these things that it would be impossible for even a dubber like me to earn less than $70,000 a year and even with a 50% income tax on that a family could live very well indeed on the remaining $35,000 a year. --- Even if $9600 of that went to pay a house mortgage. I wonder if this helps explain why so many of those small high tax countries in Northern Europe have been able to completely eradicate poverty.

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7. A man wrote a letter to the newspaper saying that someone got shot in Maine every week. He obviously doesn’t get a daily paper.

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8. The newspapers have been posting an inordinate number of articles about same sex marriage. Same sex marriage is a topic that pushes many buttons and it is not unusual to see two hundred smoldering, inarticulate responses to each article posted. You would not be a nice person if you poked at some ignorant caged animal with a long pole. There are laws against such things. But editors are able to post same-sex marriage articles which enrage a certain class of readers. There ought to be a law.

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9. Although there is absolutely nothing to do in Florida where Marsha and I have worked for the past 13 winters, I barely have time to write newspaper columns and make my radio and television programs. I have learned that there is no sense in bringing more than one book with me because in an entire winter I will barely have time to read that. This year it is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in Italian. Of course I also brought my box of 1,000 Italian flash cards. But I picked up a brand new copy of Der Zeitdieb at a lawnsale and when I asked the man in my Americanized German what he wanted for it, he answered me in German and said I could have it. A word I see often in this German book is Bessen and I don't know what Bessen is. Bessen looks like it could be gun or berries but they don't seem to make sense in context. There seem to be a lot of words in this book that the author, Terry Pratchett, made up and besides the made up words there are also the German words that I don’t know, so for two cents plus shipping I’ve ordered an English copy. You know that my hobby is languages and that I’ve often read books with a Dutch copy in one hand and a French copy in the other. That way when I come to a word I don’t know in one language, there’s a good chance I do know it in the other language, so I don’t even have to slow down. Let me give you an example of how I read German. I’ll say the words I know in English and for the words I don’t know I’ll just say “maaappp” or make some kind of noise. "Lu-Tze grabbed Lobsangs Hand and maaappped him out of the hall, by the long Rows of ehhhhh ehhhh ehhhh." You can see that reading something in a language that one is learning generates a lot of unanswered questions. I could probably figure it out if I held in the other hand the same book in French or Italian because in Italian I might read it like this: "Lu-Tze grabbed Lobsang by the ehhhhh and dragged ehhhhh out of the ehhhh." Ehhhh. You can see, that by putting the two pieces of the puzzle together, I'd have the whole. I'd like to thank you for chatting with me about this. I’m thehumblefarmer@gmail dot com. Thank you for enriching me with your comments because I know your time is valuable and you really do have something better that you should be doing right now.

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10. And then we have the Florida woman who collapsed from the cold walking up Cadillac Mountain so she could watch the sunrise on New Year’s Day. They retrieved her by helicopter. This brings to mind the prisoner who escaped into the County woods. You might remember that he then sued the police because they took so long to catch him that he froze his feet. They say that wisdom comes with age, but I want you to know that this does not apply to all of us. --- Because the older I get the more difficulty I have in understanding why people do these things. Walking up Cadillac Mountain. Like poor old Henry Adams of 100 years ago, I am struggling to understand.

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11. Robert in Brunswick says: "It would be nice to have four stomachs." Not if you've had the flu for two days. I didn't have a flu shot and Mother Nature was not pleased. Marsha told me yesterday that you can get flu shots free at some store. I've forgotten now which store it is. You probably know. The good thing about having the flu was discovering the healing power in naps. I had a morning nap and then a short two-hour afternoon nap both days on top of my usual 8 or 9 hours night’s sleep and you'd be surprised how much pep you can have, even with the flu, if you get amount of rest your body requires.

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