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Rants March 31, 2013

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1. We’ve all experienced it: the frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find. New research from a Psychology Professor at Notre Dame suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. Maine people have known about this for years. We all have many neighbors who pass through the doorway of a bar and forget that they are married.

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2. My old computer said it wanted me to update my RealPlayer so to keep it from whining at me every day I did. And then I got a letter from a friend who tells me that RealPlayer went out the window about the same time as Rousseau’s social contract. I don’t think I ever use it so how would I know? Do you have any idea of how many other things someone tries to sneak into your computer whenever you try to update any program? This update says it lets me upload videos to my mobile phone and that's probably all the update does. I am not in the socio-economic bracket of people who have mobile internet telephones. And if I was why would I want to upload music or videos to my telephone? Marsha told me today that even little 2-year-old kids know how to run these things. Have you noticed that it is a strange and unfamiliar world we now live in?

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3. The newspaper article was, How To Keep From Cheating On Your Spouse. I didn’t need to read the article because you know I could have written it. The best way to keep from cheating on your spouse is to be single between the ages of 34 and 52.

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4. You know that my favorite course at grad school was psycholinguistics. I watch screaming children in stores and because I know how behavior modification works I know why the child is screaming. You can read about how to extinguish an undesired behavior in children in a book by Booth Tarkington called Penrod Jasper if you Google Penrod and “papa please.” It is very funny and it is very true. Booth Tarkington knew a lot about people. I believe I can shape the behavior of a child or an animal because it is science and the difference between science and theology is that science works. You can bet money that you can make your cow paw at the ground like a dog and moo on command. And you will make a few bucks, if you can find a sucker who will bet you that you can't. But how does one shape the behavior of a machine? For weeks my computer has begged me for permission to crush up some file into a smaller package. And I have ignored the behavior. Which, in some environments will extinguish the undesired behavior in a breathing organism. But I just realized that my computer's need to remind me to compress files will never go away until I do what it wants me to do. There are deep, dark philosophical ramifications here that warrant investigation. But I have read of too many German philosophers who took on more than they could chew and went mad as a result. So I'm going to leave this one alone and let you look into it for me.

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5. Our topic today is fashion. Let us begin by speaking out against those horrible high heeled shoes that women feel they need to wear. Every ad on TV shows impressionable young girls strutting in back breaking high heel shoes. Do you ever see in the ads a 40-year-old woman being told that she'll lose her job if she doesn't wear them? And then there were the days when women’s waists were constrained by those laced up things. Insecure women can obviously be convinced to do some pretty bad things to their bodies, just so they'll "fit in." Men have also rules for fashion, although they are not so painful. The only one I'm strict about is the need to wear a necktie. My father came to this country to break up rocks with a hammer and by wearing my necktie I am flaunting my first generation college education. Had my father been a doctor or lawyer and paid my way through college, I'd be free to open that top button on my shirt. What do you think would happen if anyone saw me in public without a tie and the top button open on my shirt? People would whisper behind my back, "Look at Skog, trying to make people think he came from money."

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6. Let us now have a little chat about a basic difference between innocent young boys and mature men. The newspaper headline reads: "Recall of revealing Lulu lemon yoga pants causes stir at the gym" Ever hear of Lulu lemon yoga pants? There must be a lot of young men with a lot of time on their hands if they're complaining about see-through women's clothing. But, my friend, when a Maine man matures he either doesn't notice or is able to conceal his disgust when he sees beautiful young women wearing provocative tight-fitting see-through clothes.

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7. There are problems in this country today that have been caused by the fact that many small business owners don’t realize that the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon is not the party of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan. Although Eisenhower warned Americans against the military industrial complex, would he be surprised to learn that nobody was listening? Would Eisenhower be surprised to see how things have changed? Today in America you only get as much free speech as you can afford to buy.

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8. "Part of Gov. Paul LePage’s equation for a $700 million injection of funds into Maine’s economy this year involves a $100 million bond to pay for construction that would almost double capacity at the Maine Correctional Center" When I read this in the paper it gave me my first laugh of the day. Put the same amount of money into education that we do prisons in the U. S. and what do you suppose would happen to our very lucrative prison business? We read that Dick Cheney had a lot of stock in privatized prisons, and if he didn't know how to make himself money whith his hand into the taxpayer's pocket no one did. There is a lot more money to be made by putting people in prison than there is in sending them to school. Even worse, too many overly educated people vote for Democrats.

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9. One morning they said on the news that temperatures in Maine were 21 degrees below normal. No one who lives in Maine was surprised because in Maine the temperature is always 21 degrees below normal. Maine people take it for granted that the normal temperature in Maine is 21 degrees below normal. This is why you can come to Maine and pay over a million dollars for a small house lot on the ocean --- if you are lucky enough to find one. People who live in and between New York City and Washington, DC, where it can be 90 degrees and muggy all summer, are willing to pay anything to summer in a place where temperatures are 21 degrees below normal. And, as anybody who has been to St. George, Maine knows, when you live right on the edge of the salt water, in the summer it is 15 degrees cooler than it is 10 miles inland where it is only 21 degrees below normal.

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10. Who sends out all these junk emails? Here’s one that says, “Revive your financial burdens.” I don’t know if my financial burdens are something I want revived.

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11. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t open the Encyclopedia Britannica and read whatever page I see before me. You know as well as I do, no matter what you read, it usually provides food for thought. Today I read that seventy percent of English villages are known to have already existed in 1086. The people who live in these villages know this. Many years ago I got in a taxi in Athens and the driver said, “This is the coldest winter we have had in this town in 2500 years.” The frames were raised on my house on May 11, 1811. In many places in the world this would be considered a fairly recent piece of construction. But, according to Google, the oldest house in Denver was built in 1859. I seldom ride down to St. George from Thomaston without looking over to the point of land where my ggggg grandfather, Moses Robinson, lived in 1734. And I even go out of my way to be friendly with our new neighbors, the Tolmans, who didn’t get here until 1757. I’d like to remind you again that the people who live in villages are aware of these things. I once mentioned to a man from Lindisfarne that some of my ancestors visited his town on June 8th, 793, and he said, “Oh yes. We’re still talking about it.”

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12. You’ve seen it --- a photograph of an elderly man who holds a pair of glasses in his right hand. He gazes thoughtfully at the camera, chin resting pensively on a knuckle. If you think about it, you have seen dozens of these pictures. Textbooks are notoriously full of them. As medical practitioners or patrons, portraits of these great men in a familiar pose adorn hospital corridor walls. But why this ubiquitous clenched hand --- always three or so inches below the nose? Is it that many of us never outgrow our need to suck or nibble at a pacifier? Listen closely because yesterday, while taking my picture, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, explained it quite nicely. Marsha said, “Put your hand up there to hide all those ugly old chins.

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13. Here’s your humble Farmer weekly tip for health and happiness. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, just looked up from our neighbor’s newspaper and said that the oldest man in the world had just died at the age of 115. Many of us would like to know his secret for a long and happy life --- so --- of course I asked Marsha to read more. She said, “He never married.”

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