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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 25, 2014

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1. When I was a kid, we looked out the window at the scenery when we were traveling. Nowadays we look at the GPS to see where we are.

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2. Did you know that your cell phone conversations might be overheard by people who have radios, hearing aids or scanners? Because cell phones seem to work very well at the end of my driveway, people often stop there when they want to make a call from their cars. And I have a vague memory of being in a position to listen to them 10 or 20 years ago. I’m not sure, but I might have heard them on the radio in my truck. If you have hearing aids, they might also pick up sounds that are passing by in the air. I have to take out my hearing aids before using the phone because they do all kinds of weird things. The other day I was making a radio program when the phone rang. I was using my wireless mike that is part of a system with rabbit ears that stick up out of a black box and when the phone rang I heard things I’d never heard before. If you heard that particular radio program, you might remember that it caused me to break down in the middle of a story I was telling. Anyway, have you ever stopped to consider that the Wikileaks brouhaha is really nothing compared to what your neighbor next door is probably learning about your personal life on his scanner?

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3. From time to time I come across a story that I suspect will make you laugh. And you know I like to say things that I think will make you laugh. Here’s one if you are ready. At a Senate hearing, after a nationally publicized accident, the managers of a coal mine said that they did not put profits ahead of safety.

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4. Back in the good old days privilege was inherited. The lord of the manor passed on the estate to his eldest son. Which is why so many of the oldest sons were killed in hunting accidents. But since the French Revolution the rich have had to buy privilege. One of my rich friends says it's annoying to have to stop at a 4 way intersection, and thinks it would be nice to be able to buy the right of way. Why, he asks, should a guy in a three piece suit in a BMW have to stop and wait for a rusted out hulk with the bumper dragging on the ground to get across the intersection? Back in the 17th century, you would have simply run right over them with your gilded carriage.

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5. Clint Eastwood portrays the most fearless characters to ever stram across a television screen. It's hard to get away from Clint because no matter where you click, if Harry is not meeting Sally Clint seems to be lighting up a cigar or shooting half a dozen men in living color 24 hours a day. Clint’s intestinal fortitude captured my attention in a film called High Plains Drifter in which you might remember Clint shoots three men without even getting out of a barber’s chair. No. That’s not the part that takes guts. On his way to his hotel room, some saucy woman bumps into him and calls him all kinds of names and although he has more interesting things to do, he quickly drags her into the nearest barn and accommodates her. To realize how fearless the High Plains Drifter really was you should remember that back in those days there were no antibiotics.

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6. Speaking of Clint Eastwood, you might remember seeing him in an old time movie riding down a road on his horse. The road had two ruts for the wagon wheels but the rut in the middle between the wagon wheel ruts that should have been made by the horse that was pulling the wagon, were not there. The people who made the movie had never seen a rutted road that was made by a horse pulled wagon. I grew up next door to an old dirt road that more than often had a horse pulled wagon going through it. Didn’t you? I have since seen a similar road in other movies that featured horse drawn vehicles. That kind of thing shouldn’t happen. It is like having Michael Jackson or Elvis singing some rock tune in a movie about the American Revolution.

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7. You probably heard about the man in the county jail who gained 80 pounds since Christmas time. The newspaper and television people have had quite a time with it. But what you probably haven't heard, is that the warden of that jail has been offered a job in Washington DC as Executive Director of the National Association of Pork Producers.

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8. You probably forgot all about this but one of the first things our governor did was take down a mural showing working people going on strike for better wages. I have no problem with his doing this as he had enough funding to get elected and governors can pretty well do what they want to do. That’s the good thing about being governor --- or having money enough to buy an election for a governor or senator. You can do pretty well what you want to do.

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9. What can you tell me about holidays? If you look forward to holidays you are probably an adult who would rather stay home than go to work, or a child who has been alerted to its economic possibilities by an electronic media. If you are completely oblivious to holidays, birthdays or anniversaries, you are probably a very old man who lives alone --- or wishes that he did.

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10. Do you remember hearing of the National Defense Authorization Act? As I recall, when they were talking about it, it seems to me that Chellie Pingree said she was going to vote against the National Defense Authorization Act. Why would she do that? The man running Germany in the 1930s was very happy when a similar bill passed there.

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11. You talk about age discrimination. It is alive and well on the Internet today. I wouldn’t have known about it but Blip, that used to distribute clips of my television program, gave me a dozen more optional sites where they would post these video clips. And on one, I think it was MySpace, there was an advertisement on the side that was hard to miss. It was a picture of a very clean cut, very attractive young girl and underneath it said, “Men Wanted: Age 60-64.” I’m married and my days of running around with any kind of young girls were over some 25 years ago, but it hurts to see that even if I were 10 years younger I wouldn’t even get in there at her 64 cutoff age. Was it 90-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes who saw a pretty woman and said, “Oh to be 80 again.”

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