Check out our B&B web page.

+

This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 15, 2014

+

1. What do you think of the US economy? Kendall Morse said that Things are so bad in Texas, three guys were caught sneaking into Mexico

+

2. And it came to pass that one day the happy little radishes started to peep from beneath the finely sifted soil. Meanwhile at the place my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman works, Marsha put her radishes in long ago and she boasted that she has already had a beautiful crop. I plant radishes a week apart. That way I always have some. But one day I noticed that my crop of radishes was coming up far from where I thought I planted them. Some of my seeds must have inadvertently fallen into propitious soil. Which reminds me that I heard Robert Sapolsky say that from 10 to 40 percent of the people in this country don't know who their father is.

+

3. Have you ever heard of Prosperity Theology? Have you ever heard of the Gospel of Wealth? I just read in Wikipedia that Prosperity Theology is not to be confused with The Gospel of Wealth. I don’t know about you, but I think this is a good thing to know.

+

4. We read on line that ""Predictability" means that no matter where a person goes, they will receive the same service and receive the same product every time when interacting with the McDonaldized organization." This is not true. There are countries where you could not eat a dollar McChicken burger. In southern Europe they put spices in food that would burn a Finn's guts out. Your friends who have traveled and have therefore developed a cosmopolitan palate will tell you that this is so. This is why, back in the days when I traveled abroad, I would buy a roast chicken. Gourmet cooks can mess up most any kind of sandwich, soup, or stew, but even the French have not been able to render an entire spit-roasted chicken unpalatable.

+

5. Here’s a quote for you. "Prosperity theology has drawn followers from the American middle class and poor, and has been likened to the cargo cult phenomenon, traditional African religion, and black liberation theology." The cargo cult phenomenon? Have you ever heard of that one? Used to be in the good old days, only a few people could read a Bible or anything else, and those who could would tell their friends and neighbors how to think. What is one to do nowadays when one can't decide if one should throw one's lot in with the Cargo Cult folks or the Mormons or Episcopalians or with those who subscribe to Prosperity Theology? --- Especially when each and every one of the folks in hundreds of different cults can back up everything they do or say with words they will point out to you in the Scripture. If I were selling snakes and I knew a lot of folks in a local cult who killed a snake or two in each one of their services, I'd probably join that cult. Do you know of anyone who has joined a club or cult or religion recently just for economic reasons?

+

6. There was a time when more than a few people were listening to my Friday night program on what used to be called Maine Public Radio. The initial purpose of Maine Public Radio was to educate and inform the people of Maine with a variety of ideas. I don’t know what ever happened to that because there was a time when a lot of people thought that educating and informing was a good idea. If you ever heard my radio show, you know that I asked a lot of questions. Back then I could ask a question and several people would snap back an answer and I’d tell you what they had to say. Some of those long time radio friends followed me onto Facebook, so now when I type a question into Facebook, several of the smartest people in Maine snap back an answer for me. I’d lost the toolbar on top of my web pages and struggled with it for days. But then I whined and sniveled on Facebook. “Help” I cried. “How do I retrieve my toolbar on the top of my web pages?” And Facebook friend Zack snapped back at me with, “Do this and do that.” And I did this and I did that and, thanks to Zack, I have my toolbar back. People who tell you that Facebook is a toy for children and has no utilitarian function don’t know how to use it. Or they should improve the quality of their friends.

+

7. I looked at several posted versions of a cartoon. It is my feeling that it is much more interesting without editorial comment. The version I got came from David in Washington who has many curious and esoteric sources. Like the canned laughter in new TV shows, do we need to be told when something is funny or sad or pathetic? Can't we read or hear something and evaluate it for ourselves without being told, "This guy is an xx//." or "This is the most hilarious thing I've ever read"? How do you feel about being told, "Hey. This is funny. Listen to this."

+

8. You might have heard that when a woman crashed her car and was killed, some people stole the groceries out of her car. If you can create a society where people have to steal to survive, you stand a good chance of putting a lot of people in jail. You have read that "Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons." and “The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.” As long as there is more money to be made in putting people in prison than in sending them to college, the United States is very likely to continue to have the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. As long as there is big money to be made by keeping people in prison, don’t look for time off for good behavior. “Do the crime do the time.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

+

9. A man named Michael sent me an email asking for money. Someone had stolen all of his things and he couldn’t leave the hotel until I sent him some money to pay his bill. When I mentioned Michael and his financial plight on my Facebook page, my next-door neighbor Raymond Montgomery, who knows more about my financial situation than most, said, “Did someone actually consider you their last hope regarding the issue of borrowing money? How much rhubarb does it take to vacation in Manila?” And then he said, “Why would anyone go there if they already had a wife?” Although Raymond is still a young man, he is well on his way to someday becoming a respected local philosopher with considerable reputation.

+

10. Whenever you say anything about people or places or animals in a newspaper column or on the air, no matter what it is you say about people or places or animals you will discover that there is always one person who is terribly offended by your crass insensitivity in even bringing up such a subject. In other words, there is nothing you can say about anything but what someone is not going to like it. Knowing this, I am still going to proceed with a very touchy and controversial subject and if you are one who is easily offended, I suggest that you turn off your radio right now or at least have the decency to bundle your children off to the other room. A woman with whom my wife Marsha and I recently dined, has a nice dog. He has been trained not to run into the road by some kind of shock collar that zaps him when he goes out of bounds. You and I have seen doggy friends run in the road after a kid on a bicycle or another dog and get run over by an automobile. And I don’t know about you, but I think the shock collar to train doggy friends is a good thing, even as some of our more righteous neighbors will tell you that beating their children will lead them down the path to salvation. Be that as it may, one spring day my neighbor noticed that her dog ran down by the road and therefore needed to be reminded of the electrical parameters of his yard that would keep him alive and well. She has a little box with a knob on it. By turning the knob, she can determine the distance he can go from the house before he gets a gentle reminder. So she put the collar on her dog. But he wouldn’t leave the house. She couldn’t get him to step out the door. When she’d get him out, on the doorstep he’d jump back in. When she reviewed the directions that came with the machine, she discovered she’d turned the button the wrong way until she’d decreased the dog’s comfort parameters to the point where he couldn’t even step out of the house without getting electrocuted.

+

11. I have pictures of my friend Tom Dennen buying gas for our mopeds in Munkedal in 1963. I think that's where I met an unforgettable young blonde girl at a dance. It might have been on that same trip. 1963. I think she lived in Uddevalla. Dances in Sweden were a great experience for a homely American boy. In 1950 in Maine if you asked a girl to dance, she'd look you up and down and say, "No." Because that's the way it was done in Maine. But in Sweden girls came to a dance to dance and, no one got refused. If you asked her to dance three times in the course of the evening, and you had to space them out over the course of the evening--- you couldn’t ask her to dance every dance --- when they had the last dance or Dominus, that gave her the socially accepted privilege of asking you for the last dance. Which meant you could probably give her a ride home. No one got emotionally bruised with this system. I remember my 3rd cousin Jack, who called me the other day, telling about being invited up for coffee by his wife to be after their first dance. And when it got to be 1 or 2 in the morning she kept asking herself, "It's late. Why doesn't he go home?"

+