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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for February 22, 2015.

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1. Hi there, your buddy The humble Farmer here on MBPN radio with your No things Considered. I have no idea of who Stanley Weiser, is but he will be remembered as being the man who said, “A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.”

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2. When some people fix something it falls apart again within a week. You might be married to one of these people and know exactly who I’m talking about. But there are other masters of the tool chest who are able to make minor adjustments that last forever in their homes. Here on the coast of Maine, we call their secret the temporary repair. When they put something up, they don’t intend for it to last. But, nothing lasts like a temporary repair. Hang a door with nails on one hinge --- just so it’ll hang there good enough until you can find some screws to do the job right, and it will be swinging contentedly there the day you die. If you’d put screws in the hinges --- if you’d done the job right, the door wouldn’t have fit, and the screws would have worked themselves out and you would have lived with a door that stuck for years until it fell off and dropped on the dog. Knock down a wall in your kitchen and put up some good solid sheetrock. Do a good job. The cat will claw it down before you ever get around to paint it. But, put a piece of plastic in your smashed out car window --- just to keep the wind out until you can get over to the junkyard to buy a window to fix it right, and that plastic will be there the day you park the old clunker out in the back yard and use the door as a target. If you really want something that will hang in there forever, the rule to remember here in Maine is that nothing lasts like a temporary repair.

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3. You might remember that I like baked beans and spaghetti and could happily live on baked beans for dinner and spaghetti for supper until the day I die. To be sure, I could reverse the order and have spaghetti for dinner and beans for supper --- you know, just for a change so I wouldn’t get tired of the same old thing. With that in mind, please hear this letter from Brent: Dear humble, I do find you unusually paradoxical since your erudition, intelligence and academic history come across loud and clear on your show. You have a voracious passion and understanding of the social and cultural happenings around you, which are most often associated with sophistication and depth of knowledge/wisdom.....Whereas your culinary interests seem very basic and working class, that harken to your youth, years of bachelorhood, addiction to your desk top, poverty, an artist caught up in the thrall of his muses??? --- Thank you Brent. You should know that my discriminating taste when it comes to meals also applies to women, and is not regretted when I look around and see friends who were obviously hooked by their first entre.

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Your buddy The humble Farmer coming to you from MBPN’s solar radiant heated cellar studio with No Things Considered 4. It can be statistically proven 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 them to wolf brownies or at least put enough chocolate sauce on their lettuce to make them 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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5. I don’t know anything about fishing but I have a friend who does. There is nothing he enjoys more than dropping a line in the water far, far up there in the great Northern Maine woods. He says that pulling in 20 or so little fishes is only part of it. --- Can’t go up there without having three or four moose or a dozen deer come out of the woods and watch him. One day his father mentioned that it wouldn’t hurt to drop a hook along side of the boy and show him how it should be done. And on that day, and on every other day that father went along, they caught nothing. They saw no moose, no deer. They didn’t even see a fox. When the kid went alone, he said it was like being in a zoo. So he could only wonder what his father was using for aftershave. One evening at dusk, they even rode 20 miles along a logging road --- and saw nothing. There is no question but this man repels wildlife. If you can bear witness to a similar situation and can thereby verify this story, I’m thf at gmail dot com and I’d like to hear from you.

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6. Are you getting too many phone calls? Phone calls don’t bother me, because I enjoy hearing from you and my other friends. But --- if you would like people to have a quick change of heart and hang up on you when you answer your phone, here’s what you can do. I say, “Robert Skoglund. Sorry to keep you waiting.” Most people in the world have no idea of how to carry on a conversation on the telephone so they will not respond to your cheerful greeting with, “Hello, this is Susie Brown and I’m calling about the unused exercise bike you have advertized in Uncle Henry’s.” They simply say, “Hello?” I don’t know why they can’t tell me who they are and then briefly tell me why they called, but they can’t. If you don’t believe it, try it yourself. There is nothing people enjoy doing more than calling and saying, “Is Marsha there?” without telling you who they are. How often have you had to ask, “Whom shall I say is calling, please?” Or, “What’s it to yuh?” I’m passing this along to you as a public service. And, again, this is the way it played out today. The phone rang. I answered before it even stopped ringing and said, “Robert Skoglund. Sorry to keep you waiting.” The woman on the other end said, “Hello?” I repeated, “Robert Skoglund. Sorry to keep you waiting,” and she hung up. This is Guess who, in St. George, Maine.

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7. People from away don’t know how to get things done. One day The Boy gave me his father’s old 2 car garage over in Clark Island and I had one of my distant cousins haul it the three miles over to my house on his big truck. Jerry came in with his back hoe, dug off the top soil, put down gravel, I built a form and cement was poured and setting up before the sun went down. It would take someone from away a month or so to facilitate an operation like that. One day I wanted an inspection sticker on my truck. The girl in the office said that the boss was away and I’d have to try to catch him some time tomorrow. I said that when I saw him I was going to tell him that he ought to double the salary of everyone in his office. She said for me to come down at 4 the same afternoon.

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8. You recently saw it on the news. A man who worked with a bear was killed by the bear. You will also recall that two years ago a man who lived with wild bears was eaten by bears. Not long after that a man who loved sharks and other dangerous denizens of the deep came to a sudden and much publicized end when one of them turned on him. You and I know that there are wild and uncontrollable creatures on this planet that may be toyed with for a while, but that at any time they are likely to turn on you. And yet, every day you and I hear of yet another friend who plans to get married.

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9. How many times have you been working on a project when some lemme show ya boy looks over your shoulder and offers advice? If you are not careful, it is not long before he has pushed you aside and has taken the burden of the entire project upon his own shoulders. It is usually about that time that you notice that there is an alarming one to one correlation between a lemme show ya boy’s ineptitude and his eagerness to help you.

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10. When my father married my mother he was Marianne’s husband. And he stayed Marianne’s husband until he became Sonja’s father. For his entire life my father was a non-entity. I thought I had done better than my father until today when I realized that I have fallen lower than Marianne’s husband or Sonja’s father. In fact, I have dropped as low as it is possible to drop in the caste system here in American today. There is a name for American untouchables. You see us in all the big-box stores. We are called associates.

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11. Someone stood up at a recent Grange meeting 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 many good people still don’t know who their own father is.

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12. One morning I heard the people on the news talking about a football game that they called the super bowl that had been played the day before. I called my friend Julian and asked him if he watched it and he said he did. When I asked him what happened, I was not surprised to hear him say that he fell asleep. This is good. What else is television for?

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