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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 7, 2015.

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1. Many of my friends take obscure acronyms for granted. You may be one of my friends who knows all, sees all. Here is an example of a marketer putting off a potential customer by talking over his head. The email said: “My name is Surbhi Kumari and working with a reputed leading S.E.O. Company having the experience of getting our customer's websites top in Google.” What can you say to these people? Hi, Thank you for writing. Remember that we are not all gurus. I don't know what an SEO is. I am not a CPA with a PhD from MIT. Please RSPV ASAP SVP. Signed, ThF

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2. The Internet cable has been compared to a pipe through which liquid flows. The amount of liquid that will flow thru the pipe is contingent on one of two things: the radius of the pipe or the diameter of the pipe. In some countries the Internet flows through a very large pipe so their service is very fast. In Rockport, Maine, there lives a computer guru, and he has ordered things so that in Rockport, Maine the service is right up there with South Korea. But over most of our great land, corporate America has seen to it that our service is very slow. They have plugged the pipe. That is so they can charge more if you opt to have a service that is just a whit better than your neighbors. And even then, you aren't getting much. Our horse and buggy Internet service was foremost in my mind this morning when I crept down into the solar radiant heated cellar/office of Maine Private Radio and checked on the two humble Farmer TV shows I'd uploaded to YouTube last night. One show would have been on line in 5 or so hours, but, because of the tiny size of the pipe, trying to upload two at the same time takes 10 or 12 hours. So I'll only be uploading one per night from now on. You can't beat the system.

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3. What do we see in the news but another former politician who is in trouble for trying to bribe some people to keep their mouths shut. You've heard a few of our friends demand term limits for the folks in Congress. Throw the bums out. We need term limits. It appears that they don't know that as soon as a person retires or is voted out of Congress, he or she goes right back to the halls of Congress and earns even more money as a lobbyist. In many cases they are well paid to repeal any progressive legislation they might have actually voted for while in office. Term limits? You might as well have term limits for teachers, doctors or New York City taxi drivers. Just about the time you learn to speak English, you'd have to look for some other kind of work. I could never run for Congress. I don't have enough hush money to spread around to keep old friends from blabbing about my former indiscretions. You know who you are, and if you have any of my old letters you’d like to sell I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com.

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4. What word do you use when something is totally awesome? I was, like, unaware of the encroachments of the awesome word on our language until the last visit of the grandchildren. When they were like here they made me some, like, awesome posters and now awesome like rules on the walls of my solar radiant heated cellar/office/studio. To my provincial way of thinking, the word awesome is like in the same category as the word "lunch" which crept into local parlance when I was around 30. I suspect that the words awesome and lunch are products of some Californian sub-culture that crept in around me when I wasn’t looking. I'm, like, 79 years old and set in my ways. And until the day I die, dinner will, like, continue to be my awesome noonday meal.

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5. The grandchildren have been conditioned to go to sleep when a fan is running. I call this air conditioning. You might remember that I learned about behaviorism in a psycholinguistics class at the University of Rochester. Anyone who is tired can sleep anywhere anytime. I have fallen asleep standing on a stage in front of an audience. Reading puts me to sleep at night. I try to get to bed by 7:30 or some similar decent hour, but wake up when Marsha comes to bed at 10. Then I have to read for an hour to get back to sleep because the night is already half over for me. I’ve been thinking about getting a little fan.

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6. What a terrible thing. I just noticed that some of the things I posted on YouTube in recent years are now linked to my Facebook page. I am now a man who is haunted by his past. The bad thing about being 79 years old is that there is so much of it. Luckily for me, most of my Facebook friends who were there 30 and 40 years ago were so involved in the process that they aren't likely to boast about their part in it.

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7. Before you turn off your radio in disgust, please listen to everything I’m about to say. I’m going to start with this letter to Dear Abby that radio friend David emailed to me. It says, Dear Abby, My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the beginning, and, when I confront him, he denies everything. What's worse, everyone knows that he cheats on me. It is so humiliating. Also, since he lost his job 14 years ago, he hasn't even looked for a new one. All he does all day is smoke cigars, cruise around and shoot the bull with his buddies, while I have to work to pay the bills. What should I do? Signed: Clueless. And here’s the answer. Dear Clueless: Grow up and dump him. You don't need him anymore! Good grief woman, you're running for President of the United States. Well, that’s the end of the email Ha, ha, ha. And that said, is it not amazing that infidelity is considered to be a crime of such magnitude among those who would cast the first stone? From time to time you see on the news that the president of France is out sporting about town on a motorcycle with some hot young lovely at 2 A. M. while his wife is in the hospital. Anyone who has made a study of the Alpha Male sees this as predicable behavior. Many do it. Only a few get caught. A U. S. Senator’s wife is certainly not going to blab everything she knows. You have read Shaw. Colonel Pickering says, “Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?” Henry Higgins replies, “Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?” --- Have you ever asked yourself if a man's ability to live up to his marriage vows have anything to do with his ability to govern a country or run a huge corporation? Well, do they? Is it not possible that while in combat a most brilliant general could find comfort with his pretty young secretary while planning a thrust at the front just before daybreak? You have known many very successful men who didn’t slow down until smoking constricted their arteries. You might have always marveled that Clinton’s rather common indiscretions got more bad press and cries for his impeachment than George W. Bush got for starting an illegal war that cost the country trillions of dollars, impoverished millions of Americans and killed thousands of people. Perhaps the French are more reasonable about some things. The humble Farmer question of the week is: Can we compare powerful men who have affairs --- with leaking chemical tanks that poison people? Yes, we can. You can be sure that there are a lot more of both of them out there than anyone is willing to admit.

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8. It doesn't often happen, but one morning I put just a whit too much rolled oats into the boiling water. I was at the end of the container and, thinking it was one spoonful, I dumped it all in and counted 7 more spoonfuls from the other full box. It was thicker than it should be. Having made thousands of pans of rolled oats on thousands of mornings I could immediately see and feel the difference in the texture. I chanced to whisper to the beautiful woman at my side (we had Bed and Breakfast guests here and most folks aren't up and about at 5) that I was going to have trouble cooking this pan of oats long enough as the water would boil out before it was done. Well. There are people who worship the golden calf, knowing that it will guarantee them eternal life. There are people who know that if you put a horsehair in a barrel of stagnant water it will turn into a snake. And there is a person who whispered to me, "Rolled oats will cook in one minute."

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9. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, took her aunt Iola and cousin Janice down to the end of the St. George peninsula to Port Clyde, Maine, which is now right up there with our dump when it comes to places you want to take visiting friends. The sardine packing plant in Port Clyde is no more, but you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on paintings by Jamie Wyeth and Andy Wyeth in the Port Clyde General Store. Marsha said the Port Clyde General Store also advertised an excellent Ruben Sandwich, whatever that might be, for $7 or so. My artist friend Wilder Oakes has a gallery right across the road. I think he said there are now six art galleries in Port Clyde. I don’t think there is room in Port Clyde to park six cars and there is now talk of filling in the eastern side of Port Clyde Harbor to make a parking lot.

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