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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 21, 2015.

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The humble Farmer's TV show is now on YouTube. Google "Robert Karl Skoglund" and they should come up.

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1. Have you ever heard of the Defenders of Wildlife? The other day they asked me for a $5 donation to save something wild. Perhaps we should be resigned to the fact that for hundreds of millions of years, life on this planet has continually changed. No matter what they tell you in Texas, man’s contribution to global warming was not responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs --- although we certainly wiped out the wooly mammoth, the dodo and who knows what else. Yes, I personally think it is too bad when some species of animal or bird is eliminated by hunters or the destruction of its habitat. But you might want to stick your head in a hole and hide if you’re bothered by the elimination of moose of lobsters. Before we have time to elect another governor in Maine it will probably be mandatory.

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2. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Last night I weighed in at 140 pounds. It is not necessary to diet to lose weight. All you have to do is stop eating sweets and junk food. And I am not talking about "everything in moderation" here. No sweets. Nothing ever. Not for special occasions. Not for anyone or anything do you eat one piece of cake or cookie or dish of ice cream for years and years. This is one of the things that everyone knows, but no one wants to believe. "Oh, I'll have just one cookie as it is a special occasion." None of that. Did you know that just in the USA in the past six months people have spent over $32 billion on weight-loss programs? Isn't that silly, when all you have to do is stop eating certain things? I have not weighed 140 pounds since I was 42 years old and just returned from a month in Europe with a 19-year-old neighbor. You have heard me say that I haven't had ice cream or cookies or cake (outside of 2 occasions when I ate my birthday cake), or pumpkin bread or sausage or bacon since I came home from a Public Radio convention on the Riverwalk around 2006 at 175 or so pounds. I couldn't bend over and tie my shoes. But at 140 pounds I am going to say that enough is enough. I'm not going to continue on the path to skin and bones until some New York City modeling agency man knocks at my door. And the next time someone offers to buy me a butterscotch sundae, I'm going to eat it.

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3. Hum first line. While I hitch old Dobbin to the shay. Even while singing this good old song 65 years ago, I had no idea of what a shay was. When I went to Sweden in 1960 and heard the boys talk, I very quickly learned what a shay was in Swedish --- although I have no idea of how they spell it. In 1951 I knew that a shay was some kind of buggy that was pulled by a horse, but until I downloaded a picture of a shay I still didn't know that it had only 2 wheels. While singing this good old song one morning I got to thinking of how quickly and how often our language changes. In 1865 when my mother's father was 5 years old, he could probably have told you what a shay was and what it looked like. But when my mother was 5 in 1921, she probably couldn't have done it. I've looked up tilbury several times. It is a light, two-wheeled, open carriage with two seats, used in the 1800s. Tilbury Town is a fictional American town which serves as the location for many works by my distant cousin, the American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson. The small New England village was modeled after Gardiner, Maine where Robinson grew up. I wonder if a tilbury or a shay was a special kind of buggy, much as some people have sports cars today which are uncomfortable to ride in and very dangerous, but make a social statement. A shay would have no more utilitarian value than a sports car. And we know what that is. I remember hearing that my neighbor Alfred Hocking had a very smart horse and some special kind of buggy, probably 100 or so years ago. I don't know if it was the shape and style of the buggy that set him a notch above the others or if it was the speed or lines of his horse. I seem to remember seeing a picture of him in that buggy. When I was a kid you could still see some old men driving a buggy. My neighbor, Percy Jones, used to chop alders and bring them home in the back of his buggy. I used to go with him, although I was deathly allergic to his mule and probably cried and gasped for air all the time. How many other old songs can you think of that have words in them that would have no meaning at all to the young folks only 40 or 50 years old?

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4. We all have pet words. And years ago whenever I'd look up a word to make sure I'd spelled it correctly, I'd mark the date. In that old dictionary there are words with 10 or 15 dates on them. The only problem with being unable to spell comes from the words that you can't look up because you can't even come close. This just came to mind when I tried to spell racquet, as in the thing you use to pound a tennis ball. In a post on my Facebook page, I spelled racquet three different ways and got "Raquel," "racket," and a third suggestion from my spell checker. There is another option open now and I will type tennis racquet into Google. And, sure enough I get "tennis racquet." What is this madness? It looks like racquet is correct and that although Mark Suckerberg Whoozits has earned $33 billion from Facebook, he has not added the word racquet to the spell checker in his lucrative creation. This is understandable. Anyone who has earned $33 billion dollars before they are 30 probably has had no time for tennis.

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5. How one's words are twisted. If you were a politician every word you said would be twisted around by your enemies. One of my old and valued friends writes on my Facebook page: "Heavy mulch gardening. I am a strident adherent, and he is violently opposed to it." I, The humble Farmer being he, am also a strident adherent of mulch. I use grass clippings that are collected in Marsha's rider mower. But years ago I had the misfortune to use some bales of hay that had been trucked in as stage props for a wedding at which I officiated and it gave me a crop of grass and weeds, the likes of which I had never seen before or since. So I don t use hay. It is impossible to have a garden unless you put down mulch --- unless you are one of the full-time gardeners who tends to her raised beds dressed in a tied-down straw bonnet and white gloves. Years ago I got some old tennis rackets on the dump and put them on the shelf in the back window of my Mercedes, knowing that the implication that I had time to play tennis raised my perceived income by $200,000 a year. Now I know that all that was unnecessary. I could have achieved the same goal by occasionally mentioning my basil in my raised beds. + 6. One day I was shocked --- no, I was actually horrified when I looked into the wash basin and saw half a dozen hairs in there about three inches long. --- I’d just finished washing my feet.

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7. Have I mentioned this to you before? Most of what I don't know I learned from Fox news. + 8. You know that I know enough words to obtain food and shelter in several languages. But I’m not a scientist so when I see the word “emulsify” I have no idea of what it means. Say “emulsify” and it brings back vague memories of Dick Cash making something out of seaweed that would keep the chocolate from settling in chocolate milk. His kids drank a lot of experimental chocolate milk. But that’s all I know, so when I saw “emulsify” the other I looked it up. May I repeat, for the edification of us both, the definition of emulsify? Emulsify: to disperse a liquid into another liquid with which it is immiscible, making a colloidal suspension.

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9. The email said, “She tore her ACL this summer but still managed to travel. … in France, she proceeded to break her wrist.” If you’re a parent who has a kid involved in sports you already know what an ACL is. Because I could never afford to have children I had to look up ACL to learn that it is a ligament in the knee. If you have an opinion on sports you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that I do, too. The man who gave me the garage door I open every morning shuffled through life on injured knees. He told me he hobbled because his knee joints had been destroyed playing football in high school. This is neither surprising nor worthy of mention. ---- were it not for the fact that --- he said that given the chance, he would do it all over again which still amazes me. Being a spindly, wimpy little kid I was always the last one chosen to be on any team if I were tolerated at all. As a result, I was never injured by others. The only time I felt accepted by the group was when I accidentally cut off my right shin bone while chopping down the tree that had eaten my kite.

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10. When I was a young man of 40, Mrs. Ditchett, who was probably 80, made me chicken soup. It was the best chicken soup I’ve ever had and if I could locate one of Mrs. Ditchett’s granddaughters, I’d ask her if she had preserved Mrs. Ditchett’s recipe for chicken soup. If you’ve ever wished you had the recipe to something that tasted very good to you years ago you know what I’m talking about. One day I chanced to remember that Dicky, who lived in a town called Kampen, could make good chicken soup so I wrote and asked her for the recipe. Dicky started off by saying that the soup is so easy that even I can do it myself. And I have to agree that it looks pretty simple --- until I get to line six. On line six I am stopped dead in my tracks because --- it says, “When it is almost cooked, turn the flame down low.” This is how women manage to dominate the kitchen. You will not find one of them who will send you a recipe that says, “Put two quarts of water in a 3-quart pan and boil the chicken for 27 minutes at 250 degrees. Add 17 seconds for every 100 feet above sea level.” Back during my bachelor days whenever Mary Webb would drop off two mackerel I’d call Gladys next door for instruction. Gladys had lived with and around fishermen in St. George for 80 years and knew more about cooking fish than anyone. But when I’d ask her how long I should boil the mackerel, she’d say, “Until they’re done.” I’d ask how I could tell when they were done. And Gladys would say, “You can tell.”

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