Check out our B&B web page.

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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 28, 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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This program is brought to you by The humble Farmer Bed & Breakfast. If you’d like to visit us on the coast of Maine our website is thehumblefarmer.com/BaB

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l. If The humble Farmer radio show airs in New York City, there is a chance that one or two new cosmopolitan friends might drop in for an overnight in our Bed & Breakfast in beautiful downtown St. George, Maine. I enthusiastically outlined the possibilities to my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect woman, but she was lukewarm, at best when considering a bright new economic future. She said she couldn't run a Bed & Breakfast and work on the island, too. Whereupon I stuck out my chest and announced that I would be able to run the entire B&B operation on my own. She said, "How many people do you suppose would return after a breakfast of bread and a handful of grapes?"

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2. One morning I think I read in the Encyclopedia Britannica that around 270 people were kidnapped for ransom in 1932 or so because kidnapping was safer than robbing banks. It said that when a death penalty was instituted by the federal government for crossing state lines, kidnapping was pretty well stamped out. The book I read was probably 40 years old and I wondered if kidnapping had been stamped out by instituting a death penalty so I Googled. On the page I found there is a graph that shows that as you get older, your chances of being kidnapped drop. According to the graph, my chances of being kidnapped dropped to 0% 19 years ago. Old people are not that hot a commodity. Boxer, the horse, could at least be carted off and sold to a glue factory. What would you do if you found this note? "If you want to see your mother-in-law again, put $50 in a brown bag and leave it in Elliot Prior's egg box on The humble Farmer's front lawn." "We will give you $50 if you keep her."

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3. Speaking of kidnappers --- the bottom line is you can probably stay out of trouble almost everywhere if you know what you are doing. But what tourist knows where he is or what he is doing? While speaking at a convention in the midwest, I remember being viewed with amazement when a doorman or policeman learned from me that I had walked from the convention center to my hotel. It was something you didn't do if you knew the area. Just this week a man from Brazil told me about a pilot friend of his who was kidnapped and forced to fly for drug dealers. That pilot certainly knew what he was doing, but, because he was a valuable catch, they still got him. My wife Marsha has a friend in Central America who was kidnapped. He was an Italian and he talked his way out of it. He even refused a promotion in his company because it would have mandated that he hire full time armed guards to protect himself and his family. You know, it’s a lot less complicated to raise cows and sell rhubarb.

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4. I read a web page entitled, “How to Make Your Home Unattractive to Thieves.” Be poor.

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5. In a discussion of the best countries to visit if you want to be kidnapped, Facebook friend Daniel says, “I ain't goin none o' them places. Couldn't stand the rejection” Anyone who has ever been rejected when visiting a foreign country didn't bring enough money.

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6. You have heard that some people say any problem can be solved if you throw enough money at it. As in elections. If you want to win an election, you should expect to spend more money than your opponent. Because I know nothing about the chemistry of gardening, I use the same method: If something doesn't grow, I throw more cow nutrients at it. Here on the coast of Maine, as in Mark Twain's Black Forest, the size of a man's manure pile is a manifestation of his wealth and standing in the community. My asparagus looks sickly. Some of the plants are misshapen. I might have over picked it last year. I believe I will go out and weedwhack as close as I can without hitting it, get down on my hands and knees and pull the grass and weeds away from it, put some cow nutrients around each plant and put grass clippings on top of that. I already have a small start at it and have packed rhubarb leaves around a few plants. It will be a good project to film for my TV show. There is nothing that draws an audience quicker than a cooking show or a show that promises to show you the most up-to-date methods of scientific gardening. I wish you were here to show me how to do it. You know, I could take television to a whole new level if I could get you to not only see but smell what I was filming. Thank you for listening. Thank you for smelling.

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7. You might remember the story I wrote about a grandchild a few years ago. She was running about the home, completely wild. The other grandchild looked at me and said, "Chocolate." Well, according to an article I just read, that story of the sugar high is right up there with Santa Claus and ghosts. This was brought to mind one night when I read and fell asleep and read and fell asleep but kept waking up and was still watching the clock and reading about rechercheur De Cock until past midnight. Something unheard of for me. But you might recall that the other day, after losing 35 pounds by not eating sweets and dropping below 140 pounds, I decided that enough was enough and started to eat sweets again. And the other night after the grange meeting I ate my first cinnamon bun in 9 years. As I watched the numbers change on the clock that night, all I could think was that it was the sugar in that cinnamon bun. Now I know that is not true. So --- do you suppose it could have been the 2-hour nap I took at noon or the one I took at 5 PM?

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8. One morning while thinning my beets, I noticed that although I planted only one seed about 1 1/2 inches away from the last seed in the row, many of the beets came up as twins. I tried very hard to only plant one seed so I wouldn't have to thin. My great-grandmother Sarah's twin sister, Elizabeth Hilt , lived on the lot just south of me 150 years ago. Elizabeth was married to Ed Gilchrest, a brother to Lark who lived in my house and Captain Albion, grandfather to Aunt Grace, who lived two houses down from me and another brother Isaiah who lived one house north of me. My sister also had twin boys. My question was, "When the moon is right, can thrusting one seed deep into rich, fertile soil produce two beets?" I read on Google: "Thinning is necessary, as you may get more than one seedling out of each seed. [There it is right there. How did we live before Google?] Thin when they reach about 2 inches high by pinching them off. Pulling them out of the ground may disturb the close surrounding roots of nearby seedlings." I thinned this morning and they were only about 1/2 of an inch high so I don’t think I disturbed any roots. And I pulled them out and did not pinch them off. Like a cow friend who receives a tremendous wallop when he puts his wet nose on an electric fence, I have an aversion to pinching. I remember what happened to me the last time I did it.

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9. Can you help me? I'm working on a song and need help with the lyrics. It starts out like this: How are things in Dannemora? Are the walls still made of paper there?

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10. It was a dark and stormy night. You are familiar with the Bulwer-Lytton award. A visit to the Bulwer-Lytton web page will do as much for you as a walk on the beach on a sunny day. Listen to this description of The Bulwer-Lytton contest that is on that web page. We are talking here about a contest on bad writing --- to see who can write the worst introductory sentence to a novel. I quote: "The contestant who manages to exceed it over all others receives $250, and the proud knowledge that he or she has constructed a written passage so atrocious that it has been proven to cause blindness in lab mice."

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