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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for July 26, 2015.

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The humble Farmer's TV show is now on YouTube. Google "Robert Karl Skoglund" and they should come up. + This program is brought to you by The humble Farmer Bed and Breakfast in St. George, Maine. Your buddy humble here.

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1. 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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2. One day a wretched derelict showed up at a local church right after the service and asked if he could have $50 to get him to New Bedford so he could get work on a fishing boat. When the three deacons assembled to consider the case, one of the deacons, a teacher, recognized the man as one of the most troublesome kids he’d ever had in school. Another, a prison guard, had fingerprinted the fellow when he was admitted to the state prison. The third, in one of those coincidences that you only hear about on Paul Harvey, had been the man’s prisoner advocate and parole officer. None of the three deacons let on that they’d ever seen the candidate before and he didn’t let on that he knew them. They gave him the $50 to get him on a boat 200 miles away in New Bedford and figured it was the best money they had ever spent.

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3. Little news item here. Police pulled 145 nasty looking marijuana plants from a dirt road in Friendship and are looking for the owner. A Cushing logger had complained to police that the 12-foot plants were interfering with his cutting operation. Although the street value of the plants in Bangor is in excess of $50,000, the logger said it would be a waste of time for him to cut them because, unlike firewood, there is no ready market for marijuana in Knox County, Maine. The owner of the weeds is urged to call the police at once, as the plants are drying out rapidly and, unless they are claimed, will soon have to be thrown away.

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4. It’s a well-known fact that here in Maine school superintendents get three times the pay of a teacher. Superintendents do NOT get a lot of money for what they do. It simply happens to be three times what teachers get for what they do. Some people wonder why. The superintendents go to the same teachers colleges and sit in the same classes as the teachers. They both go to the same colleges to get their masters degrees. But when they start work, a strange thing happens: one gets three times the salary that the other one does. I asked a school board member why the school board paid superintendents such respectable salaries and was told, “Well, we pay them a lot more than we want to because we want somebody who can do a good job. You get what you pay for.” One wonders why the same philosophy is not applied to teachers.

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5. Here's a letter I sent this morning to a Maine Internet company. I think they handle my web page information and give me the Internet. But I'm not sure. Every year I send them a check because I have no idea what might shut down or collapse if I don't. This is what I wrote: Hi, Please send me another bill by email. I tried to pay you on line when I first got your bill. I tried to find a page where I could do it. I pay credit cards and Cable TV and my mortgage and my power bill on line. But your website for paying on line, being made by expert computer people, was too difficult for me to navigate and I gave up in frustration. I can’t even remember if I could find it. Thank you for understanding that old people aren't very good with technical things. We don't even know your language. I'll send you a check, as trying to pay you on line would simply exhaust me. I don't like to send checks because a three-cent stamp for the envelope now costs around fifty cents. Thank you again. The humble Farmer

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6. You have heard me say that I could never afford to have children and at 70 had to learn about grandchildren, starting from scratch. Without even an hour of grampy experience to fall back on, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, placed one of her grandchildren under my care for an hour. I was scared. The child Avalane could not talk. What could I do if she wanted something and how would I know what she wanted? But you can well believe that I learned something from this unique experience. The child went into my library and peeled the dust jackets off some Art In America books and ate them. I couldn’t believe it. The child ate paper. How, I wondered, could any child cultivate a taste for paper? But then --- I remembered that earlier in the day I’d seen her mother feed her an artichoke.

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7. We read that in January of 1912, Marcel Duchamp created the painting Nude Descending a Staircase, # 2. There are those who believe this work to be one of the greatest paintings of the 20th century. And herein lies a dark secret that artists have successfully hidden from a gullible public for centuries. A case in point was Jackson Pollock, who made history when he tripped and fell on his way to the ice box for a salami sandwich. And so it was with the nude on the staircase. For years it has been assumed that the nude was on his way to fetch his only pair of drawers which he'd put in the drier down in the cellar the night before. However, in the July 2015 periodical "History of Film," we read that Marcel was a regular at a movie house where the hand-cranked projector was operated by an elderly man who was a heavy drinker. Nude Descending a Staircase, # 2 is no more than Marcel's impression of Lillian Gish in The Musketeers of Pig Alley.

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8. Something at something something at whtfM is the password my Internet company gave me to enable me to access my account and pay my bill on line. The password was probably generated by an ignorant machine, because how does an ancient Maine man know if the first l is an ell or an eye? And after the second ell or eye, do you see a double u or a vee vee? Right after the @, you will see another ell or an eye. I tried to pay my bill on line a month ago but gave up and emailed them, asking me to send the bill again because, as much as I hated to pay 50 cents or so for a three-cent stamp so I could mail them a check, it was obviously the only way I could do business with them. I got no reply. Until this morning when I got an email that told me to pay up or my plug would be unequivocally pulled. You might well ask if there actually is anyone at this company or if the whole business is no more than one all-knowing computer that sends out bills and credits payments to the computer's bank account in the Cayman Islands. I'm mailing the thing an envelope with a check in it. What you want to bet that anything that arrives in the form of hard copy is incinerated to generate power.

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9. You have heard me say that my wife, Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, and I have a symbiotic relationship which is the secret to a happy marriage. I am always cold. She is always hot. When I put an ice-cold hand down the back of her shirt onto her sweaty back, I say, “Ahhh. That feels good.” And she says, “Ahhh. That feels good.” Perhaps you and your spouse sneak about the house surreptitiously turning the thermostat up and down to suit your own personal needs. --- or opening and closing windows when the other isn’t looking. This does not happen in our home ---- because --- when the temperature drops down to 74 – 75 degrees, I simply put on extra wooly pants and a sweater.

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10. When you come right down to it, you have never seen a man so homely but what he could get some other man’s wife to run off with him. But seeing the contested beauty bragging about the affair in front of a TV camera is something else. That said, I can see a day when only homely men will run for public office. If you will consider the many cheating men you have seen commanding the evening news, you would have to admit that they are far above average in looks, income, fame and physical prowess. Whenever they are tried by the bar of public opinion, women crawl out of the woodwork and vie to confess that, “When we were in the third grade he used to pull my pigtails.” But --- suppose the man were coyote ugly? How much would you have to pay a woman to admit that she had ever been that desperate? No, homely politicians are the wave of the future. They can cheat all they want and no woman would ever tell.

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11. When I Google, I pretend I’m a prospector looking for gold. And it is that 10 dirtiest hotels in the world site that we are going to continue mining now. Here’s a review that says, “… the hot tub looked disgusting; like homeless people bathed in it.” I must admit that I have never seen a bathtub that had been used by homeless people so I have no reference here. And aren’t even the people nearest and dearest to you able to make a tub look disgusting? Or have you never married and had children? And consider this: “Our room looked like something from a very bad horror movie.” Is that not a subjective observation at best where it is possible to get bogged down by semantics. Can you distinguish between a bad horror movie and a good horror movie? Is a good horror movie really horrible? Is a bad horror movie not bad? The guest continues: “I was scared to sleep in the bed. Just looking at it made me want to itch.” Let’s turn that around into something positive: wouldn’t that at least give you something to do if the television didn’t work?

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12. Radio friend Kip writes to say that he has a new ipod that is the size of a Heath bar. I’m glad to hear that Kip’s ipod machine is the size of a Heath Bar. When it comes to giving an example for size, too many people say that it was the size of three football fields. Haven’t you always wondered about this football field thing? Why doesn’t someone ever say that it was the size of the library reading room at Harvard Law School? As tall as the statues at Vigeland. Or about as wide as a street in Pompeii?

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