Check out our B&B web page.

+

This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for August 16, 2015.

+

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

+

1. A couple of journalists from Sweden had supper with us. One of them named Agneta said that she was once asked if she could spare an hour from time to time to visit people in prison. Agneta writes books and her husband is a famous movie producer named Jan Troell, so, being interested in doing new and different things, she went to the prison and had a nice visit with a man who killed three people. But --- then she went to prison to visit a man who was in there for fraud. He took out his guitar and played folk music and she never went back.

+

2. My friend Sally paints pictures of lighthouses. It is not unusual to find people on the coast of Maine who paint lighthouses, but Sally lives far from the ocean in Virginia. What makes Sally unusual among artists is that she doesn’t display her pictures. She doesn’t try to sell them. I think she should because she did one painting of a fish factory that is so good that you can smell it. Which makes me wonder how many Maine artists have rubbed bait on the back of a painting just to give it some intangible salable organic ambiance. I’m going to see if I can’t get Sally to put some of her pictures into a Maine gallery next summer. Linda Bean has got a nice gallery down the road from me in Port Clyde and Sally would fit right in there with the three generations of original Wyeths. Of course I wouldn’t want anyone who knows about art to know that I like Sally’s paintings because that would destroy her right there. I like artists like Barbara Ernst Pray and Bjorn Rundquist and Andy Wyeth and Bradley Hendershot which proves that I don’t know anything about real art anyway. I’d never make a good critic because I admire artists who paint houses and places I recognize. And I admire artists who actually get paid for their work. And when Sally showed my photos of her paintings it reminded me that Priscilla Adam’s daughter --- I think she was a sculptor --- was offered something like $600 for her first work. She wouldn’t sell it, which upset Priscilla, her mother. And the kid said that this was her baby, her creation and she said, “Would you have sold me for $600?” And Priscilla said, “I never had such an offer.”

+

3. Do you remember of seeing that bestselling author who made the evening news because he had lied to the American people on national television? This was news because he was an author.

+

4. I was out in my barn very purposefully sawing a half inch stick in two with a very dull handsaw when a car drove in the yard. A woman got out of the car and went inside to do woman business and the man, whom I had never seen before, walked over to see what I was doing in the barn. He watched for a few seconds and I was just about to compliment him for being strong enough to simply stand and watch without helping, when both of his hands shot out. We have talked about this before. It takes a unique individual --- it takes a powerful man who is secure within himself ---- to stand back and watch a neighbor engaged in some intricate operation without feeling obligated to elbow him aside and show him that you can do it better. Does this happen on all levels of society? Does Dr. Jones look over a colleague’s shoulder in the operating room and say, “Perhaps you should remove all of those little metal clamps before sewing up the chest cavity.” I don’t know. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com and you can tell me about the last time it happened to you. Please don’t confuse this with that other situation where you are standing in your friend’s kitchen and ask for a drink of water and they say, “You’ve got to let that water run a while before it gets cold.”

+

5. This might not mean anything to you if you have never read a science fiction book, but I’m going to throw it in here anyway because if you like Mel Brooks you would appreciate what I’m about to say. If you were writing science fiction that entailed space travel, would you have the courage to create a planet called Scarsdale and name your protagonist Peter Smith? If you could ever get your tale published, imagine the reaction Peter Smith from Scarsdale would have on an experienced reader of science fiction who is familiar with the space travel formula. The space ship touches down, the hatch releases blue vapors as it slowly slides open, and then, the slowly emerging figure moves down the ramp, arms outstretched. Of course, at this point the reader expects the visitor to say, “My name is Zar-El and I come from Kalgar.

+

6. Someone sent me a few web sites where I was able to read up on the use of surveillance cameras in a Maine High school. Listen to this: “While [the principal] said at the board meeting that he is sensitive to the intrusive nature of cameras, he sees them as a matter of safety, whether officials are grappling with unwelcome visitors arriving on campus, parking lot situations or evacuation procedures.” Is this proposed use of cameras in the toilets going a bit too far?

+

7. Is there anything more exhausting for a three year old child than spending a weekend with a loving and indulgent grandmother? Here’s the poor little kid, all tucked in, as Mimi reads a bedtime story. And every time the little eyes close there is a loving tug on the child’s sleeve and a “Wake up. Don’t you want to hear what happened to Peter Rabbit?”

+

8. Children repeat what they hear. If you talk Dutch or Swedish to a three year old child, the child will reply in Dutch or Swedish. Children raised by wolves howl and have an inexplicable interest in fire hydrants. That two and three year old children have the seemingly impossible ability to reproduce not just the phonemic but also the phonetic components of even the world’s most difficult language is proven every time a child speaks French. Mais wee, mis onfont. If I had a child, I would, in my conversations with that child, employ esoteric linguistic constructs obviously weighted with the approbation of the academic community. My child would, as Pogo so ably parroted, go forth into the world inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity. Dr. Olga has done this, as evinced by her letter which says, “Humble-- All the kids at church had to write Mother's Day hearts saying how people showed their love to them. All the kids said their mothers loved them by hugging them or taking care of them or giving them presents, and Emma's heart said her mother showed her love by not being deliberately obtuse.

+

9. Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever seen a stone statue cry? I have seen something that fits in the same category and I am going to tell you about it now. This is not something I would say in a room crowded with strangers, because it would immediately destroy my credibility. But I can tell you what I saw out on the highway yesterday because you have listened to me for years and know that however improbable my story, it is the truth. Listen to this. Yesterday, out on the highway, I saw a Volvo station wagon with no ski or bicycle racks.

+

10. Remember how they used to tar the roads in the good old days? A truck would back up to a machine and dump the gravel or tar into it and the machine would press it into the road. A friend of mine who drove one of those trucks was on his way to a grange meeting when his wife said, “Admit it. You’re lost. I don’t know how you can be lost. You drove every bit of this road when you helped tar it last summer.” And he said, “That’s true, but you want to remember that I was always backing up.”

+

11. You know that I want to put my land into conservation so it cannot be broken up into house lots by my heirs. Houses are going in on three sides of my 75 acres on the ocean. Can you imagine what will happen if I succeed in preserving my woods and fields? In 100 years my farm will be just like Central Park in New York City. In 100 years my farm might be the only place in St. George, Maine where you can get mugged and ravished.

+

12. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times, that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next.

+

13. You remember Chomsky’s famous sentence: Curious Green Ideas Sleep Furiously. This was a sentence that perhaps had never been said before. At our supper table I heard my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, say a sentence that has probably never been spoken in the world before. Did Doke meet Bianca in Guatamala? I enjoyed it so much I wrote it down and couldn’t wait to pass it along to you. Doke is Marsha’s Dutch friend who went to Guatamala to study Spanish for two weeks. While there Marsha asked Doke to visit her friend Bianca. And, being as curious as a green idea sleeping furiously, Marsha asked, Did Doke meet Bianca in Guatamala? If you ever heard a sentence that you think no one has ever heard before, I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com. Which reminds me --- You will remember that my friend Lawyer Crandall once boasted to me that he said something in court that the judge had never heard before. Crandall says he stood right up there in court and said, “Judge, my client is guilty.”

+