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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for August 23, 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. Professor Peter and Dr. Karen told me that they are going to Africa. It raised the same question in my mind then as it does in your mind now. So I asked them, “How do you dare to go to Africa --- with all the shooting and violence?” And Peter said, “Well, we’ve lived in New York.”

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2. While we are on the topic of our Bed and Breakfast guests, one said, “A woman recently came up to me on the street and said, ‘I’m sorry that your sister died.’ I said, ‘My sister is very much alive. She is not dead.’ And the woman said very defensively, ‘Well, I couldn’t find her on Facebook.’”

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3. Life is no more than an uninterrupted series of learning experiences. Because nobody can know everything and because we all know different things, there is never a paucity of "fools who rush in where angels fear to tread." There are harmless in house jokes for every occupation. Take, for example, the novice in the garage who is sent out to find a left-handed monkey wrench. The medical profession nailed me twice with their in-house jokes and that is the topic of our present conversation. Years ago I was to have some medical procedure. I was given some liquid and told to drink it down at such and such a time. I did. But they don't tell you what sodium phosphate does and I drank it 30 minutes before I was to appear on stage in Houlton. Of course when I mentioned it to my doctor and the nurse the next day, it was, "Ho ho ho. We thought you knew." This came to mind even more recently when the fresh water that was flushed into the toilet bowl was gray. I checked the other toilet and that water was clear. And the water in the tank was clear. Then I realized that they gray was not coming from the tank but was washing back from the exit pipe. So I poked it with the toilet brush and there was, indeed, something gray in there. And then it came to me. To investigate the possibility of patching up my stomach, on Tuesday they gave me a barium swallow. Google says: "What are the risks of a barium swallow? ... Constipation or fecal impaction may occur if the barium isn't completely eliminated from the body." Well, the barium was completely eliminated from my body. And I know this because I had the impression I had left behind a piece of rough and scratchy volcanic rock the size of a baseball. These are things your medical friends don't tell you. "Hey boy, for the next two days, you'd better use the old privy because there is no way you can flush those things because they'll wedge like rocks in the pipe." Although I have just left you with two valuable pieces of information, I truly hope that they are things that you will never, ever need to know.

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4. Brandon writes: So.. I had the pleasure to catch your show this morning and truly enjoyed it. No doubt I will become a frequent watcher from here on. To get to the point, I love all of the old music you play it is very refreshing to hear. There was a song in particular i heard this morning that was very humorous, sounded like old jazz.. "Every time i _____ her, she ____" something like that.. There were horns or something playing in the blank spaces.. Please let me know if you recall which song i am referring to. I'd very much like to laugh with it again. Thank you very much for your time and keep up the awesome show! I love your brand of humor , I will definitely keep watching. Thank you Brandon. The song was Spike Jones playing, I Dream of Brownie With The Light Blue Jeans.

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5. It was over 50 years ago that I got my undergraduate degree, which entitled me to attend the Gorham Alumni Meeting. University President Cummings, who addressed our group, told a very funny joke. I know it was very funny because it got a big laugh. --- It was more than the nervous laugh you get from an audience when your first comment is no more humorous than, "Good morning." I didn't laugh. I didn't laugh because he dropped the volume of his voice when he came to the last three words in the punchline --- and I didn't hear those last very important three words. People who are hearing impaired can often hear an entire story and miss the point because they didn't hear one word in the entire paragraph. It happens often in dinner-table conversations. At the end of presentations, it is not unusual for me to mention to ministers or speakers that they dropped their voice when they came to the punchline and I didn't hear what they said. I do this, much as any professional in any profession offers advice to a colleague. A bass player might suggest to the piano player that some kind of a B change before going to an E adds a bit more flavor than hitting the E twice. And this is the way it should be. Does it distress me that so many people who stand before audiences on a fairly regular basis don't realize that a goodly percentage of the patient souls before them can't understand much of what they say? Not at all. Although I coach speakers whenever I can, I know that if everyone knew all of the "secrets" to public speaking, I wouldn't have got paid as much as I did for doing it.

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6. Although I often admit to you that I copy things off the internet and out of the encyclopedia and read them to you, this next rant is not out of O Henry. I want to say one more thing about squeezing more and more kids into bigger and bigger far away schools. Some very nice people moved into our neighborhood several years ago, but they were very vocal when it came to a vote on our school. Having realized the benefits of a smaller school, I was naturally in favor of a smaller school. There were 18 kids in my high school graduating class in 1953. It was the second biggest class to ever graduate from St. George high school. But our new neighbors were from away and so their frame of reference was bigger must be better. They were all in favor of the bigger school because, as I recall, they were afraid that in a smaller school their kid would not have much of a social life. That’s the way I remember it. Are you listening? Years later, and the last I heard, their kid did not want to go to the bigger consolidated school. And the last I heard his mother was driving him thirty or so miles every morning to a small school of his choice.

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7. One year the Exxon Mobil Corporation reported that it earned $10.49 billion in the third quarter, the second largest quarterly profit ever posted by a publicly traded American company. The largest on record was also reported ten yes ago by Exxon Mobil - $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter. Are you surprised that gas prices dropped and that the stock market went up just before that election? Would you be surprised to pay $4.00 a gallon for gas right after the election? Here’s the humble Farmer question of the week. If you owned an oil company that earned you 10 billion dollars in one quarter, how much would you be willing to pay to prevent the development of electric cars?

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8. Why do you enjoy being around certain people? Is it because you admire them and would like to be like them? Is it some gift they have that you wish you had? Is it that you can experience that gift just by being associated with them? On the other hand, why is it that you don’t even like to think about some people because they look so dopey and are always doing stupid things? --- I guess I’ll quit right there before you accuse me of talking politics.

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9. Someone remarked a while back that our new Maine State Prison is full. Of course if that is true, it is to be expected. Matter always expands to fill the allotted space. The proof can certainly be seen piled all around your office and your garage. My friend Davis has a solution. He suggests that instead of building you a bigger jail, you only get to spend 8 hours sleeping in your cell. The other 16 hours you would be required to be somewhere else. That way a jail could accommodate three times the number of prisoners that it does today. Please raise your hand if you think we should run a prison like a business.

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