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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for September 13, 2015.

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

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1. Young people today don’t know about moderation. Back when I was a kid we had neighbors who were moderate. One day Alva Harris was lying on his back underneath a car in his garage down there in Tenants Harbor when he saw some boots walking around the car. So Alva hollers out, is that you George? And George says, “Yes, you awful busy today Alva?” And Alva says, “What you need?” And George says, “My house is on fire.”

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2. I have solar radiant heat in the floor of my cellar which is my office and studio. I can't understand how people can pour a concrete floor nowadays for a henhouse or garage or gazebo or cellar and not at least put the orange pex pipes in so they can someday heat their space with the free rays from the sun. You don't have to hook it up this week or this year. But you should have those pipes in there because there will come a day when you see that all of your neighbors heat their floors and the spaces above them with the free rays from the sun and you'll wonder why nobody told you that you could do it too. Can you tell me what my neighbors have against getting free heat in a floor? I remember the first time I felt radiant heat in a shower floor. It was also in the little stone patio floor. It was in the home of a rich woman from away who has or had a house here in town. She had water heaters on her roof and she told me that there were little pipes in the floor that were continually flushed by warm liquid from her water heaters on the roof. I thought it was magic. It was great. I didn't understand it, but I wanted it. And that was probably only 6 or 7 years ago. And now I know it is so cheap and simple to install that if I were 20 years younger I'd put it in my garage and even in my driveway. I encourage my friends to do this, but it is like getting people who have always ridden in a horse drawn buggy to set foot in an automobile. Are you getting free heat from the sun in your home?

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3. Here’s a note that Winky’s mother sent in to school with Winky one day in 1943. Please excuse my son for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea and his boots leak.

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4 Here’s the silliest email I’ve seen this year. It says that someone invented a breast implant that can store and play music. This implant is considered a major social breakthrough, because women have always complained that men stare at their breasts and do not listen to them. You don’t have to think about this too long before you realize that this is true. Women do not want men staring at their breasts --- which is why women wear low cut dresses and suspend on a gold chain, about 8 inches below the chin, a shiny piece of metal. This flashy piece of metal is designed to divert and hold the eye’s attention. Every year loving husbands give their ageing wives one or two more gold links for the chain.

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5 Here’s a quote by Picasso that I found while looking for something else: When Picasso visited an exhibition of children's drawings, he said, "When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

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6. Here’s a curious quote by movie actor George Raft, who earned and spent about ten million dollars in the course of his career. George said, "Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."

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7. In reply to a post about the high cost of pills in America when compared to other countries, a Facebook friend wrote: “We give tramadol to our 12yo St. Bernard. A month's supply costs us $14 at the Vet. One time they were out of the pills and they had us pick up the pills at our pharmacy. The exact same pill in the exact same number cost us $34.” Well, I have this to say to anyone who can afford to keep a pet that one cannot eat. The cost of maintaining such an animal would seem to be inconsequential. I speak as a man who could never afford to have children. --- Or pets that I could not eat when they got big and fat. Although over the past 45 years I’ve had many pets that I’ve raised and loved and eaten, my last house pet was a rat named Vilkus (which means wolf in Lithuanian). Vilkus, the Wonder Rat, was given to me in 1969 for a course in psycholinguistics at the University of Rochester. I bemoaned his passing and did not eat him. I was training him to drive a small battery powered car. Anyway, I have this to say. If you can afford to keep a pet that you cannot eat, the cost of keeping such an animal in pills would seem to be inconsequential. Please remember that dogs are Mother Nature’s way of punishing people who have too much money.

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8. My friend Pegg says: I can't speak for others, but I rarely visit your page. This is good, as it is once again, a manifestation of Pegg’s wisdom. So many would be much better off if they, too, rarely visited this page. Too often one is likely to read on my Facebook page something that one would rather not think about.

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9. I said that I wouldn’t have a pet I couldn’t eat. A friend wrote this reply: The house next door to mine was broken into. The dogs woke me up around 1am with their barking that night. They didn't settle back down for half an hour. I looked outside but did not see anything out of place. The next morning I noticed the neighbors door lock was smashed. I find that having two hundred plus pound dogs in the house a far more effective crime deterrent than as a nutritional snack.” My friend continues on to say that he would rather pay for food and medicine for dogs than have robbers invade his house. Does this not bring up an interesting question? Over a 30-year period which do you think would cost and destroy more --- the expense and damage entailed in keeping two big guard dogs in your house, or the expense and damage entailed in a 15-minute robbery? Before you snap back at me with an answer, you might want to live with 200 pounds of dogs for 30 years. And please remember that with the robbery, you would get 30 years of suffering over with in one day. And that ought to be worth something right there.

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