Maine Reality TV --- The humble Farmer's TV show on YouTube.

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On January 18, 2016, my 80th birthday, I paid ASCAP $246 for the right to run this radio show for you on the Internet. Although we are not starving, any help you might send along would be appreciated. humble

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TV Rants January 1, 2017

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1. Do you think you have a domesticated house pet in your home? Have you ever realized that a house pet is not domesticated until it refuses to eat you when you’re dead?

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2. You heard on some television show about the two men in Waldoboro, Maine who worked together for several weeks before they figured out that they were brothers. And when these two new-found brothers appeared on the news, a sister soon appeared. And a day or two later, even another sister. Discovering lost or unknown siblings who were farmed out at an early age is neither new nor unique, and you can be sure that there are hundreds of similar cases that nobody hears about, only because they don’t make the national news. Let me give you an example. A few years ago I continued working on the Gilchrest family tree that my grandfather Gilchrest started back in the 1920s. I called relatives I knew and asked them to send birth and marriage dates of their siblings and children and before long I had collected hundreds of relatives. I live on the farm that once belonged to my great-grandfather’s cousin, Larkin Gilchrest. And when I called one woman, who was a granddaughter or great granddaughter of Larkin Gilchrest, she said in so many words that I should mind my own business. But I continued my research. Years later one of her daughters showed up here at my farm and was looking at my computer screen over my shoulder when I said, “And this is your sister.” She said, “But I don’t have any sisters.”

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3. I feel very good about myself today. I don’t know if the alignment of the stars has anything to do with it or not, but I feel very comfortable. I am at peace with the world and it might be because I have finally done something that very few people do. I have made preparations for a day in the future. I know that day will come for me, and you know that day will come for you. I will be ready when that day comes, but will you? I have that inner glow --- that feeling of security, well being and contentment that is only felt --- by a man who has taken his new telephone book --- and has pasted, right on the front cover, the hours that the dump is open.

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4. When I told my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, about germ killer in a bottle, she said, "everybody knows it." Then she comes back a few minutes later and says: “You know those three round tubes that roll around on the floor in the back seat?” “Yes.” “Do you know what they are?” “No” “One of them is to wash the windows and the other two are hand sanitizers that clean germs off your hands. People use them before touching the handle on a shopping cart. I’ve been telling you about them for years.” I think it might have been Aristotle who first said, “Show me a person who is always washing his hands and I’ll show you a person who sucks on this thumb and picks his nose.” I’ve seen those slimy things you wipe your hands on while going on long trips in the car and I never believed in them. But now I guess I will start using them, now that I know what they can do for me when I’m not near a sink where I can wash my hands. Is it possible that a man who went to college until he was 34 and then was single until he was 54 could miss out learning about a lot of things that people who could afford to have children take for granted? Not being married like “normal” people might be compared with language learning: if somebody doesn’t teach you how to articulate coherent morphemes until you’re 54 there’s a good chance you’ll never get it and will continue to howl like a wolf whenever you’re hungry.

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5. From watching me on television, you can see that I'm quite a natty dresser. I spare no expense to look good for you, my friend. But my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is from Connecticut, where they have a different standard. And one day she asked me why I always wore such shabby clothes. I said, "Clothes don’t amount to anything. It’s the body underneath that counts." And she said, "Don't make it any worse than it already is."

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6. I drink grape drink. It comes in quart bottles and because companies are no longer required to tell consumers where anything comes from, guess why, my grape drink might well have been bottled in Bangkok by bare-footed child laborers with blue feet and runny noses. And that’s only their day job. I don’t drink grape drink straight for two reasons: it’s very expensive and it’s too strong if you drink it straight. So I fill a glass about half an inch from the top with water and top it off with grape drink as my wife says, “Why do you fill that glass so full? You know you’re going to spill it.” And I might have 5 or 6 grape juice and water cocktails during the day, because you know as well as I do that the body requires liquids. This morning there was a round quart bottle in the refrigerator beside my grape concentrate and I asked my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, what was in that round quart bottle. She said it was my grape drink. She’d made ice tea for herself and put it in the rectangular grape bottle and put my grape concentrate in the round bottle. And when she looked at the grape bottle containing her ice tea she said, sounding very much like baby bear, “Someone’s been drinking my ice tea.” This was true. Yesterday I’d made myself several grape juice and water cocktails out of ice tea and water and I’d never noticed the difference. Which just goes to show.

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7. Please listen to this. I read it in the paper. "I have driven close to 1 million miles in all kinds of weather, traffic, urban commutes, rural commutes, various obstacles, blinding sun, and never had a crash." It takes a certain kind of person to be able to write this. I couldn't do it, could you? Would you dare say that you’d never crashed in an automobile? Do you know what would happen to me tomorrow if I said that I’d never been struck by lightning?

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8. We read of a young man who flipped his van while playing with his cell phone. It’s my understanding that cell phones can cost up to $400. Does causing accidents really require that much technology or expense? Back in the good old days when we wanted to flip the pickup --- or just live dangerously --- we’d simply drive to town with an unrestrained dog in the cab.

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9. A few years ago a friend gave me a crash course on how to pick up women. At the time he imparted this information I was married, but very quickly realized that many young men would pay to have it. So we sat down by a mike and spent an hour or so reviewing and recording the more salient points of picking up women wherever you might be. Like building a computer or choreographing an elaborate ballet, it is an exact and almost infallible science. When I transcribed the whole business later, I had several pages of 12 point type. But --- by the time my friend came around later to help me polish the document I realized I had a dangerous, powerful tool in my hands. From what you’ve seen on TV you know that bad guys can already cause enough trouble without adding to their bag of tricks, so I’ve abandoned this branch of the social sciences. Because this information might be misused to hurt someone, I don’t feel it would be morally right for me to blab it around. So it was inevitable that my voluntarily suppressed pamphlet on how to pick up women came to mind when I heard that a man was arrested for selling a how-to pedophile book. You might have also heard that the lawman who arrested him keeps a Bible on his desk. And you might ask yourself which of those two books has caused the most death and destruction. Anyway, one day while thinking about my little how-to pick up women pamphlet, I asked a very smart woman if there were any special techniques women use to pick up men. She said, “You look them in the eye and snap your fingers as you point at the floor in front of you. When they walk over, you pat them on the head.”

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10. You probably have friends who are always talking about how we should get rid of all the bad people. A reader writes this about something that happened recently --- don’t ask me what it was : "About time, hopefully this will clean out some bad people." Cleaning out bad people is an interesting concept. But, have you ever asked yourself where the bad people go once they've been cleaned out? Some folks actually worked this out a long time ago. There was a time when bad people were put on boats and sent far away over the ocean. We are the result.

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11. I’ve been putting off telling you about this but today we’re going to talk about procrastination. Structured procrastination. Psychologists suggest that procrastination, if structured, can have some benefits. Let me explain structured procrastination. You know that when you have something that’s hard to do, you put it off by doing some other easy meaningless task like sorting out a jumbled up mess of screws by their length into little jars. That’s what psychologists call structured procrastination. Unless you are a Type A person who can crush walnuts with the power of your mind, you can think of examples of structured procrastination in your own life. Oh yes. Structured procrastination is the only thing that enables many of us to get anything done. The only time I clean up all the clutter in my office is when I’m putting off making a radio or television program.

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12. They say that if you look for something on the Internet, the next time you click there will be ads for that item on the side of your webpage. I only mention this because for the past few days I’ve been getting ads for luxury automobiles. If you can tell me what I could have possible have done to warrant ads for a Jaguar automobile on my web page, please let me know.

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13. Here’s a letter from Tim White who writes, “My parents told me, "We want you to be happy. We want you to have a better life than we did." So I didn't have kids.”

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