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

+

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

+

Rants January 15, 2017

+

1. My old neighbor Gramp Wiley said, “You don’t remember Tauno --- worked in the boat yard? One day a little cross-eyed fellow came in and said, ‘You’re two months behind on your car payments. I’m going to take it.’ “And Tauno puts down his caulking hammer and says, ‘You do what you have to do, but before you go out that door I’m going to straighten out your eyes.’”

+

2. In response to a newspaper article about the noise generated by a building inhabited by college freshmen, a reader writes, “Now you're actually seeing what your little angels actually do in college and HUGE SURPRISE, everyone wants to blame the town, the cops, the facility........how about someone blame the undisciplined kids (adults technically) and the parents that raised these maniacs.” You're right about the parents. Parents really don't know how to raise children until they are grandparents. And then they wring their hands and worry because their children don't know how to raise children. I was a tee totaling wimp and a veteran when I started college so I was able to stand back in the shadows and simply observe the usual first-year-away-from-mama madness. It is a right of passage any way you want to spell rite. Anthropologists have spent years in jungles and deserts and Chicago studying the phenomenon of coming of age. May I confess that several years of bravely fighting for my country in the Coast Guard were well behind me when I started college, and that I lived in lonely rooms rented out by quiet elderly folk in their 30's and never in a college dorm? Because I was supporting myself, most of my time out of class was spent grubbing for food and rent money. I don't mean to tell you that I haven't spent many, many nights in a frat house where there was hollering and drinking and who knows who was doing what to whom upstairs or in the cellar, but I was in the band that was making most of the noise.

+

3. How often do you find a web page that is not user friendly? I just tried to buy a small decal for Marsha's shiny looking car with 262,000 miles on it, but failed. tried to place an order, but couldn't get to the check out page. If it happened to me, it must have happened to dozens of other senile elderly people. One wonders if they test these pages that are made by computer savvy kids on people who might use them. Probably not.

+

4. Marsha’s laptop computer locked up. I went on Facebook and asked how to unlock it. The first reply I got said to take the battery out of it. Wanting to know how to take the battery out of the laptop that was given to Marsha by her affluent Dutch nephew, I Googled for instructions. Although I think that I am a relatively peaceful man, I wanted to jump out of my chair and strangle, with my bare hands, the child who wrote these instructions: Follow these steps: Turn off your laptop and disconnect the AC adapter. Release the latch or other attachment devices that hold your battery in place. Slide the old battery out of its compartment or storage bay. Take the replacement battery out of the box. Slide it into the notch or bay. --- Release the latch or other attachment devices that hold your battery in place? If I knew how to do this, would I ask how I could Release the latch or other attachment devices that hold your battery in place? This is tantamount to telling a cave man sitting in your car to push in the clutch. How would he know what a clutch was or where to find it? A good start would be showing me a picture of a laptop with an arrow pointing to the place where the batter is located. It would also be nice to see a picture of the battery so I'd know if I had a battery in my hand or perhaps part of the computer's liver instead. Well. After going through all this, a computer savvy friend said to hold down the start button and count to 10. Let it up and count to 10. I did. And I did. And just by pushing that start button and holding it down I cured the locked computer problem and didn’t need to worry about batteries or anything else. I don’t know how I’d do anything if I couldn’t ask my Facebook friends about how to proceed. Anyone who says that Facebook is a worthless waste of time doesn’t have the right kind of friends.

+

5. I'm laughing at myself today. I just learned something. Ever hear of Kobo? While walking my mile earlier this morning I was looking at my Dutch flash cards. I didn't bring one Dutch book with me so thought I'd buy a De Cock book on line. De Cock is a Dutch detective and I enjoy reading about him. Why should I continue to increase my Dutch vocabulary if I don't keep up by reading it every day? $35 and such for these books because they have to come from Germany or somewhere in Europe. Then -- I found one at a reasonable price, but the machine told me that I'd already bought it. Nice machine. But then I found a whole list of De Cock detective books. For $5.56 each. And they said because it was my first purchase, I got $5 off. So they took 56 cents out of my PayPal account, which had just about enough in there to buy one book. I kept looking for shipping charge and didn't see it anywhere. At last, after they got my 56 cents, I realized I'd signed up to read the book on line. Have you ever read a book on line? How would anyone do it?: I suppose if we can ever get Marsha's laptop going again, I could read it in bed. --- If I could figure out how to get the book into my computer. Do you think it is worth my while learning how to read a book on line? You know as well as I do, that were I to learn how to do it, they would change the process and I'd be right back where I am today.

+

6. There are things that should not be mentioned on the radio and we are going to talk about one of them now. You might remember that not long ago I said something about a man who discovered, much to his surprise, that his second wife was even nuttier than his first wife. Well, I’m not going to tell you how many threatening letters I got from men who said I’d better stop talking about them on the radio, but I am going to tell you that I’m never going to do it again.

+

7. You heard about it. Wasn’t it refreshing to hear that the London man who robbed that woman last week was well dressed? He pushed open the door to her room, slammed her around, tore out the telephone and took purses and cameras. Is this not a great improvement from the old raggedy Fagan image that’s been popularized on stage and screen? Would it not seem to indicate that everybody’s standard of living has improved?

+

8. Who should send me a letter but my radio friend Bill who runs around in a car with a red light on the roof trying to help people who get their toes caught in a crack. He’s pulled people out of the water and out of car wrecks and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been called by folks who needed to get to work but were trapped in the cabin by a rutting bull moose. Bill saw a post on my Facebook page that says, “Good moms let you lick the beaters. Great moms turn them off first.” Bill writes, “I once went to a call where 2 newlyweds were making a cake. She let him lick the beater, but accidentally hit the switch. His tongue was so enmeshed in the beater that it had to be cut apart with a bolt cutter. I will never forget either of their faces. I wonder if they are still married.” Do you believe that story or do you think Bill made it up? If you have ever taught school you know that story is true, because you have probably had the pleasure of seeing the children from several similar couples in some of your classes.

+

9. My wife Marsha, The APW and I have a new thing called a Roku box. We have cancelled our television, kept the cable for the Internet, and watch Columbo and Monk and movies on Roku. No longer able to watch the morning Today show, we eat breakfast side by side --- I, drinking my rolled oats from the pan, and Marsha eating peanut butter and marshmallow on a freshly peeled banana. So now, for the first time in over 25 years of a happy marriage, we talk to each other over breakfast, and have discovered so many disturbing things about each other that hardly a day goes by but what one or the other of us doesn't secretly plan on filing for divorce.

+

11. We’ve all done incredibly stupid things that we don't want anyone to know about so it’s pretty easy to visualize what we’re talking about here. I'm talking about the man who hurt himself trying to pull a metal sign out of a pine tree with an ATV. Something snapped and he was injured. We read that “Alcohol does not appear to be a factor." If this had happened to me, I would rather have it say in the paper that I was drunk.

+