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

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In February, 2017, I paid ASCAP $200. or so for the right to run this radio show for you on the Internet. Although we are not starving, if you would show your appreciation by donating a small contribution to my PayPal account, you would earn an inedible spot on The humble Farmer's wall of fame.

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Rants March 26, 2017

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1. I can tell you that when you are 81, you don’t feel a bit different than you did when you were 22. When I was 22 I was so tired I couldn’t get out of my tracks then, either. But --- some things do change when you get old and I’m going to tell you about one of them. The other night when my wife Marsha cleaned the dishes off the supper table, she said, “Are you going to finish eating the rest of the salad that’s on your shirt?”

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2. The email said that the “St. George Community Sailing Foundation teaches sailing, seamanship, and water safety to young sailors, ages 9-18, of all skill levels in beautiful Tenants Harbor on the coast of Maine.” Learn how to sail a boat. What a fun thing for kids to do. In 1946 we had a few old neighbors who used to sail boats and a lot of neighbors who earned a living in power boats, but back then I never heard of one kid in St. George who wanted to learn how to sail a boat.

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3. Do you know what kind of memories talk of sailing a boat invokes in an old man who was born in a community that went to sea? When I was 10, I listened to old men who had learned to sail when they were children. Captain Thomas told me of hearing the mate's boots clumping down the ladder to wake him in the morning. --- And what it was like to work up in the rigging, who knows how far from the deck, trying to straighten things out in a gale --- when he was 14 years old. If you couldn’t hang on, they probably didn’t ask you to do it again. I can still see Captain Thomas looking down at me with a smile as he shook his head and said over and over, “You don’t know. You don’t know.”

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4. Can you imagine letting a 14-year-old work on a vessel hauling freight between New York City and Japan? For generations of St. George people, going to sea before you were old enough to shave was the norm. By the time he was 19, Ardie Thomas was a captain. As I recall, the ship's owners wrote to St. George and asked for A. Thomas, his older brother Arthur, but he took the job instead. Although he'd been at sea for 4 or so years by then, he said he learned celestial navigation by some serious reading in his cabin very soon after he was captain of his own coaster. He told me that he could come up from Cuba to New York City and, when he couldn’t read the stars, put his bow right on the Ambrose lightship with only dead reckoning and a lead line. He said that the masts were so high on one of his ships that he cleaned off the topmost flag going under some bridge coming into New York.

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5. Captain Thomas’s great grandfather was a brother to my great grandfather Gilchrest. On one side of his gravestone is carved, "Lost At Sea." Mother said that Andy Wyeth painted a close-up of that side of the stone years ago but I never saw it. The H. S. Gregory, a big square-rigger, was built in Thomaston by my grandfather’s uncle. The captain was his cousin, Ed Watts. One of the chief owners was Samuel Watts, a distant cousin. In 1882 my mother's father was on this H. S. Gregory, hauling wheat from the west coast to Ireland, when it sprung a leak off Cape Horn in a storm. The carpenter died trying to fix the pump which was clogged with wet wheat. The captain and all but five of the crew were blinded by the fumes. Six hundred miles off Ireland they were finally sighted by another vessel and were taken by breeches buoy into a lifeboat. When grandfather finally got home he could have been captain on his next voyage, but thought better of it and never went again.

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6. When I was a kid some of my neighbors couldn't look at a painting of a schooner without pointing out that this or that line was missing or in the wrong place. So now another generation St. George kids who can raise the cash for a two-week class can learn how to sail. The course is taught by people I don’t know who can do things I can’t do. We appreciate their willingness to teach young people how to sail, and hope that the students will always have the time and resources to support their hobby. The life of a sailor is not without risk. More than a few St. George people left the dock and not come back. I might have told you about Captain Freddy who went to sea at 17, rather late in life. He’d been asked to go before when Captain Watts wanted him to help haul a load of coal from Baltimore and around Cape Horn to Japan. Because most of the crew were from other countries, the captain liked have a few local boys aboard. Freddy’s mother had lost so many relatives to the sea that she pleaded with him to not go. In telling about it 60 years later, Captain Freddy said, “Kind of funny how that turned out. That vessel simply disappeared and they never found a trace of it. I suppose it’s just as well that I didn’t go.”

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7. It's been a tough year for those who drink while driving snowmobiles and authorities are looking for common characteristics found in men who crack up. Here's one they might want to investigate. My friend John Reilly told me that he once saw a guy standing up on a snowmobile, rocking it back and forth, as it shot across an icy pond at 70 miles an hour. It flipped, and the man and his wife were thrown on the ice. When the man stopped spinning, he immediately got up and rushed over to make sure that the snowmobile was OK.

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8. When was the last time you read the Count of Monte Cristo? I think I read it the first time when I was 12 or so and I've thought about it from time to time ever since. You'll remember the Count of Monte Cristo was worth a hundred million back before anyone ever heard of Exxon profits. His goal in life was to destroy the three characters who had trumped up charges that had put him in jail, which is where he met the priest who taught him all the languages and told him where the treasure was buried that made him rich. You remember all that. Anyway, this Count of Monte Cristo guy made Exxon executives look like bottle pickers. I mean he was loaded. One day one of The Count's enemies, who was a banker named Danglers, came up to him and said that if he, the Count, would do business with the Dangler's bank, he was prepared to issue him a million dollars worth of credit. Whereupon, the Count of Monte Cristo pulled a roll out of his pocket and said, "I carry that much around for pocket change. Of what use would I have for such a trifling sum?" All of this was brought to mind when a very nice girl called me on the phone to tell me that she could save me from the high interest rates I'm presently paying on my present credit card. I told her that if I ever did have to use it, there was no interest because I was in the habit of paying it off every month. That didn't slow her down a bit, because she started off on another tack. She said they were prepared to give me a platinum card that was good for $40,000. You've already figured out what I said then, haven't you? Going to use it yourself the next time they call and offer you $40,000, aren't you? "Of what use would I have for such a trifling sum?"

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9. Radio friend Bruce down in New Hampshire sent us this: i was looking at the Wikipedia entry for art farmer and came upon this: > His identical twin brother, Addison Farmer was a bassist. once, when an interviewer asked the brothers how they told each other apart, Art replied: "In the morning, I pick up the bass and if I can't play it, I know I'm Art."

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10. Dear humble-- Emma was learning to drive the other day and it was raining. She was sitting in the car and waiting to pull out into traffic and I was beside her offering words of wisdom. So I said, "Now, Emma, when it is raining, you need to leave plenty of room between the cars when you pull out into traffic. She heard. "Now, Emma." and pulled out into the intersection and smashed into a minivan --- It could have been much worse. Yes, Thank you for passing that along. I am reading your letter because I think we all enjoy hearing things like this. It lets us know that we are not alone.

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10. My wife Marsha has 47 first cousins and one of them visited us. She said they had an exchange student in their home for two weeks. Of course, they asked for one who didn't smoke. He was a French kid from Zieer and they picked him because his picture looked so sweet, and they figured he'd be less worldly than a French kid from France. But when he arrived he showed them some nude pictures of himself and told them that his father and grandfather had taken him to a brothel to get him drunk on his sixteenth birthday. Of course, you go down way east on the coast of Maine and that kind of party wouldn't be necessary. But then the cousin found a heap of cigarette butts underneath this kid's bedroom window. I'll bet he'll think twice before he lies on his application again, because they punished him. They made him drive in Boston.

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11. You are only one of millions of people who heard about the freshman at Eagle Rock Junior High who won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to the alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide." --- and for plenty of good reasons, since it can 1. cause excessive sweating and vomiting 2. it is a major component in acid rain 3. it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state 4. accidental inhalation can kill you 5. it contributes to erosion 6. it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes 7. it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical. Forty-three said yes, six were undecided, and only one knew that the chemical was water. The title of his prize winning project was, "How Gullible Are We?"

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