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 April 9, 2017

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1. A woman once knocked at my door. When I opened it, I saw her standing there with her small dog. I said, "Hi doggie." After thinking about that for a couple of seconds, I said, "How does it feel to have someone ignore you and greet your dog?" She said, "It's like living with my husband."

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2. In a small town way down in the eastern part of Maine, which is Washington county, two friends were talking. And one allowed as how social opportunities were somewhat limited there. He said, “You know, I have dated every woman in Washington County except my mother and my sister.” And his friend said, “Well, you ain’t missed much.”

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3. How do you know when the honeymoon is over? What made you realize that you had been married a long, long time? One morning when I woke up, before I could even groan and get my eyes open, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, whispered in my ear, “Will you put the windows back in so I can finish painting them?”

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4. Perhaps you get these emails, too. The ones that ask you for $5 or $25 to help defeat someone in Congress who is not doing the job that really needs to be done. The one that came today says, “If we can hit $1 million this week, we'll have a great shot of replacing Sen” so and so. Isn’t this staggering? That it takes millions of dollars to run for Congress? This means that you can’t run for Congress unless you are very well heeled to begin with and even then your friends are going to have to kick in millions of dollars to buy the television ads that are necessary to get you elected. Of course, then the people who put up the money will own the person who wins the election. With our present system, that only makes sense: If you turn your back on the people who gave you the money that got you into Congress, wouldn’t they be foolish to help you get elected again? That’s the system we have now. Can you imagine an election where no political advertisements of any kind were allowed and voters made their decisions on what the candidates said during debates? Don’t expect to see your local newspapers or television stations come out in favor of such a system. And until you do see that day, it’s a pretty safe bet that the candidates who have the richest friends will win most of the elections. From what I’ve heard and seen of Congress over the past 50 years, I don’t know if that’s a good thing, do you?

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5. People from away don’t understand how we do things here in Maine. I have 200 or so rhubarb plants. I used to give away a lot of rhubarb. But my friends didn’t want to take it when I said it was free, so I started snapping a rubber band around a handful of it and putting it on a chrome plated farm stand out by the road. You get it by the bunch, because if I ever put it out by the pound, even though it might be 8 ounces over, there would come a day when someone would howl that it was one ounce short. But a bunch is a bunch. One day, a man from away was watching me snap it off, cut off the huge leaf, and put the stalk on the five by five inch top of an ancient blue spring scale that I carry down to the rhubarb patch. Every once in a while I’d snatch it up, snap a rubber band around it and throw the bunch aside. The man watching said, “That scale don’t work.” Of course it works. When I can’t get no more on the top of the scale and it starts to fall off, you’ve got a bunch. 050520

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6. Someone told my wife she would enjoy reading Pillars of The Earth. Knowing that it is about life in England 800 years ago I found a synopsis of the plot. Halfway through the first paragraph it said, “Alfred comes to despise Jack because he is clever and can read.” Nothing changes. This is the delineating dichotomy that causes most of the jealousy and hate in our society today.

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7. I was trying to sell a three wheel bike on the list of Craig. My friend John Hammer wrote this ad to help me sell it: "Racing trike, disguised to look fatigued so no one will steal it. Mechanically restored for 'go', not 'show'. Be the first at the 4 p.m. Super-early Bird Specials; no one will pass you on the way to 9 a.m. Bingo opening!" And it IS a steal, at just such and such dollars (Must sell to pay for speeding tickets)” If John Hammer were running for office, wouldn’t you have to vote for him?

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8. Did you know that your cell phone conversations might be overheard by people who have radios, hearing aids or scanners? Because cell phones seem to work very well at the end of my driveway, people often stop there when they want to make a call from their cars. And I have a vague memory of being in a position to listen to them 10 or 20 years ago. I’m not sure, but I might have heard them on the radio in my truck. If you have hearing aids, they might also pick up sounds that are passing by in the air. I have to take out my hearing aids before using the phone because they do all kinds of weird things. One day I was making a radio program when the phone rang. I was using my wireless mike that is part of a system with rabbit ears that stick up out of a black box and when the phone rang I heard things I’d never heard before. If you heard that particular radio program, you might remember that it caused me to break down in the middle of a story I was telling. Anyway, have you ever stopped to consider that the Wiki leaks brouhaha is really nothing compared to what your neighbor next door is probably learning about your personal life on his scanner?

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9. You know that I still live in a village where my people have lived for over 250 years. So it should come as no surprise to you that I am related to almost everyone here, except the new families that have moved in since the War of 1812. When I was a little boy, Captain Thomas, who was born in 1877 and was a third cousin to me, used to look at me and say, "You don't know. You don't know." I am now older than Captain Thomas was then and I finally understand what he was saying to me. --- And what he was thinking when he looked at me. I once spoke with a fine young man of 22 or so, and I thought the same thing when I looked at him. You don’t know. I wished that there was some way I could shift some things from my brain to his. I wished I could give him the pleasant memories I have of his people for six or so generations. And how good all of those old folks were to me when I was a little boy. I knew his great-great-great-great grandmother. And when I was a little boy her daughter (who was born in 1878) was one of my favorite people. And later there were some things I did with this boy's grandfather and some things I saw his grandfather do. And when I spoke with that boy on that day, I kept thinking, "You don't know. You don't know. --- And it is just as well, when it comes to some things, that you don't know."

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10. Claire, who is a Facebook friend, sent me a picture of her back door. Claire has 8-foot lengths of firewood standing beside the door. Years ago, when I was in the process of destroying my lungs with wood smoke from a kitchen stove, I didn't do that with my firewood. I just threw it on the ground, and after a few snowstorms and ice storms, by the time March rolled around I had to chop my alders out of the ice with an axe. I wish I’d thought of standing my firewood on end by the back door. It is the kind of technological advance that warrants a picture on any timeline showing the ascent of man.

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11. You've heard about body language --- that you can tell what a person is thinking by the way they stand. The body language experts will tell you that anyone who has his arms folded across his chest is aloof and uncommunicative. That might be true in Boston, but on the street in Rockland, Maine it could mean that you slopped clam chowder on your sweater.

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12. Marsha and are not into fancy cars. I mentioned that I would imagine from the ads I see on TV, a lot of people must be making a monthly payment to have a newer car than their neighbor. Tim says, “Don't assume that the motive to buy a new car is primarily competitive consumerism. The way cars are built these days, and the way New England winters have always treated them, buying a new car is a strategic move akin to leaping from a rapidly fracturing ice floe to one that has not yet deteriorated.” Tim might well have added, that some men do the same with their wives.

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13. Here’s something I learned on You Tube. In Africa they are using teams of rats to detect TB bacteria in saliva samples from four clinics serving slum neighborhoods. So far this year, the 25 rats trained for the pilot medical project have identified 300 cases of early-stage TB - infections missed by lab technicians with their microscopes. If not for the rodents, many of these victims would have died and others would have spread the disease. Fifty years ago when I was a grad student at the University of Rochester I learned how to train rats. But I had no idea then that rats could be trained to sniff out land mines or to sniff out disease. Have you heard anything about using rats to sniff out disease in this country? I doubt if they’d use it here because it’s simple, nobody would make any money selling it, and it works.

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