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

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May 28, 2017 TV Rants

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1. Your tip for the week comes from our good friend Robert in Brunswick who says, “Don't eat any sandwiches that have been sitting on the display shelf at the delicatessen for more than a week.” Robert is obviously unmarried. Men who are married don’t need that kind of advice.

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2 I must have been around 60 the first time I saw the Internet or got a computer. I knew I had to have a computer because they said it would print 5,000 addresses on envelopes. For most of my life we addressed envelopes by hand or printed names on sticky labels and pasted the labels on the envelopes. The first computer I had saved the names on tapes and it would go peep, peep, peep when it was printing the names on envelopes. It was a fantastic technological advancement. Seems as it would print 200 names before you had to put in another tape. I still have that tape deck thing and it is probably a museum piece now. How things have changed. Nowadays we not only exchange letters electronically with our friends, but also video files. I got one a video file today that showed a deer that had broken through the ice in a shallow pond. The way I understand it, a helicopter hovered over the deer and the downward prop thrust blew the deer onto the ice and across the ice. The last of the video shows the deer running off through the woods. Then you play the video again, because you know that as soon as the helicopter is gone, that deer is going to walk back out on that thin ice and fall into the pond again.

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3. Tell me if someone you know or someone you have heard of comes to mind as I tell this truthful little tale. There are many innocent people in jail today because while they were drunk or on drugs they took the rap for someone else. Their crime was stupidity. You might have read that a man who was convicted of murder and spent 16 years in jail was recently exonerated and released. It goes without saying that any evidence that would have proved this man’s innocence was not presented at the original trial. And, guess what --- he never would have been a suspect to begin with, had he not been smoking crack cocaine in the area where the crime was committed.

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4. May we pause here and shed just one tear for the demise of the American hero? Can you remember the last time you saw a hero? Or did heroes wither and fade away so gradually, much like the standard of living we once enjoyed, that you didn’t even notice that something you once took for granted was gone? Of course young people always take the status quo for granted. Nowadays college graduates expect to spend the next 15 or 20 years paying off their college loans, and would find it hard to believe that the $10 we were able to earn on Saturdays paid for our food and room and that we graduated without owing a cent. And nowadays young people don’t know that, back when men had a function, heroes used to rush in at the last minute to save the girl. In a pinch she tossed her hair over the balcony and the hero climbed up on it. But this is the way you’ll see it played now: The bad guy with a gun or knife moves toward the helpless heroine. Her male friends are outside, guns in hand, trying to break down a door or climb in a window. But as the door gives in they hear screams and they know they’re too late. Sure enough, when they rush down into the cellar, she is drinking a Starbucks coffee and the battered bad guy is on the floor, hog tied hand, foot and mouth with duct tape.

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5. Yes. I recycle. From time to time you hear me repeat something that you heard me say weeks or years ago and that is what you are going to hear now. The dirtiest hotels in the world. That was what the junk email said. Of course I had to Google The dirtiest hotels in the world so I could see where they were. Number one is in San Francisco. Let me read you a sample of the reviews: “First and foremost no one should ever walk into a hotel only to find prostitutes walking around the inside.” Think about this. What reason would they have to complain about a prostitute who was on her feet?

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6. We have in Maine an agency called the Maine Film Office. When someone in Hollywood with 50 million dollars wants to film a Stephen King movie in Maine, our Maine Film Office will help them spend as much of that money as possible in Maine. And it came to pass that a movie producer called the Maine Film Office and asked where he could hear what a Maine accent sounded like. Much money was on the line, so arrangements were quickly made for the producer and a writer to quietly visit Tall Barney’s in Jonesport where lobstermen were known to drink coffee and talk. The visitors were told to show up early but to not sit in the center because that was “The Liar’s Table” where the lobstermen sat. The visitors should sit at a nearby table where they could order a coffee and hear what was going on. All went according to plan. The fishermen arrived on time and talked and the Hollywood people sat nearby and listened. But it was a somewhat shaken pair that checked in with the Maine Film Office later in the day because --- they couldn’t believe what they’d heard. For over two solid hours the only thing the lobstermen talked about was golf.

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7. Some of us tend to make life more complicated than it needs to be. You know what I’m talking about because we both have friends who see simple and straight forward solutions to everything. For example, my neighbor Don, who comes from up in the County, said that it was a waste of taxpayer money to keep people on death row for 15 or 20 years. I told Don about a man who just got out of jail after serving 16 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Don said, “That’s what I mean. That wouldn’t have happened if they’d just shot him.”

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8. We often talk about the mistakes young boys make because I can testify from firsthand experience. But our present topic is young girls, for which I have only hearsay. A woman close to 80, who outlived her first husband, is starting to require a bit of medical attention. Showing signs of mild decay, like the Wonderful One Hoss Shay. She recently told me that she lived her life backwards. When she was young and healthy, she was married to a doctor.

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9. From time to time, lobstermen who feel they are being crowded, cut off the offender’s traps. Like any war, this escalates until the ocean floor is littered with thousands of dollars worth of lobster traps and people start pointing guns at each other. Sometimes they attempt to ram the other fellow’s boat or shoot at him. It can get very ugly. Here’s a comment someone posted on a blog about a recent lobster war: "Arson, cutting traps, stealing from traps, sinking boats, attempted murder, must be a fortune out there in Lobsters to commit these types of crimes." Is this not an astute observation? How many people have you heard of who shot at each other for the right to mow some rich man’s lawn?

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10. You have seen movies where the hero and the girl struggle up out of an ash filled volcanic crater. As they reach the summit, they gaze into each other’s eyes and, unable to control themselves, snap together like the waist band in a new pair of pajamas. You have seen movies where, after crawling through a million gallons of spilled crude oil, the hero and the girl meld into one glorious black glob. To bring it closer to home, perhaps you have welcomed your spouse in a similar manner when he comes home from 12 hours of baiting lobster traps. But --- today when I walked up to my loving wife, held out my arms, and said, “Can I have a hug?” she looked me up and down and said, “Are you clean?” Should I assume from this that the honeymoon is over?

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11. You might have read that when a woman wears a leather dress, a man's heart beats quicker, his throat gets dry, he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally. They say it is because she smells like a new truck.

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12. The date on the article was February 10, 1918. It had to do with WWI draft dodgers in Arizona. When the sheriff and his posse showed up at the ranch house, the draft dodgers shot the sheriff --- and the posse. You can see why they really wanted those boys in the army.

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13. I happened to be standing in the kitchen and said to my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, “Let’s fight to see what it’s like.” What do you think she said? “I don’t have time.”

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