We hear that the economy is in bad shape. And although I don’t have any answers, I might have the same questions as you do. You might remember that Mr. Nixon did better in the polls than Santa Claus when he opened the doors to China and by so doing put us where we are today.
Which is broke.
Three generations ago, the dollar bill you gave to the milkman would pass from hand to hand five or six times before it ever left your village. And then it would circulate a while longer in your county and then move elsewhere in your state. Spend that dollar nowadays in a big box store and within a week it is in China by way of Arkansas. Not one of your neighbors gets to see it.
Thirty five years ago nobody thought to ask what would happen if you and all your neighbors bought everything you could from China at low, low Wal*Mart prices: toys, wood, clothes, dishes, instruments, and now even food.
Yes. If everything we buy in every store in America is made in China does it take an economic genius to figure out what is going to happen to the companies in the USA that made the things we used to buy from them?
Right. They go out of business. And when they go out of business, American workers lose their jobs. Of course, this is no concern of mine or yours because American workers losing their jobs is an abstraction --- we don’t know who these people are, and their wages were probably too high, anyway. But being able to buy things made in China at low, low prices is, for you and me, a concrete and necessary reality.
So China is now the proverbial Company Store. For all practical purposes, China owns most of The United States. And because every day that goes by they get almost every cent that we spend, day by day they own more and more of the United States. To survive, very soon almost every rural family will have to do what their ancestors and put up preserves from a big garden. They will keep a cow, chickens and a few pigs.
How do we avoid this huge, sucking economic black hole? By buying only those products made in the USA so Americans can go back to work? Probably not, because we look for those low, low prices offered only by the Chinese. And there is a good chance that there are no longer on our shelves any products made in the US of A.
So, now we are told that the US economy is in bad shape. The past administration whipped up an unnecessary war that has cost you a trillion or so. And while the war commanded your attention, every business was deregulated or privatized so billions more could be funneled down that rat hole.
But a brighter day is coming, because is not Mr. Obama going to jumpstart a ruined economy with a trillion or so dollars? You’d better hope he gives it all to the bankers, because if you and I get our hands on it, within a week every penny of it will be in China.
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Seeing this rant from my January 11, 2009 radio show, one of my radio friends sent me something similar:
"This year, taxpayers will receive an Economic Stimulus Payment. This is a very exciting new program that I will explain using the Q and A format: Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment? A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers. Q. Where will the government get this money? A. From taxpayers. Q. So the government is giving me back my own money? A. Only a smidgen. Q. What is the purpose of this payment? A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition TV set, thus stimulating the economy. Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China ? A. Shut up. Below is some helpful advice on how to best help the US economy by spending your stimulus check wisely: If you spend that money at Wal-Mart, all the money will go to China. If you spend it on gasoline it will go to the Arabs. If you purchase a computer it will go to India. If you purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala (unless you buy organic). If you buy a car it will go to Japan. If you purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan. And none of it will help the American economy. We need to keep that money here in America. You can keep the money in America by spending it at yard sales, going to a baseball game, or spend it on prostitutes, beer and wine (domestic ONLY), or tattoos, since those are the only businesses still in the US.
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You are invited to stop by for supper anytime.
Robert Karl Skoglund260 Hamlin Drive
Fort Myers, FL 33905
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
Hear humble's radio show on his web page
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html
See and hear humble tell stories on his web page:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/
Hear dozens of humble's rants and even his radio show on PRX:
http://www.prx.org/Enjoy humble's music/humor program on Maine cable television stations:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/TvTowns.htmlDid you know that Robert Skoglund, The humble Farmer, stands on stages and tells funny stories?Ask humble to entertain you and your friends with dry stories like these:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/PortlandA.htmlYou can visit humble and Marsha at their Bed & Breakfast on the coast of Maine.http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/BaB.html
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The humble Farmer Rants for January 25, 2009 Radio Show
Rants January 25, 2009
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1. My friend Sal is exactly like so many of my other friends: he can do things that I, and perhaps you, can’t do. He is a specialist in his field. Sal spends summers down the road a bit from me in Port Clyde, Maine and winters down the road a little bit from me on the Florida Keys. Oh, the one thing that you and Sal have in common is the stories you tell me, and this is one of them. Every January there is an antique car and tractor fair in Fort Meade, Florida. It is such a large fair that one rents a golf cart at the gate for $65 just to get around. One year Sal arrived at the fair too late to rent a golf cart. Alas! Every last one was gone. But when he walked onto the grounds he saw a small tractor for sale. Sal said, “I bought it for $400 and rode around on it all day.” I said, “But what did you do with it after the fair?” Sal said, “I sold it for $2600.”
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2. It doesn’t take much to make me laugh --- even if I haven’t had a cup of coffee. This morning I laughed when I deleted some of the emails in my junk email box. One said, “Looking for a Fling?” What is a fling nowadays? If I had been pressed to define a fling, I would have said that a fling is running off to some near-by town for two or three days. But not until today did I ever wonder if yesterday’s fling is called a flang or a flung. I just Googled “Looking for a Fling” for a current definition. According to Google, the affliction known as “Lonely Wives Looking for a Fling” is now pandemic.
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3. For years I’ve enjoyed collecting and sending along to you the silly things I encounter throughout the day. This one is an email from a Maine couple in which someone mentions that they’d like to hear from their Maine friends. It says, “I am forwarding this message from Ron and Lorina … as they wish to be remember to everyone. Joleen ----- Original Message ----- Subject: Hello Hope everyone made it back safe and sound. We were wondering how Marge is fairing? Please give her our address & email. Really would like to hear from our Maine friends. Simone & Ron …“ The wonderful thing about a letter like this is that it justifies the institution immortalized in Melville’s story about Bartleby --- the dead letter office.
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4. For a year I have toyed with the idea of making a television program that consists of nothing except an old man who sits in a chair and simply talks while tossing a baseball from hand to hand. Until this morning, I wondered who would watch such a show. I wish I’d asked you, because that person lives with you so you knew a long time ago. For hour upon endless hour, that person sits like a rag doll and watches men run with a ball under their arms, or men hit a round thing with a stick. When they are lucky, they watch girls who hop on sand while pounding a ball over a net. Sometimes they watch cars going round and round an oval track and won’t even take a bathroom break for fear they’ll miss the pile up of the century. So --- we have determined that it is not what it is on the screen that builds a faithful television audience --- anything that provides an excuse to sit and drink whatever is in the glass or can is a show capable of climbing off the charts. So, when the day comes that they stumble upon this show, and they will, will you please do me a favor and, as you fill up the dish with heavily salted nuts, suggest that it might be time to order a catheter?
+5. It must be true because I not only heard it on TV, I also read it on the Internet. Drivers who use cell phones in their cars kill 2600 people and injure 330,000 every year --- just in the United States. Cell phones are now right up there with those beloved dogs and cats in a driver’s lap when it comes to causing automobile accidents. You can believe it, because half the people you pass on the turnpike have a cell phone plastered to an ear. Scientists tell us that 20-year-old drivers have the same reaction time as 70-year-old drivers who don’t even know how to use a cell phone. My first car was a 32 Ford coupe convertible with mechanical brakes and because I probably weighed around 100 pounds when I was 15, for all practical purposes I had no brakes. If you don’t know what mechanical brakes are, you should look it up. It took everything you had, and even big, rugged men had trouble stopping a car that had mechanical brakes. Eddie Tyler might tell you that in 1951 I passed him on the right hand side. I was coming up on him too fast down there between Harrington Cove and the Clark Island Road, there was a car coming the other way, and because I couldn’t stop I went out in the dirt and the grass and passed him on the right with dust and rocks all a flying. At the time I’d probably been driving a car for only a few days so it was a valuable lesson --- ever since then I’ve driven as if I have no brakes. I’ve taught driver education so I also have the annoying habit of hanging in there with the speed limit and stopping at stop signs, so my friends all hate to ride with me. When they do, they call me nasty names. And you probably know that in Europe they have Yield signs so I don’t have to stop there if nobody is coming. In America they have stop signs in many, many places that would be better served by a Yield sign. Anyway, can you tell me why the experts talk about reaction time when they should be talking about thinking time? If you don’t tailgate, you don’t need that famous reaction time they talk about where you have to jam on your brakes to keep from ramming that car ahead. And if a deer jumps out of the dark, you don’t need reaction time because they say you hear the bang and never see the deer anyway. When all is said and done, I’m glad I don’t have a cell phone. It’s bad enough to have to drive a car when you’re over 70. I’ve been hit in the rear end at least 6 times just because I stop at stop signs.
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6. I am thinking about having my credit card paid by big brother. I pay off the balance every month but think my payment arrived one day late because of a holiday and my negligence. There is, I think, a $30 or so fee for this. You might have many of your monthly payments automatically deducted from your checking account so this can’t happen. I haven’t done it yet, because I don’t like the idea of someone being able to dip in there and take what they want. You might have seen some months, when there might not have been anything in there to take, when you had to very judiciously juggle things around. Businessmen would not have that problem. They haven’t seen a bill in years because their office staff takes care of things like that. I think they ran electricity down our road around 1923 and I’m old enough to remember hearing that my neighbor Alex went into a rage when CMP sent him a bill. He said that he’d always paid cash for everything, no one had ever sent him a bill in his entire life and he’d have the power shut off if he were going to get bills. You might be old enough to understand that most any change is upsetting.
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7. You will recall I mentioned a while back about seeing a program that promised to tell me how to tell a real Rolex watch from a counterfeit Rolex watch. I was so busy taking notes, so I could tell you about it, that I didn’t see how the program ended. Radio friend Bill Miller sends this: “Dear Humble, Once, while working for U -Haul a few years back, I stumbled upon a Rolex laying in the under-seat portion of a truck. No one claimed it, and I had, a Rolex Presidential watch. This watch had diamonds on the quarter hour and a gold bezel...Im not sure what that would get me in life but wow...I had a Rolex. For years I wore that watch very proudly as a status symbol..showing I was a winner in life..a ROLEX. Some years later I was working as a paramedic on the beach in florida and had to extricate a young man who had imprudently dove into the water wearing speedos ,showing off to women who wanted gucci flannel pajamas, and had broken his neck. As I reached below the backboard in 4 feet of water I felt that watch unclip and fall off my wrist...gone...forever. That was a life lesson I couldnt have paid enough for. I wear a Timex now. Bill” My question to you is the obvious one: Why would anyone wear a watch that came with a cheap strap?
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8. What you can learn when you listen to the radio. Of course it has to be a certain kind of radio and I’ve been getting my radio off a place called PRX on the Internet. This week I learned that Hawaii has about the highest electric bills of any state. Right up there with New York, Vermont and Maine. But on this radio program I heard that the University of Hawaii is going broke trying to run their air conditioners. How about that? Haven’t you always heard that the temperature in Hawaii is perfect? Never hot, never cold. And now we hear they can’t afford to run their air conditioners. I guess this punches a hole in that bit of folklore. Another bit of folklore, which approaches an outright lie, is calling Florida the Sunshine State. And if you have never heard of Ibsen or his play called “An Enemy of the People” I suggest you Google “An Enemy of the People” right now and become familiar with it. --- Because there are days when they shut down highways in Florida, The Sunshine State, because you can’t see the road through the smoke from wildfires. Even worse are the controlled fires caused by burning the cane fields and the burning forests that are being swept away by endless housing developments. On an average day, you might not see that smoke or even be aware of it, but the soot builds up on your car and in your lungs. Some days the air is so bad in parts of The Sunshine State that you can’t get enough air in your lungs to ride a bicycle. You find that your lungs make a little whistling sound when you breathe. People who live in many parts of Florida take this constant smoke and burning eyes for granted and should you mention smoke, they’ll give you a funny look and say, “What smoke?” Don’t expect to see anything about Florida’s rotten air quality on television or in the newspapers. It would be bad for the tourist business. Yes, and please do look up Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People.
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9. When I called my wicked step mother she said that one of our neighbors had fallen on the floor and perished. She stayed right there and languished because they didn’t find her for a day or so. She had one of those magic buttons to wear around her neck, I think they call them Lifelines, but she didn’t bother to put hers on that day. So when she dropped, she was helpless. You know, there are days when you can go out in the woods and scramble to the top of a 60 foot spruce tree and I remember those days well. But I told the wicked one that I knew I was at the age where it would be foolish to go out in the woods unless I told someone where I was going. She said that she was at the age where it would be foolish to go out in the woods.
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10. Here’s another junk email that got my attention. If you are a social commentator, you should be grateful for junk email because you will never run out of topics. This one says: “Your wife need your attention? Solve all your problems with IT.” I don’t know why they need to advertise. You and I have friends who no sooner left for work, when IT came in the back door.
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11. (prx 090120) On the morning of the presidential inauguration I looked at the television and saw three million people jostling each other, elbow to elbow in that space between the Washington Monument and the Capitol Steps. I couldn’t help but think what a great day it was in Washington for pickpockets.
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12. Have you ever seen the Eifel Tower in Paris? Have you ever seen The Brandenburg Gate in Germany? This is redundant. Where else would you find the Eifel Tower or The Brandenburg Gate? I was going to say that for over 30 years, I have boasted and bragged that I have never talked down to you. I was going to say that when I mentioned An Enemy of the People or Bartleby, I took it for granted that you were familiar with the works of Ibsen or Melville, so I would never day, “Ibsen’s, An Enemy of the People.” I was going to say that President Obama was talking down to you by pointing out to you and me in his inaugural address that his words, “the time has come to set aside childish things,” came from the scripture. But, much to my surprise, in looking over my notes, I see that I have recently been as guilty as the President of the United States. Is there not a lesson to be learned here? You hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye.” That’s Scripture, Matthew 7, 3.
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You are invited to stop by for supper anytime.
Robert Karl Skoglund
260 Hamlin Drive
Fort Myers, FL 33905
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
Hear humble's radio show on his web page
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html
See and hear humble tell stories on his web page:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/
Hear dozens of humble's rants and even his radio show on PRX:
http://www.prx.org/Enjoy humble's music/humor program on Maine cable television stations:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/TvTowns.html
Did you know that Robert Skoglund, The humble Farmer, stands on stages and tells funny stories?Ask humble to entertain you and your friends with dry stories like these:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/PortlandA.html
You can visit humble and Marsha at their Bed & Breakfast on the coast of Maine.
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/BaB.html
+
1. My friend Sal is exactly like so many of my other friends: he can do things that I, and perhaps you, can’t do. He is a specialist in his field. Sal spends summers down the road a bit from me in Port Clyde, Maine and winters down the road a little bit from me on the Florida Keys. Oh, the one thing that you and Sal have in common is the stories you tell me, and this is one of them. Every January there is an antique car and tractor fair in Fort Meade, Florida. It is such a large fair that one rents a golf cart at the gate for $65 just to get around. One year Sal arrived at the fair too late to rent a golf cart. Alas! Every last one was gone. But when he walked onto the grounds he saw a small tractor for sale. Sal said, “I bought it for $400 and rode around on it all day.” I said, “But what did you do with it after the fair?” Sal said, “I sold it for $2600.”
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2. It doesn’t take much to make me laugh --- even if I haven’t had a cup of coffee. This morning I laughed when I deleted some of the emails in my junk email box. One said, “Looking for a Fling?” What is a fling nowadays? If I had been pressed to define a fling, I would have said that a fling is running off to some near-by town for two or three days. But not until today did I ever wonder if yesterday’s fling is called a flang or a flung. I just Googled “Looking for a Fling” for a current definition. According to Google, the affliction known as “Lonely Wives Looking for a Fling” is now pandemic.
+
3. For years I’ve enjoyed collecting and sending along to you the silly things I encounter throughout the day. This one is an email from a Maine couple in which someone mentions that they’d like to hear from their Maine friends. It says, “I am forwarding this message from Ron and Lorina … as they wish to be remember to everyone. Joleen ----- Original Message ----- Subject: Hello Hope everyone made it back safe and sound. We were wondering how Marge is fairing? Please give her our address & email. Really would like to hear from our Maine friends. Simone & Ron …“ The wonderful thing about a letter like this is that it justifies the institution immortalized in Melville’s story about Bartleby --- the dead letter office.
+
4. For a year I have toyed with the idea of making a television program that consists of nothing except an old man who sits in a chair and simply talks while tossing a baseball from hand to hand. Until this morning, I wondered who would watch such a show. I wish I’d asked you, because that person lives with you so you knew a long time ago. For hour upon endless hour, that person sits like a rag doll and watches men run with a ball under their arms, or men hit a round thing with a stick. When they are lucky, they watch girls who hop on sand while pounding a ball over a net. Sometimes they watch cars going round and round an oval track and won’t even take a bathroom break for fear they’ll miss the pile up of the century. So --- we have determined that it is not what it is on the screen that builds a faithful television audience --- anything that provides an excuse to sit and drink whatever is in the glass or can is a show capable of climbing off the charts. So, when the day comes that they stumble upon this show, and they will, will you please do me a favor and, as you fill up the dish with heavily salted nuts, suggest that it might be time to order a catheter?
+5. It must be true because I not only heard it on TV, I also read it on the Internet. Drivers who use cell phones in their cars kill 2600 people and injure 330,000 every year --- just in the United States. Cell phones are now right up there with those beloved dogs and cats in a driver’s lap when it comes to causing automobile accidents. You can believe it, because half the people you pass on the turnpike have a cell phone plastered to an ear. Scientists tell us that 20-year-old drivers have the same reaction time as 70-year-old drivers who don’t even know how to use a cell phone. My first car was a 32 Ford coupe convertible with mechanical brakes and because I probably weighed around 100 pounds when I was 15, for all practical purposes I had no brakes. If you don’t know what mechanical brakes are, you should look it up. It took everything you had, and even big, rugged men had trouble stopping a car that had mechanical brakes. Eddie Tyler might tell you that in 1951 I passed him on the right hand side. I was coming up on him too fast down there between Harrington Cove and the Clark Island Road, there was a car coming the other way, and because I couldn’t stop I went out in the dirt and the grass and passed him on the right with dust and rocks all a flying. At the time I’d probably been driving a car for only a few days so it was a valuable lesson --- ever since then I’ve driven as if I have no brakes. I’ve taught driver education so I also have the annoying habit of hanging in there with the speed limit and stopping at stop signs, so my friends all hate to ride with me. When they do, they call me nasty names. And you probably know that in Europe they have Yield signs so I don’t have to stop there if nobody is coming. In America they have stop signs in many, many places that would be better served by a Yield sign. Anyway, can you tell me why the experts talk about reaction time when they should be talking about thinking time? If you don’t tailgate, you don’t need that famous reaction time they talk about where you have to jam on your brakes to keep from ramming that car ahead. And if a deer jumps out of the dark, you don’t need reaction time because they say you hear the bang and never see the deer anyway. When all is said and done, I’m glad I don’t have a cell phone. It’s bad enough to have to drive a car when you’re over 70. I’ve been hit in the rear end at least 6 times just because I stop at stop signs.
+
6. I am thinking about having my credit card paid by big brother. I pay off the balance every month but think my payment arrived one day late because of a holiday and my negligence. There is, I think, a $30 or so fee for this. You might have many of your monthly payments automatically deducted from your checking account so this can’t happen. I haven’t done it yet, because I don’t like the idea of someone being able to dip in there and take what they want. You might have seen some months, when there might not have been anything in there to take, when you had to very judiciously juggle things around. Businessmen would not have that problem. They haven’t seen a bill in years because their office staff takes care of things like that. I think they ran electricity down our road around 1923 and I’m old enough to remember hearing that my neighbor Alex went into a rage when CMP sent him a bill. He said that he’d always paid cash for everything, no one had ever sent him a bill in his entire life and he’d have the power shut off if he were going to get bills. You might be old enough to understand that most any change is upsetting.
+
7. You will recall I mentioned a while back about seeing a program that promised to tell me how to tell a real Rolex watch from a counterfeit Rolex watch. I was so busy taking notes, so I could tell you about it, that I didn’t see how the program ended. Radio friend Bill Miller sends this: “Dear Humble, Once, while working for U -Haul a few years back, I stumbled upon a Rolex laying in the under-seat portion of a truck. No one claimed it, and I had, a Rolex Presidential watch. This watch had diamonds on the quarter hour and a gold bezel...Im not sure what that would get me in life but wow...I had a Rolex. For years I wore that watch very proudly as a status symbol..showing I was a winner in life..a ROLEX. Some years later I was working as a paramedic on the beach in florida and had to extricate a young man who had imprudently dove into the water wearing speedos ,showing off to women who wanted gucci flannel pajamas, and had broken his neck. As I reached below the backboard in 4 feet of water I felt that watch unclip and fall off my wrist...gone...forever. That was a life lesson I couldnt have paid enough for. I wear a Timex now. Bill” My question to you is the obvious one: Why would anyone wear a watch that came with a cheap strap?
+
8. What you can learn when you listen to the radio. Of course it has to be a certain kind of radio and I’ve been getting my radio off a place called PRX on the Internet. This week I learned that Hawaii has about the highest electric bills of any state. Right up there with New York, Vermont and Maine. But on this radio program I heard that the University of Hawaii is going broke trying to run their air conditioners. How about that? Haven’t you always heard that the temperature in Hawaii is perfect? Never hot, never cold. And now we hear they can’t afford to run their air conditioners. I guess this punches a hole in that bit of folklore. Another bit of folklore, which approaches an outright lie, is calling Florida the Sunshine State. And if you have never heard of Ibsen or his play called “An Enemy of the People” I suggest you Google “An Enemy of the People” right now and become familiar with it. --- Because there are days when they shut down highways in Florida, The Sunshine State, because you can’t see the road through the smoke from wildfires. Even worse are the controlled fires caused by burning the cane fields and the burning forests that are being swept away by endless housing developments. On an average day, you might not see that smoke or even be aware of it, but the soot builds up on your car and in your lungs. Some days the air is so bad in parts of The Sunshine State that you can’t get enough air in your lungs to ride a bicycle. You find that your lungs make a little whistling sound when you breathe. People who live in many parts of Florida take this constant smoke and burning eyes for granted and should you mention smoke, they’ll give you a funny look and say, “What smoke?” Don’t expect to see anything about Florida’s rotten air quality on television or in the newspapers. It would be bad for the tourist business. Yes, and please do look up Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People.
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9. When I called my wicked step mother she said that one of our neighbors had fallen on the floor and perished. She stayed right there and languished because they didn’t find her for a day or so. She had one of those magic buttons to wear around her neck, I think they call them Lifelines, but she didn’t bother to put hers on that day. So when she dropped, she was helpless. You know, there are days when you can go out in the woods and scramble to the top of a 60 foot spruce tree and I remember those days well. But I told the wicked one that I knew I was at the age where it would be foolish to go out in the woods unless I told someone where I was going. She said that she was at the age where it would be foolish to go out in the woods.
+
10. Here’s another junk email that got my attention. If you are a social commentator, you should be grateful for junk email because you will never run out of topics. This one says: “Your wife need your attention? Solve all your problems with IT.” I don’t know why they need to advertise. You and I have friends who no sooner left for work, when IT came in the back door.
+
11. (prx 090120) On the morning of the presidential inauguration I looked at the television and saw three million people jostling each other, elbow to elbow in that space between the Washington Monument and the Capitol Steps. I couldn’t help but think what a great day it was in Washington for pickpockets.
+
12. Have you ever seen the Eifel Tower in Paris? Have you ever seen The Brandenburg Gate in Germany? This is redundant. Where else would you find the Eifel Tower or The Brandenburg Gate? I was going to say that for over 30 years, I have boasted and bragged that I have never talked down to you. I was going to say that when I mentioned An Enemy of the People or Bartleby, I took it for granted that you were familiar with the works of Ibsen or Melville, so I would never day, “Ibsen’s, An Enemy of the People.” I was going to say that President Obama was talking down to you by pointing out to you and me in his inaugural address that his words, “the time has come to set aside childish things,” came from the scripture. But, much to my surprise, in looking over my notes, I see that I have recently been as guilty as the President of the United States. Is there not a lesson to be learned here? You hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye.” That’s Scripture, Matthew 7, 3.
+
You are invited to stop by for supper anytime.
Robert Karl Skoglund
260 Hamlin Drive
Fort Myers, FL 33905
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
Hear humble's radio show on his web page
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html
See and hear humble tell stories on his web page:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/
Hear dozens of humble's rants and even his radio show on PRX:
http://www.prx.org/Enjoy humble's music/humor program on Maine cable television stations:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/TvTowns.html
Did you know that Robert Skoglund, The humble Farmer, stands on stages and tells funny stories?Ask humble to entertain you and your friends with dry stories like these:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/PortlandA.html
You can visit humble and Marsha at their Bed & Breakfast on the coast of Maine.
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/BaB.html
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Rants for The humble Farmer radio program, January 11, 2009
humorous social commentary for the January 11, 2009 The humble Farmer radio program
Broadcast on the Internet on humble's web page, on the web page of Village Soup, and on WDNA in Miami.
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1. (090111) Imagine how startled you’d be if you just learned that Johnny Cash did not do time in Folsom Prison. Did the fact that I’m probably not the only person who was misled help Johnny Cash sell 90 million records? On the same page on the Internet I also learned that Merle Haggard wrote Okie from Muscogee as a satire. Everybody knows that song, Okie from Muscogee, and it is only now that I realize why I have heard of Merle Haggard. I don’t see how you could not have heard Okie From Muscogee because it was on top of the popularity charts fairly recently --- 1970 or so. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Okie from Muscogee was a satire, either. Listening to songs by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, is there really any way to tell?
+
2. It finally happened. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, looked at me and said, “Take those filthy pants off right this minute and throw them in the wash.” I had to laugh. I said, “I just put them on fresh two minutes ago right out of the bureau drawer.” You know, I’m not able to do it very often, but this morning I stopped her right dead in her tracks.
+
3. (prx 090108) We hear that the economy is in bad shape. And although I don’t have any answers, I might have the same questions as you do. You might remember that Mr. Nixon did better in the polls than Santa Claus when he opened the doors to China and by so doing put us where we are today.
Which is broke.
Three generations ago, the dollar bill you gave to the milkman would pass from hand to hand five or six times before it ever left your village. And then it would circulate a while longer in your county and then move elsewhere in your state. Spend that dollar nowadays in a big box store and within a week it is in China by way of Arkansas. Not one of your neighbors gets to see it.
Thirty five years ago nobody thought to ask what would happen if you and all your neighbors bought everything you could from China at low, low Wal*Mart prices: toys, wood, clothes, dishes, instruments, and now even food.
Yes. If everything we buy in every store in America is made in China does it take an economic genius to figure out what is going to happen to the companies in the USA that made the things we used to buy from them?
Right. They go out of business. And when they go out of business, American workers lose their jobs. Of course, this is no concern of mine or yours because American workers losing their jobs is an abstraction --- we don’t know who these people are, and their wages were probably too high, anyway. But being able to buy things made in China at low, low prices is, for you and me, a concrete and necessary reality.
So China is now the proverbial Company Store. For all practical purposes, China owns most of The United States. And because every day that goes by they get almost every cent that we spend, day by day they own more and more of the United States. To survive, very soon almost every rural family will have to do what their ancestors and put up preserves from a big garden. They will keep a cow, chickens and a few pigs.
How do we avoid this huge, sucking economic black hole? By buying only those products made in the USA so Americans can go back to work? Probably not, because we look for those low, low prices offered only by the Chinese. And there is a good chance that there are no longer on our shelves any products made in the US of A.
So, now we are told that the US economy is in bad shape. The past administration whipped up an unnecessary war that has cost you a trillion or so. And while the war commanded your attention, every business was deregulated or privatized so billions more could be funneled down that rat hole.
But a brighter day is coming, because is not Mr. Obama going to jumpstart a ruined economy with a trillion or so dollars? You’d better hope he gives it all to the bankers, because if you and I get our hands on it, within a week every penny of it will be in China.
+
4. (prx 090110) Where do you get your information? Newspapers? Television? Because I can’t afford to buy a newspaper, and because one must carefully consider the source when getting news from television, I just realized that I am turning more and more to the Internet. You know that I already have solar hot water heaters attached to my house and that I am presently building panels that will generate electricity from sunlight. All my bustle and scurry has nothing to do with a burning desire to save the planet. Putting in solar collectors will save me money. So I’m also on a tear to get rid of all the energy hogging appliances in our home. Did you know that the older models of refrigerators gobble electricity and that many of the new ones will pay for themselves in just a couple of years just by being more energy efficient? Of course, you know, too, that over the past 30 years, whenever I’ve learned something interesting, I’ve quickly passed it along to you --- for whatever it’s worth. So, if you are standing, please sit down in the nearest chair and hang on with both hands because I was staggered by what I just read today. While looking on line for an energy efficient refrigerator, I learned, that many of the newer refrigerators will run on next to no electricity at all --- if you never open their doors.
+
5. If you are like me, you constantly update your web pages. You put up things that are new and you take down things that no longer have meaning. When this wonderful letter came in from a radio friend in Miami, I put in on my Facebook, my blog and my web page at once. Please listen carefully to this: Dear Mr. Skoglund, As a Native American, or whatever you want to call us, from my earliest remembrances of growing up in the home of my beloved maternal grandparents, I learned to love and respect my elders. As I grew older I came to the realization that offering to our elders respect and gratitude was small compensation for the wisdom they imparted to us younger people. For this reason I rise early every Sunday morning to listen to your show, more for the wisdom you impart than for the good music you play. As a Native American, I, too, have often wondered why people think they need to have more than one pair of shoes. Thank you for imparting your wisdom each Sunday morning. Have a happy, healthy, and enjoyable New Year.” This letter is signed by a Mr. Myers who has appended on the bottom of his letter:
Treat the earth well,
It was not given to you by your parents;
It was loaned to you by your children.
Isn’t that wonderful. The earth was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. My sentiments exactly. Oh, and while I was on my web page I then removed this other item which doesn’t apply anymore, now that we have a new press secretary in the White House. It said: "You might have seen that best-selling author who made the evening news because he had lied to the American people on national television. --- This was news because he was an author."
+
6. Long time radio friend Harris Contos sent me the following news item: “VASSALBORO, Maine --Vassalboro's planning board has approved an application for a coffee shop with topless waitresses despite opposition of most residents who showed up. More than 50 residents showed up for Tuesday night's meeting and most of them voiced disapproval of the idea. Ellsworth businessman Donald Crabtree plans to open the topless cafe within 30 days at the site of the former Grand View Motel on busy Route 3. Planners said the central Maine town has no ordinance to regulate businesses' uniforms -- or lack of them. They say the proposal met the town's 10 performance standards, which are mostly related to safety, parking, traffic and signs.” Of course I immediately replied to this news item from Harris. My obvious question to him was the same question that is in your mind right now. Would their health insurance would pay for any colds caught during working hours? Harris believes that any waitress submitting such a claim would get a form letter back from the company, pointing out that they weren’t covered.
+
7. A news item about topless waitresses in a Vassalboro coffee shop, sent to us by long time radio friend Harris Contos, raises several issues. Would an unemployed waiter be likely to picket coffee shops where your steaming hot coffee is served by topless waitresses? As a person who believes that men and women should receive equal pay for the same work, I am somewhat alarmed that any woman would choose to uncover anything perceived as an advantage. And what culture from ages past has so impressed its values upon us that a topless waitress should be viewed worthy of space in a newspaper --- or of a place in a coffee shop? How much would a topless coffee shop have to undercut the competition before you would be seen going in there? And what do you say to the waitress when she smiles coyly and asks, “Cream and sugar?”
+
8. Whatever is America’s greatest satirist, Alan Able, doing nowadays? If you can find out, please tell me because I’d like to know. I see that a movie of his life is available and I have snuck it into Marsha’s queued requests on Netflix. The name of it is Abel Raises Cain, and I am told by Netflix there will be a long wait. Thirty or more years ago Alan Able impressed me with his satirical antics and I became a fan. We exchanged stuffed envelopes through the mail, this was long before email, and one day, which must have been around 25 years ago, I found a note from Alan Able on my back door. I missed his visit. The same week I chanced upon a girl from the Pinies in New Jersey, who was wandering about my farm taking pictures of the huge woodpile, the sheep and the piles of junk. Do remember that this was before my wife Marsha moved in and restored order. Anyway, knowing that Alan Able was capable of most anything, I viewed the New Jersey girl with great suspicion for several days, thinking that she might have been set upon me by Alan Able. I suggest that you Google Alan Able, because reading about his capers is a refreshing, enjoyable adventure in itself. Take for example, his Omar’s School for Beggars, a fictional school for professional panhandlers. Or read about the actor he hired to pose as Deep Throat after Nixon’s Watergate scandal. That conference drew 150 reporters. Read about the 7 actors he hired to fall asleep in the studio while Donahue was interviewing gay senior citizens. Or the time he ran for Congress on a platform that included selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Able campaigned to ban all breastfeeding, saying that it manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink and even become gay. My favorite was his Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Their goal was to clothe naked animals all over the world and their slogan was “A nude horse is a rude horse.” It began as a satire on media censorship. Thanks to the satire of Alan Able, there is no censorship of the media in America today.
+
9. (PRX 090112) You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 18 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.
+
10. Last week I caught a rat in a mouse trap. Something ate a hole in an orange that was on the floor by the door and I thought I’d catch whatever it was in a mouse trap. I didn’t think whatever it was could be more than two inches long. But the next night, around 6 o’clock right after supper, I was surprised to see a huge rat, upside down with the trap on top of him, with his nose caught in that mouse trap, right there in the entry way that you might as well call the kitchen floor. How a rat got into the house I have no idea, unless it hopped in when someone left a door open. --- What do you do when you see a live rat with his nose caught in a mousetrap? If you scoop up the whole business, the rat might escape and you’d sleep that night with a rat either running across the bed covers or trying to yank them onto the floor. Being a television person, I quickly set up my video camera and took pictures of the rat while I was trying to figure out what to do. You can well believe that when I posted the film of the entire operation on Blip, which some people call the thinking woman’s YouTube, I heard at once from some animal rights people. Well, now, a week or so later, I’m still hearing about this live rat in a mousetrap and more than one person has called my attention to the havahart trap web page. I commend this havahart web page to your attention the next time there are unwanted rats in your kitchen. All it says is, “Rat Traps. Remove unwanted rats the most humane way!” So --- here you are with the unwanted rat in the little humane havahart cage without a word of advice as to what is expected of you next. Presumably you will not kill the rat, because if that were an option, you might as well have set a snap trap, eliminated an interminable unnecessary wait on death row, and had the unpleasant business over with at once. So --- there should now be no question in your mind as to what you must do when you have taken a rat prisoner. Visit one of your animal rights friends as quickly as possible and let the rat out in their kitchen.
Broadcast on the Internet on humble's web page, on the web page of Village Soup, and on WDNA in Miami.
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1. (090111) Imagine how startled you’d be if you just learned that Johnny Cash did not do time in Folsom Prison. Did the fact that I’m probably not the only person who was misled help Johnny Cash sell 90 million records? On the same page on the Internet I also learned that Merle Haggard wrote Okie from Muscogee as a satire. Everybody knows that song, Okie from Muscogee, and it is only now that I realize why I have heard of Merle Haggard. I don’t see how you could not have heard Okie From Muscogee because it was on top of the popularity charts fairly recently --- 1970 or so. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Okie from Muscogee was a satire, either. Listening to songs by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, is there really any way to tell?
+
2. It finally happened. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, looked at me and said, “Take those filthy pants off right this minute and throw them in the wash.” I had to laugh. I said, “I just put them on fresh two minutes ago right out of the bureau drawer.” You know, I’m not able to do it very often, but this morning I stopped her right dead in her tracks.
+
3. (prx 090108) We hear that the economy is in bad shape. And although I don’t have any answers, I might have the same questions as you do. You might remember that Mr. Nixon did better in the polls than Santa Claus when he opened the doors to China and by so doing put us where we are today.
Which is broke.
Three generations ago, the dollar bill you gave to the milkman would pass from hand to hand five or six times before it ever left your village. And then it would circulate a while longer in your county and then move elsewhere in your state. Spend that dollar nowadays in a big box store and within a week it is in China by way of Arkansas. Not one of your neighbors gets to see it.
Thirty five years ago nobody thought to ask what would happen if you and all your neighbors bought everything you could from China at low, low Wal*Mart prices: toys, wood, clothes, dishes, instruments, and now even food.
Yes. If everything we buy in every store in America is made in China does it take an economic genius to figure out what is going to happen to the companies in the USA that made the things we used to buy from them?
Right. They go out of business. And when they go out of business, American workers lose their jobs. Of course, this is no concern of mine or yours because American workers losing their jobs is an abstraction --- we don’t know who these people are, and their wages were probably too high, anyway. But being able to buy things made in China at low, low prices is, for you and me, a concrete and necessary reality.
So China is now the proverbial Company Store. For all practical purposes, China owns most of The United States. And because every day that goes by they get almost every cent that we spend, day by day they own more and more of the United States. To survive, very soon almost every rural family will have to do what their ancestors and put up preserves from a big garden. They will keep a cow, chickens and a few pigs.
How do we avoid this huge, sucking economic black hole? By buying only those products made in the USA so Americans can go back to work? Probably not, because we look for those low, low prices offered only by the Chinese. And there is a good chance that there are no longer on our shelves any products made in the US of A.
So, now we are told that the US economy is in bad shape. The past administration whipped up an unnecessary war that has cost you a trillion or so. And while the war commanded your attention, every business was deregulated or privatized so billions more could be funneled down that rat hole.
But a brighter day is coming, because is not Mr. Obama going to jumpstart a ruined economy with a trillion or so dollars? You’d better hope he gives it all to the bankers, because if you and I get our hands on it, within a week every penny of it will be in China.
+
4. (prx 090110) Where do you get your information? Newspapers? Television? Because I can’t afford to buy a newspaper, and because one must carefully consider the source when getting news from television, I just realized that I am turning more and more to the Internet. You know that I already have solar hot water heaters attached to my house and that I am presently building panels that will generate electricity from sunlight. All my bustle and scurry has nothing to do with a burning desire to save the planet. Putting in solar collectors will save me money. So I’m also on a tear to get rid of all the energy hogging appliances in our home. Did you know that the older models of refrigerators gobble electricity and that many of the new ones will pay for themselves in just a couple of years just by being more energy efficient? Of course, you know, too, that over the past 30 years, whenever I’ve learned something interesting, I’ve quickly passed it along to you --- for whatever it’s worth. So, if you are standing, please sit down in the nearest chair and hang on with both hands because I was staggered by what I just read today. While looking on line for an energy efficient refrigerator, I learned, that many of the newer refrigerators will run on next to no electricity at all --- if you never open their doors.
+
5. If you are like me, you constantly update your web pages. You put up things that are new and you take down things that no longer have meaning. When this wonderful letter came in from a radio friend in Miami, I put in on my Facebook, my blog and my web page at once. Please listen carefully to this: Dear Mr. Skoglund, As a Native American, or whatever you want to call us, from my earliest remembrances of growing up in the home of my beloved maternal grandparents, I learned to love and respect my elders. As I grew older I came to the realization that offering to our elders respect and gratitude was small compensation for the wisdom they imparted to us younger people. For this reason I rise early every Sunday morning to listen to your show, more for the wisdom you impart than for the good music you play. As a Native American, I, too, have often wondered why people think they need to have more than one pair of shoes. Thank you for imparting your wisdom each Sunday morning. Have a happy, healthy, and enjoyable New Year.” This letter is signed by a Mr. Myers who has appended on the bottom of his letter:
Treat the earth well,
It was not given to you by your parents;
It was loaned to you by your children.
Isn’t that wonderful. The earth was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. My sentiments exactly. Oh, and while I was on my web page I then removed this other item which doesn’t apply anymore, now that we have a new press secretary in the White House. It said: "You might have seen that best-selling author who made the evening news because he had lied to the American people on national television. --- This was news because he was an author."
+
6. Long time radio friend Harris Contos sent me the following news item: “VASSALBORO, Maine --Vassalboro's planning board has approved an application for a coffee shop with topless waitresses despite opposition of most residents who showed up. More than 50 residents showed up for Tuesday night's meeting and most of them voiced disapproval of the idea. Ellsworth businessman Donald Crabtree plans to open the topless cafe within 30 days at the site of the former Grand View Motel on busy Route 3. Planners said the central Maine town has no ordinance to regulate businesses' uniforms -- or lack of them. They say the proposal met the town's 10 performance standards, which are mostly related to safety, parking, traffic and signs.” Of course I immediately replied to this news item from Harris. My obvious question to him was the same question that is in your mind right now. Would their health insurance would pay for any colds caught during working hours? Harris believes that any waitress submitting such a claim would get a form letter back from the company, pointing out that they weren’t covered.
+
7. A news item about topless waitresses in a Vassalboro coffee shop, sent to us by long time radio friend Harris Contos, raises several issues. Would an unemployed waiter be likely to picket coffee shops where your steaming hot coffee is served by topless waitresses? As a person who believes that men and women should receive equal pay for the same work, I am somewhat alarmed that any woman would choose to uncover anything perceived as an advantage. And what culture from ages past has so impressed its values upon us that a topless waitress should be viewed worthy of space in a newspaper --- or of a place in a coffee shop? How much would a topless coffee shop have to undercut the competition before you would be seen going in there? And what do you say to the waitress when she smiles coyly and asks, “Cream and sugar?”
+
8. Whatever is America’s greatest satirist, Alan Able, doing nowadays? If you can find out, please tell me because I’d like to know. I see that a movie of his life is available and I have snuck it into Marsha’s queued requests on Netflix. The name of it is Abel Raises Cain, and I am told by Netflix there will be a long wait. Thirty or more years ago Alan Able impressed me with his satirical antics and I became a fan. We exchanged stuffed envelopes through the mail, this was long before email, and one day, which must have been around 25 years ago, I found a note from Alan Able on my back door. I missed his visit. The same week I chanced upon a girl from the Pinies in New Jersey, who was wandering about my farm taking pictures of the huge woodpile, the sheep and the piles of junk. Do remember that this was before my wife Marsha moved in and restored order. Anyway, knowing that Alan Able was capable of most anything, I viewed the New Jersey girl with great suspicion for several days, thinking that she might have been set upon me by Alan Able. I suggest that you Google Alan Able, because reading about his capers is a refreshing, enjoyable adventure in itself. Take for example, his Omar’s School for Beggars, a fictional school for professional panhandlers. Or read about the actor he hired to pose as Deep Throat after Nixon’s Watergate scandal. That conference drew 150 reporters. Read about the 7 actors he hired to fall asleep in the studio while Donahue was interviewing gay senior citizens. Or the time he ran for Congress on a platform that included selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder. At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Able campaigned to ban all breastfeeding, saying that it manifests an oral addiction leading youngsters to smoke, drink and even become gay. My favorite was his Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Their goal was to clothe naked animals all over the world and their slogan was “A nude horse is a rude horse.” It began as a satire on media censorship. Thanks to the satire of Alan Able, there is no censorship of the media in America today.
+
9. (PRX 090112) You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 18 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.
+
10. Last week I caught a rat in a mouse trap. Something ate a hole in an orange that was on the floor by the door and I thought I’d catch whatever it was in a mouse trap. I didn’t think whatever it was could be more than two inches long. But the next night, around 6 o’clock right after supper, I was surprised to see a huge rat, upside down with the trap on top of him, with his nose caught in that mouse trap, right there in the entry way that you might as well call the kitchen floor. How a rat got into the house I have no idea, unless it hopped in when someone left a door open. --- What do you do when you see a live rat with his nose caught in a mousetrap? If you scoop up the whole business, the rat might escape and you’d sleep that night with a rat either running across the bed covers or trying to yank them onto the floor. Being a television person, I quickly set up my video camera and took pictures of the rat while I was trying to figure out what to do. You can well believe that when I posted the film of the entire operation on Blip, which some people call the thinking woman’s YouTube, I heard at once from some animal rights people. Well, now, a week or so later, I’m still hearing about this live rat in a mousetrap and more than one person has called my attention to the havahart trap web page. I commend this havahart web page to your attention the next time there are unwanted rats in your kitchen. All it says is, “Rat Traps. Remove unwanted rats the most humane way!” So --- here you are with the unwanted rat in the little humane havahart cage without a word of advice as to what is expected of you next. Presumably you will not kill the rat, because if that were an option, you might as well have set a snap trap, eliminated an interminable unnecessary wait on death row, and had the unpleasant business over with at once. So --- there should now be no question in your mind as to what you must do when you have taken a rat prisoner. Visit one of your animal rights friends as quickly as possible and let the rat out in their kitchen.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Tentative Rants for January 11, 2009 The humble Farmer radio program
Rants January 11, 2009
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1. Imagine how startled you’d be if you just learned that Johnny Cash did not do time in Folsom Prison. Did the fact that I’m probably not the only person who was misled help Johnny Cash sell 90 million records? On the same page on the Internet I also learned that Merle Haggard wrote Okie from Muscogee as a satire. Everybody knows that song, Okie from Muscogee, and it is only now that I realize why I have heard of Merle Haggard. I don’t see how you could not have heard Okie From Muscogee because it was on top of the popularity charts fairly recently --- 1970 or so. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Okie from Muscogee was a satire, either. Listening to songs by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, is there really any way to tell?
+
2. It finally happened. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, looked at me and said, “Take those filthy pants off right this minute and throw them in the wash.” I had to laugh. I said, “I just put them on fresh two minutes ago right out of the bureau drawer.” You know, I’m not able to do it very often, but this morning I stopped her right dead in her tracks.
+
3. We hear that the economy is in bad shape. And although I don’t have any answers, I might have the same questions as you do. You might remember that Mr. Nixon did better in the polls than Santa Claus when he opened the doors to China and by so doing put us where we are today.
Which is broke.
Three generations ago, the dollar bill you gave to the milkman would pass from hand to hand five or six times before it ever left your village. And then it would circulate a while longer in your county and then move elsewhere in your state. Spend that dollar nowadays in a big box store and within a week it is in China by way of Arkansas. Not one of your neighbors gets to see it.
Thirty five years ago nobody thought to ask what would happen if you and all your neighbors bought everything you could from China at low, low Wal*Mart prices: toys, wood, clothes, dishes, instruments, and now even food.
Yes. If everything we buy in every store in America is made in China does it take an economic genius to figure out what is going to happen to the companies in the USA that made the things we used to buy from them?
Right. They go out of business. And when they go out of business, American workers lose their jobs. Of course, this is no concern of mine or yours because American workers losing their jobs is an abstraction --- we don’t know who these people are, and their wages were probably too high, anyway. But being able to buy things made in China at low, low prices is, for you and me, a concrete and necessary reality.
So China is now the proverbial Company Store. For all practical purposes, China owns most of The United States. And because every day that goes by they get almost every cent that we spend, day by day they own more and more of the United States. To survive, very soon almost every rural family will have to do what their ancestors and put up preserves from a big garden. They will keep a cow, chickens and a few pigs.
How do we avoid this huge, sucking economic black hole? By buying only those products made in the USA so Americans can go back to work? Probably not, because we look for those low, low prices offered only by the Chinese. And there is a good chance that there are no longer on our shelves any products made in the US of A.
So, now we are told that the US economy is in bad shape. The past administration whipped up an unnecessary war that has cost you a trillion or so. And while the war commanded your attention, every business was deregulated or privatized so billions more could be funneled down that rat hole.
But a brighter day is coming, because is not Mr. Obama going to jumpstart a ruined economy with a trillion or so dollars? You’d better hope he gives it all to the bankers, because if you and I get our hands on it, within a week every penny of it will be in China.
+
4. Where do you get your information? Newspapers? Television? Because I can’t afford to buy a newspaper, and because one must carefully consider the source when getting news from television, I just realized that I am turning more and more to the Internet. You know that I already have solar hot water heaters attached to my house and that I am presently building panels that will generate electricity from sunlight. All my bustle and scurry has nothing to do with a burning desire to save the planet. Putting in solar collectors will save me money. So I’m also on a tear to get rid of all the energy hogging appliances in our home. Did you know that the older models of refrigerators gobble electricity and that many of the new ones will pay for themselves in just a couple of years just by being more energy efficient? Of course, you know, too, that over the past 30 years, whenever I’ve learned something interesting, I’ve quickly passed it along to you --- for whatever it’s worth. So, if you are standing, please sit down in the nearest chair and hang on with both hands because I was staggered by what I just read today. While looking on line for an energy efficient refrigerator, I learned, that many of the newer refrigerators will run on next to no electricity at all --- if you never open their doors.
+
5. You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 18 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.
+
6. Friends who know that I am interested in solar power send me articles. I immediately pass along the best ones to you. Ever hear of a solar powered refrigerator? It's a simple yet brilliant invention. Not only is the fridge solar powered, it can also be built from household materials - making it ideal for Third World countries or Maine. Emily Cummins, who is only 21, came up with the idea while working on a school project in her grandfather's potting shed and the fridge is already improving the lives of thousands of poverty-stricken Africans. After her first year at college, she spent five months in Africa, perfecting and demonstrating her product. In Namibia she became known as 'The Fridge Lady'. Miss Cummins returned to the UK to start a business management course at Leeds University. She had been refused a place on an engineering course because, to her dismay, she didn't have the correct qualifications. And I laugh out loud every time I read that. Here’s a girl who comes up with a fantastic invention and she lacks the correct qualifications to take an engineering course. Makes you wonder if Mozart could get into music school today. Last year Emily Cummins met the Queen at Buckingham Palace after being invited to a prestigious women in business event. Emily Cummins invented a solar fridge. Check her out on Google.
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7. My present topic is wishy-washy people. – I think that’s what I want to talk about --- people who can’t make up their minds. Not a day goes by, but what one of your wishy-washy friends stops by in need of something. They probably think that by being satisfied with anything and everything, their friends will think they are easy to get along with. But wishy-washy people make me scream and holler and wave my arms. Last night my friend Alden came in here and asked if he could borrow a rat trap. I said, “Do you want a new rat trap or an old rat trap?” He said, “I don’t care.” Answers like that drive me crazy, because then, I have to either press a friend to the mat in hopes of extracting a definitive answer, or I have to make the decision myself. If I give him a new rat trap, will Alden say that he doesn’t really want to take my only new rat trap and that an old, used rat trap will do as well? And if I give him an old, cherished, family-heirloom type of rat trap, will he think I don’t value him enough to give him a shiny new one? You run into this kind of thing every day --- someone who can never tell you exactly what it is they want. Ask them if they’d like a cup of tea or a cut of coffee, and they’ll say, “Yes.” And then there was Thelonious Monk, rehearsing one his original pieces with a small group. The sax player said, “Hey, --- is that third note in the second bar of the chorus a b or a b flat?” And Monk said, “Yeah, one of those.”
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8. Here’s a good page if you have an extra hour and want a few laughs:
http://thinkprogress.org/category/raa/ Some of these people are really serious.
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9. You hear would-be intellectuals putting down television all the time. Their mantra is that there is nothing worth watching on television. Perhaps it is the redneck in me, but I beg to disagree. This morning I saw part of an educational television program that I would describe as nothing short of vital. It explained how I could keep from getting cheated when I bought rolex watches. If you can think of anything you would rather see on television than how to tell a real rolex watch from a counterfeit rolex watch, please tell me what it is. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com. I’ve heard a lot about rolex watches over the years, but I don’t know what they are and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Have you? And please notice that I said I saw part of the program. That’s because I was so busy taking notes so I could tell you about it that I didn’t see how it ended.
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10. One of my radio friends sends me this: “If you like "young adult" literature, Tangerine, by Edward Bloor is set in a smoky FL subdivision.” What in the world could I have ever said that gave anyone the impression I cared for young adult literature? Let me repeat that so you can hear the sneer in my voice: What in the world could I have ever said that gave anyone the impression I cared for young adult literature? It is true --- I read books that were written for the 13-year-old school girls in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, France and Holland. By definition, a Harlequin Romance written in German is world literature and I peruse this world literature on a daily basis to refine and polish my linguistic skills. Is not a person who can order a hot dog in 9 languages a cosmopolitan on a par with James Bond? F Credis Toe. Geen senap. Because my IQ is low, I will never get to the point where I can absorb the nuances of Voltaire or Cervantes or Thomas Mann or Dante in the original, so I will live out my life trapped on the sixth grade level wherever I go in Europe. Dutch and Swedish are my best languages, but even there I can only understand the most elementary satire and have to have most jokes and the wordplay in advertising explained to me. So, to eliminate the need for any future misunderstanding, I would like, at this time, to state categorically that I consider a Harlequin romance printed in the English language nothing more than trash. To the best of my knowledge I have never read one --- not even to help me read a parallel text in Spanish. I would never, under any circumstances, permit a Harlequin Romance in English to be brought into my home, and, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t have single friend who even knows what they are. Tack ska du har for att listena.
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11. You have heard me say that I go to exercise class. Three times a week I stand before a television screen in the select company of 30 or ladies who were born around 1925 and swing my arms and stretch my legs for an hour. The last time I looked, I was the only man there. But --- I pass many pot-bellied men of a similar vintage on my way in and out of the building. Most of them are seated or standing near a pool table, where one of the company pokes at a little ball with a stick. Even if you have never played pool, you might remember seeing Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats in the movies, which is about all the education anyone needs on pool right there. I never learned how to play pool. The pool hall was 9 miles away in the city of Rockland. It was owned by Phil Sulides who was a good guy. As I recall, there was a chair or chairs in the front of the pool hall where you could get a shoe shine. I can’t remember now why I ever went in there, but I think there were two or three pool tables out back obscured by the amount of cigarette smoke that you would only expect to find at the Elk’s Club today. I was one of those wimpy little kids who never learned how to play baseball, either. Many men would consider my entire childhood a waste. About the only thing I learned as a kid was how to read.
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12. Last week I caught a rat in a mouse trap. Something ate a hole in an orange that was on the floor by the door and I thought I’d catch whatever it was in a mouse trap. I didn’t think whatever it was could be more than two inches long. But the next night, around 6 o’clock right after supper, I was surprised to see a huge rat, upside down with the trap on top of him, with his nose caught in that mouse trap, right there in the entry way that you might as well call the kitchen floor. How a rat got into the house I have no idea, unless it hopped in when someone left a door open. --- What do you do when you see a live rat with his nose caught in a mousetrap? If you scoop up the whole business, the rat might escape and you’d sleep that night with a rat either running across the bed covers or trying to yank them onto the floor. Being a television person, I quickly set up my video camera and took pictures of the rat while I was trying to figure out what to do. You can well believe that when I posted the film of the entire operation on Blip, which some people call the thinking woman’s YouTube, I heard at once from some animal rights people. Well, now, a week or so later, I’m still hearing about this live rat in a mousetrap and more than one person has called my attention to the havahart trap web page. I commend this havahart web page to your attention the next time there are unwanted rats in your kitchen. All it says is, “Rat Traps. Remove unwanted rats the most humane way!” So --- here you are with the unwanted rat in the little humane havahart cage without a word of advice as to what is expected of you next. Presumably you will not kill the rat, because if that were an option, you might as well have set a snap trap, eliminated an interminable unnecessary wait on death row, and had the unpleasant business over with at once. So --- there should now be no question in your mind as to what you must do when you have taken a rat prisoner. Visit one of your animal rights friends as quickly as possible and let the rat out in their kitchen.
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1. Imagine how startled you’d be if you just learned that Johnny Cash did not do time in Folsom Prison. Did the fact that I’m probably not the only person who was misled help Johnny Cash sell 90 million records? On the same page on the Internet I also learned that Merle Haggard wrote Okie from Muscogee as a satire. Everybody knows that song, Okie from Muscogee, and it is only now that I realize why I have heard of Merle Haggard. I don’t see how you could not have heard Okie From Muscogee because it was on top of the popularity charts fairly recently --- 1970 or so. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Okie from Muscogee was a satire, either. Listening to songs by Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, is there really any way to tell?
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2. It finally happened. This morning my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, looked at me and said, “Take those filthy pants off right this minute and throw them in the wash.” I had to laugh. I said, “I just put them on fresh two minutes ago right out of the bureau drawer.” You know, I’m not able to do it very often, but this morning I stopped her right dead in her tracks.
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3. We hear that the economy is in bad shape. And although I don’t have any answers, I might have the same questions as you do. You might remember that Mr. Nixon did better in the polls than Santa Claus when he opened the doors to China and by so doing put us where we are today.
Which is broke.
Three generations ago, the dollar bill you gave to the milkman would pass from hand to hand five or six times before it ever left your village. And then it would circulate a while longer in your county and then move elsewhere in your state. Spend that dollar nowadays in a big box store and within a week it is in China by way of Arkansas. Not one of your neighbors gets to see it.
Thirty five years ago nobody thought to ask what would happen if you and all your neighbors bought everything you could from China at low, low Wal*Mart prices: toys, wood, clothes, dishes, instruments, and now even food.
Yes. If everything we buy in every store in America is made in China does it take an economic genius to figure out what is going to happen to the companies in the USA that made the things we used to buy from them?
Right. They go out of business. And when they go out of business, American workers lose their jobs. Of course, this is no concern of mine or yours because American workers losing their jobs is an abstraction --- we don’t know who these people are, and their wages were probably too high, anyway. But being able to buy things made in China at low, low prices is, for you and me, a concrete and necessary reality.
So China is now the proverbial Company Store. For all practical purposes, China owns most of The United States. And because every day that goes by they get almost every cent that we spend, day by day they own more and more of the United States. To survive, very soon almost every rural family will have to do what their ancestors and put up preserves from a big garden. They will keep a cow, chickens and a few pigs.
How do we avoid this huge, sucking economic black hole? By buying only those products made in the USA so Americans can go back to work? Probably not, because we look for those low, low prices offered only by the Chinese. And there is a good chance that there are no longer on our shelves any products made in the US of A.
So, now we are told that the US economy is in bad shape. The past administration whipped up an unnecessary war that has cost you a trillion or so. And while the war commanded your attention, every business was deregulated or privatized so billions more could be funneled down that rat hole.
But a brighter day is coming, because is not Mr. Obama going to jumpstart a ruined economy with a trillion or so dollars? You’d better hope he gives it all to the bankers, because if you and I get our hands on it, within a week every penny of it will be in China.
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4. Where do you get your information? Newspapers? Television? Because I can’t afford to buy a newspaper, and because one must carefully consider the source when getting news from television, I just realized that I am turning more and more to the Internet. You know that I already have solar hot water heaters attached to my house and that I am presently building panels that will generate electricity from sunlight. All my bustle and scurry has nothing to do with a burning desire to save the planet. Putting in solar collectors will save me money. So I’m also on a tear to get rid of all the energy hogging appliances in our home. Did you know that the older models of refrigerators gobble electricity and that many of the new ones will pay for themselves in just a couple of years just by being more energy efficient? Of course, you know, too, that over the past 30 years, whenever I’ve learned something interesting, I’ve quickly passed it along to you --- for whatever it’s worth. So, if you are standing, please sit down in the nearest chair and hang on with both hands because I was staggered by what I just read today. While looking on line for an energy efficient refrigerator, I learned, that many of the newer refrigerators will run on next to no electricity at all --- if you never open their doors.
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5. You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 18 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.
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6. Friends who know that I am interested in solar power send me articles. I immediately pass along the best ones to you. Ever hear of a solar powered refrigerator? It's a simple yet brilliant invention. Not only is the fridge solar powered, it can also be built from household materials - making it ideal for Third World countries or Maine. Emily Cummins, who is only 21, came up with the idea while working on a school project in her grandfather's potting shed and the fridge is already improving the lives of thousands of poverty-stricken Africans. After her first year at college, she spent five months in Africa, perfecting and demonstrating her product. In Namibia she became known as 'The Fridge Lady'. Miss Cummins returned to the UK to start a business management course at Leeds University. She had been refused a place on an engineering course because, to her dismay, she didn't have the correct qualifications. And I laugh out loud every time I read that. Here’s a girl who comes up with a fantastic invention and she lacks the correct qualifications to take an engineering course. Makes you wonder if Mozart could get into music school today. Last year Emily Cummins met the Queen at Buckingham Palace after being invited to a prestigious women in business event. Emily Cummins invented a solar fridge. Check her out on Google.
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7. My present topic is wishy-washy people. – I think that’s what I want to talk about --- people who can’t make up their minds. Not a day goes by, but what one of your wishy-washy friends stops by in need of something. They probably think that by being satisfied with anything and everything, their friends will think they are easy to get along with. But wishy-washy people make me scream and holler and wave my arms. Last night my friend Alden came in here and asked if he could borrow a rat trap. I said, “Do you want a new rat trap or an old rat trap?” He said, “I don’t care.” Answers like that drive me crazy, because then, I have to either press a friend to the mat in hopes of extracting a definitive answer, or I have to make the decision myself. If I give him a new rat trap, will Alden say that he doesn’t really want to take my only new rat trap and that an old, used rat trap will do as well? And if I give him an old, cherished, family-heirloom type of rat trap, will he think I don’t value him enough to give him a shiny new one? You run into this kind of thing every day --- someone who can never tell you exactly what it is they want. Ask them if they’d like a cup of tea or a cut of coffee, and they’ll say, “Yes.” And then there was Thelonious Monk, rehearsing one his original pieces with a small group. The sax player said, “Hey, --- is that third note in the second bar of the chorus a b or a b flat?” And Monk said, “Yeah, one of those.”
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8. Here’s a good page if you have an extra hour and want a few laughs:
http://thinkprogress.org/category/raa/ Some of these people are really serious.
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9. You hear would-be intellectuals putting down television all the time. Their mantra is that there is nothing worth watching on television. Perhaps it is the redneck in me, but I beg to disagree. This morning I saw part of an educational television program that I would describe as nothing short of vital. It explained how I could keep from getting cheated when I bought rolex watches. If you can think of anything you would rather see on television than how to tell a real rolex watch from a counterfeit rolex watch, please tell me what it is. I’m humble at humblefarmer dot com. I’ve heard a lot about rolex watches over the years, but I don’t know what they are and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. Have you? And please notice that I said I saw part of the program. That’s because I was so busy taking notes so I could tell you about it that I didn’t see how it ended.
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10. One of my radio friends sends me this: “If you like "young adult" literature, Tangerine, by Edward Bloor is set in a smoky FL subdivision.” What in the world could I have ever said that gave anyone the impression I cared for young adult literature? Let me repeat that so you can hear the sneer in my voice: What in the world could I have ever said that gave anyone the impression I cared for young adult literature? It is true --- I read books that were written for the 13-year-old school girls in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, France and Holland. By definition, a Harlequin Romance written in German is world literature and I peruse this world literature on a daily basis to refine and polish my linguistic skills. Is not a person who can order a hot dog in 9 languages a cosmopolitan on a par with James Bond? F Credis Toe. Geen senap. Because my IQ is low, I will never get to the point where I can absorb the nuances of Voltaire or Cervantes or Thomas Mann or Dante in the original, so I will live out my life trapped on the sixth grade level wherever I go in Europe. Dutch and Swedish are my best languages, but even there I can only understand the most elementary satire and have to have most jokes and the wordplay in advertising explained to me. So, to eliminate the need for any future misunderstanding, I would like, at this time, to state categorically that I consider a Harlequin romance printed in the English language nothing more than trash. To the best of my knowledge I have never read one --- not even to help me read a parallel text in Spanish. I would never, under any circumstances, permit a Harlequin Romance in English to be brought into my home, and, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t have single friend who even knows what they are. Tack ska du har for att listena.
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11. You have heard me say that I go to exercise class. Three times a week I stand before a television screen in the select company of 30 or ladies who were born around 1925 and swing my arms and stretch my legs for an hour. The last time I looked, I was the only man there. But --- I pass many pot-bellied men of a similar vintage on my way in and out of the building. Most of them are seated or standing near a pool table, where one of the company pokes at a little ball with a stick. Even if you have never played pool, you might remember seeing Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats in the movies, which is about all the education anyone needs on pool right there. I never learned how to play pool. The pool hall was 9 miles away in the city of Rockland. It was owned by Phil Sulides who was a good guy. As I recall, there was a chair or chairs in the front of the pool hall where you could get a shoe shine. I can’t remember now why I ever went in there, but I think there were two or three pool tables out back obscured by the amount of cigarette smoke that you would only expect to find at the Elk’s Club today. I was one of those wimpy little kids who never learned how to play baseball, either. Many men would consider my entire childhood a waste. About the only thing I learned as a kid was how to read.
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12. Last week I caught a rat in a mouse trap. Something ate a hole in an orange that was on the floor by the door and I thought I’d catch whatever it was in a mouse trap. I didn’t think whatever it was could be more than two inches long. But the next night, around 6 o’clock right after supper, I was surprised to see a huge rat, upside down with the trap on top of him, with his nose caught in that mouse trap, right there in the entry way that you might as well call the kitchen floor. How a rat got into the house I have no idea, unless it hopped in when someone left a door open. --- What do you do when you see a live rat with his nose caught in a mousetrap? If you scoop up the whole business, the rat might escape and you’d sleep that night with a rat either running across the bed covers or trying to yank them onto the floor. Being a television person, I quickly set up my video camera and took pictures of the rat while I was trying to figure out what to do. You can well believe that when I posted the film of the entire operation on Blip, which some people call the thinking woman’s YouTube, I heard at once from some animal rights people. Well, now, a week or so later, I’m still hearing about this live rat in a mousetrap and more than one person has called my attention to the havahart trap web page. I commend this havahart web page to your attention the next time there are unwanted rats in your kitchen. All it says is, “Rat Traps. Remove unwanted rats the most humane way!” So --- here you are with the unwanted rat in the little humane havahart cage without a word of advice as to what is expected of you next. Presumably you will not kill the rat, because if that were an option, you might as well have set a snap trap, eliminated an interminable unnecessary wait on death row, and had the unpleasant business over with at once. So --- there should now be no question in your mind as to what you must do when you have taken a rat prisoner. Visit one of your animal rights friends as quickly as possible and let the rat out in their kitchen.
Monday, January 5, 2009
The humble Farmer Rants for January 4, 2009 Radio Show
Rants January 4, 2009
1. Jeb Bush is considering a 2012 run for the presidency and you can understand why his brother George is his strongest supporter. If Jeb could be elected, George would not go down in history as the worst president this country ever had.
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2. Living on the coast of Maine can be a challenge. Let's take a specific example. What do you do if you live within sight of the famous Olsen house, and 75 yachts from New Jersey anchor beside your back yard? You might look out and think that it's a mighty pretty sight. But if you've seen yachts anchor there before, you know you could be looking at trouble, because most of those people on the yachts are environmentally oriented. That means that they would cut off a hand before they'd throw a can, bottle or scrap of paper overboard. But they've got to get rid of their trash somehow and you know how they do it. They lug it ashore and stack it neatly in your barn. The man who brought this to my attention said that he asked them why they were stacking their trash in his barn. And they said, "What do you do with your trash?" And he said, "I take it to the dump." And they said, "When you go there you can take ours, too." If you've driven through parts of Philadelphia and New Jersey, you probably thought that the people who lived there were responsible for all the ankle deep trash beside the road. But now I can't help but wonder if it isn't recycled yacht trash that some old Maine lobsterman has thrown out of his car on his way to Florida.
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3. I’m pretty much like Greta Garbo. I just want to be left alone. All I want to do is make a happy program to amuse and entertain and perhaps inform my friends. But I just heard that a talented and intelligent young friend of mine will be out of work for the next two weeks and as a senior citizen who has seen much and read even more, I feel I must comment on these economic times which some claim are difficult. Don’t you find it interesting that so many of the people who are out of work eagerly voted for the greedy captains of industry who make a habit of shutting things down and putting people out of work every time they’re in office? Anyone who has been around more than just a little realizes that hard times are created to break up unionized labor and drive down wages and living conditions. Anyone who has lived long enough or who can read a history book knows that it has happened over and over here in America. Youngsters, or old people who don’t bother to read, have no idea that the closing of factory doors is just one more step in that age old struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Many of the jobless who are wailing and rending their garments can’t even see that cause and effect relationship and when the next election comes around, they’ll vote against themselves again.
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4. I don’t want to do it, controversy does not become me, but because of what my friends are telling me and what you’ve been seeing on the news, I’ve got to talk about the economy. What you want to bet that the billionaire Warren Buffett could get along on my Social Security income better than many 35 year old kids could. I don’t make enough to pay an income tax and I’m better off now than I’ve ever been in my entire life. These unemployed people, who are young enough to be my grandchildren, were brought up in a rich kid lifestyle. They pay to go skiing and they go out to restaurants to eat. They buy clothes that they don’t need and they have more than one pair of shoes. You might not believe this, but last week while buying a dollar chicken sandwich in McDonald’s, I heard the clerk say to a man, “That will be twenty dollars” and something. Twenty dollars to take your wife and a couple of kids into McDonald’s? I couldn’t believe that working class people had that kind of money to throw around. What are people thinking? The fact that a working family can come up with $20 for four plastic containers that contain mostly ice indicates to me that the economy can’t be all that bad. Please remember that you are listening to a man who went to school with cardboard and metal covering the holes in his shoes. It would seem that hard economic times is a relative term.
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5. I just heard it on television from a man and a woman who were touted as “experts in the field.” When going out on dates in 2009, the man still pays. You can imagine how this must enrage women whose sisters have fought for equality for generations. I have neither experience nor an opinion on the matter because a 15 year old child probably knows more about dating than I do. When I first became aware of girls, all the kids in the neighborhood, 10 or 15 of us, would walk a well beaten path through the fields and woods down to the shore and go swimming. We’d go at a different time every day because the icy cold salt water was warmest after it had just come in over mudflats heated by the sun. In the winter we went skating on Jerry’s pond out back of father’s house in the middle of the woods. I didn’t date in college. On top of being shy, awkward, and socially inept, every bit of the ten dollars a week I got for playing in a dance band at the Blue Goose went for room rent and food. When I got married at the age of 29, it was to a girl whose father had anchored his yacht in Tenants Harbor. When she and her siblings rowed ashore to absorb local culture, I happened by and gave them all a ride in my funny old Model T truck. And because it was a chance meeting, you can’t really call that a date. Some time later, after she left me to marry a better man, I lived alone in my battered old farmhouse for 20 years. I won’t say I didn’t provide any service to the community during what should have been my most productive adult years, but I wouldn’t consider it dating, unless you think a man can date without leaving the comfort and privacy of his own home. And right after I met my wife Marsha in the cellar of a church in Camden where she was the kingpin in a coterie of widows and divorcees who had taken it upon themselves to provide meals for hungry single men, we spent evenings in my home stuffing envelopes addressed to meeting planners. Yes, I missed out on this dating experience thing, but I realize now that all turned out for the best. You know, it isn’t until a man sees his friend’s grandchildren in jail, that he gives thanks he was once a socially inept, poor boy with bad breath.
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6. The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea. What is it about that special someone in your life that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling and brings the tears to your eyes when you think about it? Songs have been written about that uniquely human emotion, but I’m under deadline and it’s easier to stick with purple prose. Just this past week someone said it bothered them to hear me refer to my life’s companion as “The Almost Perfect Woman” but that’s too bad. You can’t please everybody and I don’t care because my only goal is to please you. Sometime, if you’re interested, you might ask me why I call my wife Marsha The Almost Perfect Woman, and I will tell you. But now we’re going to discuss what it is about her that endears her to me and makes her special. For years her favorite toy was a Snapper lawnmower. I’ve seen her come home from work at five and walk behind that mower without stopping until the sun went down. She resists and resents my attempts at hand delivered nourishment. She sets the blade down as low as it will go and cuts the grass right down to the dirt. If I have mowed a section of lawn that afternoon so it looks lush and green, she mows it again. You can find the phenomenon in the literature under compulsive neurosis. For my entire life I admired women who lived to scrub and cook and clean and, guess what, now that I’m married to one? You’re going to think I’m making this up but if you look on my web page you’ll find photographic verification. One day my wife Marsha hit our ancient privy or toilet or whatever you want to call it with her John Deere rider mower and moved it about a foot. Oh, if she has to be at a certain place at a certain time, she will not leave the house until it is impossible for her to be on time. I’ve seen her take a shower at midnight and then clean the shower stall just the way she came out of it, and then go in the other room and scrub down the shower in there, too. Yes, before she got the rider mower, her favorite toy was the Snapper lawn mower. Every piece of metal or plastic on it has been bent back like your hair in a high wind because it’s been driven into every piece of granite and every building on the property. The living bark has been ripped from all my big apple trees and even when surrounded by stakes of metal, small fruit trees don’t stand a chance. She’s knocked the wooden finish board corners off several of our outbuildings. Bolts are continually being snapped off the motor, and the carburetor and muffler are left dangling after encounters of a granite kind. And here’s the funny thing. I don’t know why, but every time I am called out to restore that lawnmower, I choke up, my eyes get all watery, and I think how much I love that woman. It might help that I think she is pretty.
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7. While deleting the 30 or so junk emails that come in every hour or so, my eye caught the words “so bored.” One might suspect that this is an invitation to engage in an exchange of emails. But is not “so bored” an indication that we have heard from someone who cannot read or think? We understand that people who are dyslexic cannot read, but my dyslexic friends are among the smartest and most creative people I know. So we might assume that the “so bored” email is not from one of them. This leaves us with no alternative but to realize that the “so bored” email comes from someone who might be able to read but who cannot think. Well --- if you were trying to attract anyone’s attention for any reason, would you preface your remarks with the announcement that you were not too terribly clever?
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8. My friend Julian, who has sold more than a few things in his day, says that the time to sell is when you have a buyer. I take that to mean that even though you might not be thinking about selling your grandfather’s 1932 Plymouth sedan with “floating power, set in rubber”, if someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, he or she owns it. I was thinking of that while out lawn sale ing the other day. Like a woman who knows the price of everything in the grocery store, I know that bicycles are 3 to 5 dollars, books (and we are talking classics or science in hard cover) are a quarter, a handful of Craftsman wrenches are a dollar and pyrex dishes are half a dollar. So when I walk up a driveway and see prices on items that are ten times higher than they should be, I laugh out loud and think to myself that optimism for the economy is alive and well. Thank you for tolerating this digression. Now to the point. We said that the time to sell is when you are visited by someone who wants to buy. You might turn that end for end and say that the time to buy, is when you find someone who WANTS to sell. But if you have been to enough lawn sales, you know that the time to buy is when you find someone who HAS to sell.
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9.
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html
Wow. Is it true that people in Maine pay more for electricity than just about every other state in the Union? Why don’t we hear about this kind of thing on the news? According to the chart I saw, Maine people pay about twice as much for electricity as they pay in seven other states: we’re talking Idaho, Washington, Nebraska, North Dakota, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. In looking at the chart quickly, it seems that only Vermont and New York pay more than Maine. What better reason to buy a windmill that will generate electricity or make some solar panels. Of course, if you think that your power company is all set to slash your electric bill by a third just to bring it into line with most of the United States, you wouldn’t think that generating your own power with the sun or wind is even worth investigation. And while I have your attention, if you think your power company is going to cut your electric bill, you might be interested in hearing about a little private hedge fund that is paying returns in the double digits.
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10. My wife buys most of her groceries at Wal*Mart because she pays less and I don’t like it. I’m a suspicious old man and I would like to know where my food comes from. Used to be you could read on the can that B&M beans were baked and put in the can in Portland, Maine. Now you read on most any can in your cupboard that it was packaged for a company in Arkansas without a hint of whose grubby little hands filled and sealed it. Yes, you and I know that the standards which govern the inspection of food processed here in the US have dropped intentionally and drastically over the past 8 or so years. We understand that profits are lost when food packaging lines are halted to remove substandard items. We read that food inspectors are penalized for inspecting. Can that be why we are hearing all these stories about so many poison things that come from China? Point out the flaws in Chinese products and you won’t have time to think about the problems we have with the quality of the food that is being produced here at home. Along the same line, if you start a war in some other part of the world, the press will find neither time nor space to report on your domestic shortcomings. Oh, I started out to ask you. Can you tell me why it is no longer necessary to print the country of origin on the cans of food sold on store shelves today?
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/07/26/china.products/index.html
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11. I recently got a chain letter from a dear friend. It was one of those “do you remember the good old days” chain letters. In one place it says, “I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 60s & 70s…” One usually remembers the songs that were popular when one was in grade school up through high school and the friend who sent me this chain letter which waxes nostalgic over the great tunes of the 60s and 70s was in grade school in 1929. She was over 55 years old in the 70s, and by then her children had long since graduated from college. On June 22 she will be 87 years old but if she still has the strength and ability to dance to those wonderful tunes of the 60s and 70s I say, go for it.
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12. A few of the top teachers over at the high school started a program which introduces freshmen to the history and occupations here on the coast. They brought in my brother, Jim, to tell the students about local history, Sherm Hoyt to tell them about fishing, clams and lobsters, and me to talk about humor and storytelling as a natural resource. I’ve spoken at hundreds of banquets and have learned not to eat before I speak because if I eat, I'm likely to fall asleep. So I told the students that I never eat before I speak and asked them if they knew why. A young man named Shannon said, "Because you'd spit crumbs all over the audience." I once made my second appearance for a Connecticut company that had been forced to cancel the Christmas bonus. The overall mood was gloomy at best. I told the students that I'm very often asked back to speak to a group two or three times and that sometimes the second response is very different from the first. I asked them if they knew why. And Wayne Hilt's granddaughter said, "Because they had heard you before?" So fear not my friend. From what I heard from those high school freshmen, humor and storytelling will continue to be one of Maine’s most valuable resources.
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humble, I attended the MPBN public "hearing" in Waterville last Monday. I make a series of remarks - we'll call them "constructive criticism" - in the course of the evening, but I prefaced my first comment with the fact that I had been a public radio listener for over 25 years, and a member right up until they biffed off the humble Farmer. I got an immediate response from two heads in the audience that turned in my direction, a "hear, hear!" and further flogging of that dead horse. I was going to bring up the disclaimer thing again, but others were hammering it into the ground so I didn't need to. Beck got an earful, trust me. Makes me proud to see what good company I'm in.Pegg in Palmyra
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Those who miss laughing at my dry, surrealistic commentary might find an acceptable substitute in MPBN press releases.
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260 Hamlin Drive
Fort Myers, FL 33905
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
Hear humble's radio show on his web page
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html
See and hear humble tell stories on his web page:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/
Hear dozens of humble's rants and even his radio show on PRX:
http://www.prx.org/Enjoy humble's music/humor program on Maine cable television stations:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/TvTowns.html
Fort Myers, FL 33905
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
Hear humble's radio show on his web page
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html
See and hear humble tell stories on his web page:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/
Hear dozens of humble's rants and even his radio show on PRX:
http://www.prx.org/Enjoy humble's music/humor program on Maine cable television stations:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/TvTowns.html
Did you know that Robert Skoglund, The humble Farmer, stands on stages and tells funny stories?Ask humble to entertain you and your friends with dry stories like these:http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/PortlandA.html
You can visit humble and Marsha at their Bed & Breakfast on the coast of Maine.http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/BaB.html
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