Rants January 11, 2009
+
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.
+
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.”
+
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.
+
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.
+
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.
+
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.
+
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment