April 22, 2007 humble Farmer Radio Program Rants

The humble Farmer at Bowdoin College, January 31, 2003

Thank you for visiting this page of Rants.
Below are the rants from The humble Farmer radio show for the week of
April 22 - 28, 2007

April 22, 2007 Rants

1. Your buddy, The humble Farmer, here with another 55 minutes of old fashioned music just for you. You know that I do not like the j word. What you hear on this program I like to call old fashioned music. My brother asked me if jazz music was redundant. I said I thought it was an oxymoron.

2. I don’t raise my voice in my home. Probably because my father came from the old country and my father didn’t raise his voice. When your father came from the old country your father didn’t need to raise his voice and he only made suggestions once. And if he suggested that I do something, it was to my advantage to do it. Quickly. So I don’t raise my voice in the home. This presents a problem when someone calls for Marsha and she is upstairs. So I clap my hands three times which lets her know that she should appear on the scene quickly. Saves screaming like Dagwood always used to do --- Blooonnndie. Marsha’s regulars know this, so when they call and don’t immediately hear three claps they automatically know that my wife isn’t home. I mention this only because last night I came as close as I ever have to raising my voice to my wife. There is no excuse for raising one’s voice to a loved one, but when you understand the seriousness of the question she asked me, you will realize that I did not raise my voice in anger but in shock. --- And alarm. When you come right down to it, any woman should know better than to ask this question of an old Maine man. Last night, my wife Marsha put a steaming bowl of delicious fish chowder on the table before me, and when she asked, “Should I have put bacon in this chowder?” I screamed, “No.”

3. My neighbor Hall called the other day and when I asked him what his son Glenn was doing, he said he was overhauling a motor in his lobster boat. He reminded me that Glenn had gone to school down in South Portland where he learned how to overhaul engines and that reminded him that years ago Glenn and one of his friends started up a 1928 Chevrolet engine. And they were pretty proud that they were able to get that old engine running. But George Davis listened to it and said that she had a skip on four. Which got Hall started on George Davis. George Davis was rebuilding his kitchen and when Hall asked him how it was coming along George said, “I’m getting tired of sanding this spackle. I didn’t mind when all that grit and dust got in my bed and I didn’t mind when it got in my food, but when it got under my upper plate I knew it was time to quit.”

4. You might have seen on the news that a Bed & Breakfast guest discovered an alleged camera hidden in an alleged clock. I would like to think that the camera was put there to catch a thief. Nowadays you never know when your actions are going to be recorded by a camera and shown on national television and these peep shows enjoy fantastic ratings. Hoping to profit by the public’s insatiable desire to watch others through a hidden camera, you are now going to be treated to a verbal peek at our home through a make believe crack in our kitchen wall. -- Here we go. --- If you have lived under the same roof with another person for any length of time, you are aware that your behavior is governed by rules and regulations. These rules do not have to be written down or even articulated because you live with these household rules and you know what they are. Every household is different. Because there are only two people in our household and because one of them is a man and one is a woman, I will outline the prescribed duties of the man and the woman in our household. The woman does all of the cleaning. She does the laundry and hangs it out. She makes the bed and puts on clean sheets. She makes sure items of clothing are folded neatly and put away. The woman always has the man’s clean underwear and clothing for another happy day placed neatly by the side of his bed before he gets up in the morning. She makes sure there are always fresh towels in the bathroom. The woman prepares all of the meals and does the dishes afterwards. The woman repairs minor tears in clothing and sews on buttons. The woman goes to work at 8 AM and is usually home by 5. In season, the woman sometimes comes home from work and mows the lawn for three hours without pausing to come into the house. As you can see, there is really not much left for the man to do, unless you count setting up staging so the woman can scrape and paint the outside of the house. Oh, I just remembered one more thing the woman does. She makes and enforces our household rules.

5. Have you ever deceived your wife? The one you love? I have to admit that I have deceived my wife. This morning as soon as I got dressed I put on my snowmobile suit. It was a simple and blatant act of deception. My wife wasn’t surprised to see me in my snowmobile suit, because there are days here on the coast of Maine in July and August that are so cold that I come to the supper table in my snowmobile suit. And because she was rushing to get out of the house her mind was focused on getting out and not me. So she didn’t say a thing. There are a few things in this life that I do not like to do. Attending any kind of sporting event where people transport a cylindrical object from one place to another is one of them. Attending any kind of event where we are expected to sit and enjoy some kind of entertainment, be it musical or verbal is another. Plays by Shakespeare, Moliere or Oscar Wilde being valid exceptions. I also dislike going to any kind of meeting. On this particular day that I snapped on my snowmobile suit I was heading for a meeting, and, had my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, seen me before I jumped into that snowmobile suit, she would have cried: “You are not going anywhere in those ratty looking pants.”

6. Here, for your it is a small world department, is a letter from Randolph up at Deertrees theater in Harrison. For your information, Martin Nicholson, who visited Marsha and me in St. George, Maine, lives in England and drives a one of those monster tractors in tractor pulls. Martin is famous enough to be found by googling. Although an Englishman shot my great great great grandfather, who was one of the insurgents serving under George Washington at the Battle of Harlem in 1776, we hardly ever think of that unpleasantness any more and I didn’t hold it against Martin when he visited us. Randolph writes, Mr. humble, I was just scrolling through your web site looking for some new publicity material … when I stumbled upon the photo of the driver for the Peaselake Tractor Pulling Team, Martin Nicholson. Martin happens to be the ex-boyfriend of my second wife's half sister. Tis indeed a small world. randolph --- Ex-boyfriend of Randolph’s second wife’s half sister and fellow countryman of the British soldier who shot my insurgent great great great grandfather who fought to bring down a legal government? Tis indeed a small world.

7. You might have seen that a cruise ship sank off the coast of Greece. It was a calm warm day and they were close to shore so almost everyone was rescued. Would you dare go for a ride on a cruise ship? My friend Julian, who has hunted bears in the great north woods, piloted a boat full of sports out 150 miles to catch sailfish, and who flew an airplane for years, says he wouldn’t dare go on a cruise ship. If the cruise boat sank, he could, of course easily be rescued. But Julian says that on cruise boats the real danger is the Norwalk virus.

8. You have heard me say, more than once, that while attending a newspaper conference on syndication in New York City, I heard Mort Walker say that he couldn’t go to a funeral without getting three panels out of it. You will recall that Mort Walker wrote the Beetle Bailey comic strip, and Mort Walker is no different from any other person who writes a newspaper column or is responsible for social commentary on the radio or television. Social commentators do not run around looking for something to write about. Every time they turn on the television, the radio or pick up anything that has writing on it, something clicks in their head and they can’t rest until they have recorded their observation in a notebook or in their computer. This can be difficult to do if one’s wife thinks it is more important for him to run down to the dump and then organize his office so she won’t be embarrassed when people come into the house. --- For years it was common for me to pick up any volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, open it at random, and read for ten minutes. One morning last fall, by chance the book opened to Fascism in Italy in the 1920s and since then I haven’t had time to work or even have a life. Yesterday, while visiting Doctor Ira for my annual checkup, I picked up a magazine with an emaciated half-nude woman on the cover because one of the articles listed on the cover caught my eye: “How to look Rested if You didn’t Get Any Sleep.” Or, tricks to make you look like you slept 8 hours even if you got only a few minutes. “I can’t understand how she fell asleep at the wheel. When we extracted her from the vehicle her face looked completely refreshed and rested.”

9. My wife Marsha was sitting in a soft chair eating her breakfast when I walked over to better hear her instructions entailing the dump run. She looked at my waist, swallowed some egg, and said, “Old man.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “You have your sweater buttoned wrong.” You see, I was wearing one of those sweaters that button down the front and from her seated position it looked like I had fastened the two top buttons wrong so that one side of the sweater hung down 4 inches lower than the other. You’ve done it. You know what I’m talking about. That’s why they invented zippers. I looked down and buttoned the lower buttons. And when I did the bottom of the sweater evened up and it was discovered that I didn’t have my sweater buttoned wrong after all. Marsha said, “No matter how you wear it, it looks wrong.”

10. Although I could never afford to have children, I married a widow who now has three grandchildren. So --- I am able to realize all the wonderful benefits of being a grampy without the attendant guilt of having brought another polluting consumer into an already overcrowded world. When the children are here, monkey climbs down off the couch and becomes an essential component of our daily life. What a delight it is to teach children to conjugate verbs with the aid of a puppet money. I take a bite from a piece of toast, and say to the child “I ate.” Then I pretend to feed the monkey a piece of toast and say, “Primate.”

11. What do you do when you get an email that says, “If we can’t find your site - your customers can’t find your site. You need better search engine placement.” I simply reply, “If you can find me and email to me, others can find me and email to me. Thanks for letting me know that my web page is a force to be reckoned with.”

12. My friend Julian says that 19th century spies would like to have had the ink that Wal*Mart uses to write their sales slip warranties. Within a few months it has faded away and you’re left with a blank piece of paper. There are people in this country today who act as if the Constitution was written with it.

End: We are told that more men than women attended a recent construction trade show. The TV commentator said that there aren’t enough women in construction. Could this be because women are smarter than men? My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, said, “I don’t want to work outdoors in the cold.”

Here’s another audio rant you can hear on my web page. This after seeing Tommy Thompson, father of welfare reform, speak on TV.

My name is Bummy Bumpson and I’m running for President of these United States. You might have seen me speak at the recent Iowa conclave so you probably already know that I am the father of corporate welfare reform. When I was first elected governor you might be surprised to hear that there wasn’t one fat, lazy, ignorant corporation in my state that was paying a federal income tax. So I invited all those welfare recipients to a meeting and I said, “The working families that earn less than $50,000 a year have been supporting our great country since the Reagan years. Domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax. You have been living on corporate welfare for so long that you can’t seem to lift yourself up out of it.” And those corporation presidents cried out, as if in one voice: “Yes, yes, we want to be able to pay an income tax like poor working people but a thousand points of light blinded our eyes and now we have forgotten how. Please help us.” And once we gave those corporate presidents a bit of encouragement and job training they and their companies were able to join hands with taxpaying mainstream America. And 98 percent of the corporations in my state that were on welfare are now paying an income tax. My name is Bummy Bumpson, I’m running for the office of President of the United States, and I’d appreciate your vote.

Not read on the air: A humble letter that was published in the KJ and Waterville Sentinel: Isaac Asimov wrote that dialects are only languages of the tongue. He pointed out that there is also a language of the heart. Therefore, Neighbor A could speak of someone in the kindest, most politically correct terms, and then tie him behind a pickup truck and drag him until he was dead. Neighbor A might speak of people in the kindest, most politically correct language, and yet find a distressing technicality that would keep them from voting or getting immediate aid after a hurricane destroyed their homes. On the other hand, Neighbor B could employ a politically incorrect lexical item to describe friends he loves dearly. Which neighbor do you think would be most likely to get elected President of the United States?

Thank you for reading my rants. Come have supper with us at the St. George farm. Your buddy humble

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Robert Karl Skoglund
785 River Road
St. George, ME 04860
(207) 226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
www.TheHumbleFarmer.com