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This is a rough draft of my Rants for the week of September 16, 2007

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1. My cousin Truman is a very witty man. He’s also an antique dealer, and when anyone comes into his store and says, “Do you buy antiques?” He always says, “I’ve got to. I can’t steal enough to stay in business.” If you have some lines of your own that you can produce upon demand, here’s another one you might be able to use. Someone came up to Groucho on the street and said, “You’re Groucho Marx.” Groucho said, “I’ve always known that.”

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2. Hi Humble, I'm very happy to hear that you're still making your show and putting it on the web. I still listen on Friday evening. That just seems right. You talked a lot about the Trump thing you were going to in Portland. But I don't recall hearing you talk about how it went. Did I miss something? Phil Thanks, Phil. You are right. I thought I did a whole show on what I learned at the Trump seminar, but I can’t find it. So I probably didn’t. What I learned was well worth the day it took me to drive to Portland, sit there as an observer for a morning, and then drive home. You realize that the Trump folks are not running around the country to improve their health. So they have hired the top psychologists and sound engineers in the world. You know that every move, every step, every word these people employ on stage has been carefully choreographed to maximize the result desired by Donald Trump. And anyone who earns money by standing on a stage would do well to observe the Trump crew and see what it is they do that has made them successful. The Trump folks paid a lot of money to learn how to do what they do. I went to Portland and got the same amount of instruction for the price of a day’s wages and a tank of gas. The professional Trump crew confirmed what I already knew about how to set up a room. Very often people who put on shows don’t know how to maximize the audience response. In my case as a humorous story teller, the desired response is a lot of laughter and compliments for the meeting planner. Professional performers know how to maximize the response so meeting planners and people who put on shows should ask performers how to set up the room. There are an infinite number of variables such as heat, light, alcohol, time of day. Chairs are not set out in rows, but are set up in horseshoe fashion so each chair enables or forces the person in it to see the person on center stage without twisting sideways or turning the neck. When there are fold up chairs, the chairs appear as if by magic and are set up each time a person or parties of two or more people arrive. There are never any empty chairs set up in the room. Only very intelligent people sit as close to the front as possible. Most people will sit as far to the back or on the side if they can. This problem, and it is perhaps the greatest problem faced by a humorous story teller, can be eliminated by having one or two or six helpers set up chairs for people as they arrive. This forces everyone to sit as close to the front as possible and eliminates a house where 30 to 50 percent of the chairs are empty while people are standing around the wall up back. What the entertainer says on the stage is not as important as how the chairs are set up and how many chairs are filled when it comes to generating laughter from the group. As I said, this is the way Trump sets up a room. After the show I asked the Trump sound man what the presenters were using for mikes. He showed me what I recall was a Countryman E-6. I went on line and ordered one before I went to bed that night. These boys can’t afford to use anything but the best. No person who is serious about presenting before an audience can. Thank you for asking, Phil. I can go on but I think I have more than answered your question.

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3. Have you noticed that some type fonts are impossible to read? This is because in some type fonts, an a looks like an o. There is no problem with this when reading English or a language with which you are familiar, because you can get the meaning from context. But when they use this type font in an email address --- especially in very small type --- you can’t figure out what it is. If you’ve ever failed to decipher someone’s handwriting while trying to get an email address, you know what I’m talking about. Remember this if you ever have to print brochures.

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4. Here’s an example of how we don’t know what we see when we read. For over a year, from time to time when I sent out a bunch of emails to radio friends at one time, I got one back that said, “Canvas me. Not at this address.” For a year every time I’ve seen that email, I’ve searched from my computer but could never find it. Today I realized that it doesn’t say Canvas me. It says Cavas C A V A S me. So I found Cavas me and I was able to delete it. We read so fast we often don’t look at all the letters in a word. I mention this only because you know I enjoy telling you about things that are strange and curious. Isn’t it about time I had a letter from you?

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5. If you say something over and over enough times, it becomes an axiom, part of the language --- part of the culture ---and --- no matter how far removed it is from the truth, people believe it. “Tax and spend” is the first one that comes to mind. The famous Maytag repair man who sits around with nothing to do could be another. Everybody knows that from time to time even the best products are recalled. Cars are always being recalled because they suddenly discover that a faulty widget on the back causes them to roll over in foggy weather. Yes --- to the chase. A few years ago some rich friends who lived with us for several weeks bought us a Maytag dishwasher. It is now an integral part of our home and we couldn’t live without it. But I just got a letter from Maytag. I was advised to unplug my Maytag dishwasher and not to use it again until the famous Maytag repair man arrived to fix it. Soon after, we came home to find a 3 foot cardboard box at our back door. It was new parts from Maytag. I opened up the box to see if there were any instructions in there that would tell me who I should call --- or if they already had the famous Maytag man on the way. The next day I got a letter in the mail from Maytag that said, “When the box arrives, do not open it.” There was a list of dealers on the page and think I called three of them. The good news is that I just talked with a woman who has scheduled our repair for next Monday morning at 10. She said that the Maytag repair man already had two to do in our immediate area so he might as well do ours while he was over this way. I told her that earlier this morning I had seen the famous Maytag repair man on TV --- you know, the one who has nothing to do. And she said that her Maytag man is right out straight. She said, “Everybody sells them and nobody wants to fix them.”

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6. While in the bank yesterday I mentioned to the teller that she transcended the name tag. She wasn’t wearing one, which is unusual because all the tellers in the bank wear name tags. This is good. It is a courtesy to customers. It’s nice to learn the names of your friends with whom you do business. Because I go to many meetings where people wear name tags, I’m in the habit of wearing a name tag when I go anywhere. I wear it as a courtesy to others. If you go to many conventions as I do you might have noticed that you can always tell the most important person at any meeting: they transcend the name tag. They figure, “I’m a pretty important person at this meeting. Everybody knows me. I don’t need a name tag.” But back in the bank, when I mentioned to the teller that she transcended the name tag, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to explain to her that she wasn’t wearing a name tag like all the other tellers, perhaps because she was a little bit special. When I got home I mentioned it to my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, and asked her if she thought I was being inordinately obtuse. And she said I was. My wife said that many people might consider “transcend” to be a very big word. She also reminded me that all a good teller really has to do is smile, be cheerful and count correctly.

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7. A few of us were sitting around in the lobby of a hotel in Leadville, Colorado, gasping for breath at 10,000 feet and waiting for something exciting to happen, when a woman mentioned that she was living in a 4,000 square foot house. That meant absolutely nothing to me. If she had said that her house was painted beige that would also have meant absolutely nothing to me. There are some words and concepts that are foreign to an old Maine man. On the other hand, we know about other useless but curious things that are of more interest to us. For example, although I don’t know how many square feet are in my house, I know that it was framed up on May 11, 1811.

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8. I think religion is a good thing. It gives us an option. If it weren’t for religion, money would be the only excuse to go to war.

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9. While looking at a web page that gave the telephone area codes for the state of New York, a little page popped up on my screen. This is what is said. “You will be caught with porn files in your pc.” “Pornography gets downloaded without your consent every time you bump into an adult website or even a banner.” I don’t know what you do when this warning pops up on your screen, but I don’t plan to spend too much time worrying about it. What bothers me are the hundreds of emails I get every day from ebay and the folks who want me to find true love.

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10. Last week I was sitting in the Minneapolis airport waiting for a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit where I would change and get on a plane to Manchester. Right across the aisle people were getting ready to board a direct flight to Manchester. I walked over and told the man behind the counter that I was going to Manchester by way of Detroit and wouldn’t he like to put me on the direct flight? He said he would do it if I paid him $100. I’ve been thinking about this. Wouldn’t you think that it would be cheaper for Northwest Airlines to send me to Manchester on one airplane instead of two? And wouldn’t you think that Northwest Airlines would be glad to pay me $100 if I’d be good enough to use one of their airplanes instead of two? There is obviously something here I don’t understand. If you know what it is, please tell me. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com

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11. I was telling my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, about “This is a watchbird watching a something. This is a watchbird, watching you.” The Watchbird was in a cartoon in a magazine I used to see back in the 1940s. I googled watchbird and found out that these Watchbird cartoons were created by Munro Leaf who had a Master’s Degree from Harvard. I learned that Munro Leaf wrote the story about Ferdinand the Bull. You might remember seeing Ferdinand the Bull because Disney made it into a famous cartoon. I thought it was interesting that Munro Leaf and his children’s story were denounced by the Nazis because Ferdinand the Bull was a pacifist.

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12. Was it Henry Ford who gave a floor sweeper a big salary and put him in an office where his only job was to think, just because the floor sweeper came up with an idea that saved Ford millions of dollars? I have heard that there is a very rich man who lives not far from here who came up with an idea that saved another company millions of dollars. Sometimes not understanding how things work might be an advantage because your mind isn’t cluttered up with the way things are supposed to be done. The first television commercial I wrote, produced, directed and narrated took best of show at the Brodison Awards, beating 650 entries in 42 categories of advertising. At the same time, another commercial I made took second place. You can easily believe that I knew nothing about making television commercials which is why they obviously blew the judges away. The judges had never seen anything like my commercials before. What I’m getting at here is that it is often easier to do something when you know absolutely nothing about it and have never done it before. Nowadays when I’m asked to speak I sometimes look around the room and might say to myself, “Argh. It’s too hot in here, they’ve had too much wine, the seating is bad, the lighting is bad, the sound system is bad, they’ve been playing golf in the hot sun for 14 hours, they want me to speak at 10:30 PM although most of them were milking cows at 4 this morning, and so on. Do you remember when you used to be able to do so many more things, just because you didn’t realize that they couldn’t be done?

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13. Have you been thinking about what I just said? Do you realize what I just said? I said that is that it is often easier to do something when you know absolutely nothing about it and have never done it before. Might this not explain why there are so many people in the world?

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