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This is a rough draft of my Rants for the week of September 23, 2007

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1. My friend Richard Bird, who is an absolute wizard when it comes to solving computer problems, seems to be an inexhaustible source of interesting funny stories that make me laugh. I notice that he always tells me one just before he presents his bill.

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2. You will be glad to hear that the famous Maytag repair man put a new wiring system in our Maytag dishwasher. There was a recall and Maytag, good company that it is, sent a man to my house to fix it. You will not be surprised to hear that the famous Maytag repair man is one of the most personable people I have met in a long time. The Maytag repair man was eager to help me. He knows his business. While he was waiting for the super glue to set up he gave me some valuable advice about the washing machine in my cellar --- and I’m talking about the kind of advice you can’t get anywhere else. It has to come from a man who knows his business inside and out. So I am pleased. I should mention that I felt as if I bonded with this young man immediately. When I asked him if I could get him a thick rug which would be easier on his knees, he said, “No, I don’t need it. I’m wearing my padded insulated long underwear.”

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3. You know that I’m always eager to talk with you. Although I might talk a lot more than you think is necessary when we first meet, the next day you might realize that somewhere along the line the situation was subtly reversed and that the next week you heard me repeating your very witty or informative stories on this program. Thus it was with my friend, the Maytag repair man. In the course of our conversation he said that there are areas along the Maine coast that have an undeserved reputation. We’re talking here about crime and mayhem and I know the parties involved. You might know them, too. He told me that he wouldn’t hesitate to leave $5,000 worth of equipment with these people because he knew he’d get his money. Are you listening closely? He said that the people who gave him a hard time with his work or his bill were usually our rich friends from away.

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4. Last year a friend of mine spent two days in the hospital. His health insurance company refused to pay for the visit. Are you surprised to hear this? My friend is a smart man and he is not a poor man. He could have easily written a check for the $5,000 and paid the bill, but he knew that the insurance company was being very naughty, so he appealed their decision. He appealed the decision to higher and higher authorities for a year. And after a year or so, by the time he reached the top authority in Maine, he was getting letters from doctors and the hospital saying they were going to sue him because he hadn’t paid his hospital bill. And he said, “Sue away. When we resolve this matter, the insurance company will do what it is supposed to do and the insurance company will pay you five grand for my two day stay in your hospital.” Yesterday he got a letter from the insurance company that said they would pay the bill. But is this not is a frightening thing? My friend is smart and he is not a poor man. But think how health insurance companies can intimidate poor, sick people who don’t understand how the system now works. By the very nature of our unfortunate system, which is to make a profit for the insurance companies, too many of those companies are not going to pay a claim if there is any way on this green earth that they can weasel out of it. As I said, this is a frightening thing. It is enough to make you decide to walk half an hour every day and give up sweets, cigarettes and beer.

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5. My computer guru and good friend Richard Bird told me that one day when his car was parked in a dooryard, way down in the deepest jungles of Georgia, someone mowed the lawn. Mr. Bird said that, unbeknownst to him, a gob of Georgia grass as big as your fist got lobbed up against a wheel on his car and it stuck there. The next day he left for Maine in a pouring rain. For three days he drove to Maine in a pouring rain. And when he got to Maine he discovered that a gob of Georgia grass as big as your fist was still stuck on his hubcap. Is this not nature’s own way of revealing its awesome power? We can send people to the moon and we can squeeze 5,000 songs into a piece of plastic as big as a fountain pen. But you could not buy a super glue that would hold a gob of grass on a hubcap.

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6. My computer guru friend Mr. Bird says that he would be the last person to suggest that the government should control more of our affairs, but there is one place where he would make an exception. Mr. Bird says, that there should be a law --- that every single transformer or AC adapter that comes with every printer or camera or fax machine or telephone --- should have clearly printed on it, what it goes to. If you don’t stick a little piece of tape on these things and write on the tape what it goes to, within two or three years you will have 20 or 30 of these little black boxes, with six foot plug-in wires on them, cluttering up your desk drawers and you won’t have the least idea of what any of them go to.

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7. My computer guru friend, Richard Bird, told me that years ago when he was living in a comfortable house overlooking the salt water, he invited a few friends in for a lobster dinner. The ladies in the group were delighted and when they arrived they told Richard that he could sit back and relax because they would take care of everything. He said that was nice, but he wanted to ask them to do only one thing. Do not throw the lobster shells into the trash. The lobster shells were to be placed in a bucket and carried out to the end of the dock and dumped back into the salt water where they belonged. But, probably just out of force of habit some of the lobster shells were dumped into the trash. And while Richard was taking them to the dump, the plastic bag broke and a bit of lobster juice soaked into the carpet of Richard’s new Jeep. Is there anything that stinks more --- that draws more flies than lobster juice on a hot day? You can’t scrub it out of a carpet. Richard lived with it for two years. Then, one freezing cold day, when the bacteria were relatively inactive, he traded it in.

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8. My brother called up to tell me to turn on my TV. Someone was talking about IQ. He knew I’m interested in the IQ. You know all there is to know about IQ so we’re not going to talk about that now. Except – this man said that IQ tests categorized people and that if your IQ tested low, it could keep you from doing something that --- without the IQ test --- you might have been able to do. I think I got that right. That’s the way I understood it. But, if your IQ is too high, it can also keep you from doing something that you might want to do. My wife’s Dutch nephew was working on a doctorate at MIT when he decided it wasn’t what he wanted to do. So he learned how to fly an airplane and then he learned how to teach people to fly airplanes. Now I think he is a pilot for some commercial airline down in the Caribbean. The point of all this is that he applied to become an American citizen. Although his IQ is far above average, he couldn’t get in. The way I understand it, he would be taking a good job away from some qualified American citizen. On the other hand, if his IQ were low and he had wanted to pick fruit or disembowel cattle in a meat packing plant, he would have been welcomed with open arms.

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9. Have you ever consulted the weather map on the Internet? That’s the map that shows the clouds moving across the state lines so you can figure out how long it will be before the sun shines. I wanted to know if the fog was going to burn off this morning so I looked for a moving weather map. The one I found had a man standing by a map of the United States. In the center of the map it said, “hot.” I’m sitting here on the coast of Maine with my sweater on, and I want to know if there is any chance I can go outside today without wearing my snowmobile suit. I don’t care if it’s 100 degrees in Kansas. I want to know if the temperature is going to get up to a sweltering 60 degrees on the coast of Maine today. I still don’t know if the fog is going to lift here or not, because the weather man’s chin covered Maine. He wasn’t even going to not talk about the weather in New England, he wasn’t even going to let us look at Maine on the map. If you can figure out why this always happens, please tell me. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com

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10. How do you handle your junk email? Here’s another example of junk email that came in this morning. I knew it was a junk email before I opened it. But still I did open it because there is always that slim chance that I might be wrong. I knew it was junk mail because there was a name on it --- the sender told me what her name was. Unless they work in a post office or a lawyer’s office, many educated and/or intelligent people still haven’t learned how to answer a telephone. And many educated and/or intelligent people still haven’t learned that you put your contact information on an email and that in the subject line you put whatever it is that you are writing about. So even though we have a Bed & Breakfast, when I got an email from helene.b that said Reservation – Vacation Rental, I knew that it was a piece of junk mail.

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11. Today I learned a new phrase. It is “First Person Shooter Game.” I looked it up and read that a first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game that renders the game world from the visual perspective of the player character and tests the player's skill in aiming guns or other projectile weapons. These games combine enhanced realism with graphic violence. I am aware that nowadays instead of climbing trees and running along the shore or in the woods, kids play video games. My computer guru friend, Richard Bird, mentioned First Person Shooter Game when I asked him to help me with the complicated aspects of the Quicken and Outlook programs on my computer. Richard compared his comprehensive knowledge of these programs with a kid’s need to beat the machine. From what Richard said, I understand that any genius willing to work until two or three in the morning can master any computer program.

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12. My father never went hunting. When I first went to Sweden around 50 years ago, I met an old woman way out in the jungles of deepest darkest Smaland who said that she remembered seeing my great-grandfather Sven Magnusson go by with a gun. She said he was a hunter. I suppose if you go far enough back, you can find a hunter in your family, too. I’m about to become a hunter and it’s not because I want to. I was brought up to think that deer were beautiful creatures and that it was not nice to shoot them and eat them up. But for years deer have been destroying my garden and my fruit trees and I now see deer as nothing more than evil, destructive 100 pound rats. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, says there was a deer on the back lawn when she hung out the wash this morning. And although we haven’t seen a rat around here in years, I remember when there were a lot of rats not only out in the hen pen and in the barn but also in the walls of your very house. So I was brought up to believe that it was noble to shoot a rat. And now I’m about to shoot deer. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com How does one get a license to shoot deer?

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13. While we are talking about great scientific advances here, you probably wanted to point out that although scientists have finally perfected a hearing aid that will become obsolete in two years, our collective genius has yet to produce a product or fence that will keep deer out of your garden.

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