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Peace is bad for Business.

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November 25, 2007 Rants

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1. The other morning when I woke up, I realized that there are two kinds of people in the world. When one type gets up in the morning, a large area in the bed where they have spent the night is toasty and warm. The other type of person quickly moves into this warm spot.

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2. You might remember that a week or so ago I got an email that said something about nude photos of Kate Moss. I wondered aloud to you that if there were indeed a person named Kate Moss, who in the world would want to take the time to look at nude photos of her, anyway? I mean, don’t we have preachers and ads for exercise machines on TV? Who could ask for anything more? Most importantly, I have yet to see anyone, young or old, who doesn’t look better with clothes on. This is probably because my attitude toward these things was shaped in the 1940s when pin up girls wore attractive wooly sweaters. I also said on that program that I wondered how many people would want to look at nude photos of me. So to settle the question I posted the same rant on my web page under two links. One link says: “Rare Nude Photos of Kate Moss.” The other link says, “Rare Nude Photos of The humble Farmer.” According to the counters on the pages, Kate Moss is ahead of me 70 to 52.

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3. You have certainly participated in and perhaps even designed and published scientific studies. So if someone were to tell you that the idly curious chose Rare Nude Photos of Kate Moss over Rare Nude Photos of The humble Farmer by the wide margin of 70 to 52, you would certainly point out that the Kate Moss link was over mine. You know as well as I do --- that had I put my link on top, there is a good chance it would have received more hits. Also the links could have been placed side by side which would have also given another different result to this fruitful study. And if they were side by side, it might be proven that left handed people chose one link over the other, so the study could be skewed by only permitting left handed or right handed people to participate. Please don’t think that I’m going to give up graciously.

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4. The fact that Kate Moss got 70 ballots to my 52 doesn’t mean a thing in this day and age. If my father had any clout at all, I could get the court to throw out most of the Kate Moss ballots.

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5. My friend Judy sent me an email and in the email she said, “if you are out and about and looking for raw material, there’s more than enough in this issue.” I want to thank Judy for that comment because: Number One --- I never go out looking for material. It always comes to me. And: Number Two --- it made me realize that looking for story material would be like looking for love. You can look, but you’re not going to find the real thing. The best stories are like my wife Marsha. They just happen.

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6. The doctor gave me some powder to breathe twice a day. I hoped that it would keep me from being allergic to smoke and smells, but I guess all it does is increase my lung capacity. It also makes my vocal cords very furry, so you heard a very raspy voice on my last show --- so I’ll have to stop inhaling the powder the day before we get together here. Don’t you think it is interesting that the powder the doctor gave me for my lungs raises the devil with my vocal cords? For every pill that was ever invented to help one part of your body, the same pill pulls down or destroys another part of your body. Marsha’s great aunt Florence over in Den Haag, New York lived to be 100 or so and she did it by never seeing a doctor or eating pills. She finally got tired of living and stopped eating.

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7. You know that I’m a sedentary person. Perhaps you also spend too much time working at your computer. But lately I’ve been getting out of bed when I wake up in the morning, which is around 5, and I’ve been riding my bicycle around the block until the sun comes up. The first day I did it, I was finished at three laps, or about 9 minutes, but this morning I was up to 21 laps or about an hour, when I started to feel the joint in my left knee. So I stopped riding and came in the house and ate my rolled oats. What kind of person do you think stops exercising when he feels that first sign of discomfort which precedes pain? Don’t look for me at the next Olympics.

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8. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, saw it on television while I was taking a shower this morning. A 16 year old boy is getting his doctorate in something to do with the brain. He could read at 2, went through high school and college in two or three years and the sales on his autobiography are such that he is able to live comfortably. He is one tenth of a second behind the fastest kid swimmer in the United States, but his father says that’s ok. It’s good to fail at something.

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9. You might have a printer like I do. My printer has six or so ink cartridges in it and when you print, a little screen hops up on your computer that tells you how much ink you have left. The one I have keeps encouraging me to buy ink before I run out, and you might have heard about some watchdog agency being after this particular company for trying to get people to throw away their cartridges before they are empty. But I’m mentioning this little screen that tells you how much ink you have left because over 55 years ago I had something similar in my car. When I was 14, I bought a 32 Ford coupe convertible. It had mechanical brakes which would have been a challenge even for Arnold, because an average grown man would have had trouble stopping it. No matter how hard you pushed on the brake pedal you could slow it down more by going through the gears. And, by the way, the fact that my first car had no brakes has governed the way I have driven ever since, because it has kept me from tailgating. But the gas line broke on my 32 Ford. So I put four feet of copper tubing on the fuel pump and ran the other end into a gallon jug of gas which was on the floor. And as I’d drive along, I’d glance down and watch the gas in that gallon jug go down down down.

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10. Can you imagine anyone letting their 15 year old kid drive a 32 Ford coupe convertible that had no brakes? It would go 70 miles an hour. We never heard of seatbelts. And because the line to the gas tank was broken there was an old glass vinegar jug there on the floor of the car with gasoline in it and you could watch the gas go down, down, down, as you drove along. I can’t remember if there was a good muffler on that car or not, but I do know I didn’t want that vroom vroom vroom sound that some young men even today seem to think smacks of virility. I wanted a quiet car that you couldn’t hear, like a Stanley Steamer. I remember trying to get insurance one time, but --- I don’t know if you’ll believe this or not --- my neighbor who sold insurance wasn’t interested.

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11. My first car was a 32 Ford coupe convertible. There was a 1936 V8 engine in it and the fuel pump was on top of the engine and in the middle in the back right up against the fire wall. And those fuel pumps would wear out so what you’d do was take the fuel pump off and cut a little round piece out of your leather belt and stuff that little leather disk in the little cup on the end of the rocker arm. Doing that would keep you going for another couple hundred miles. Kids nowadays have no idea of what I’m talking about here. Tires were four ply and six ply. The plies told you how many wrappings of fabric there were on the tire underneath the rubber. Why did you get me thinking about this? The tread would wear off the tire and you’d see the first layer of fabric. And you’d stop every few miles and get out and look at that tire to see how many layers of fabric you had left. It sounds so unbelievable now that if I were a kid listening to an old man telling about it I probably wouldn’t even believe it. And if you had a 6 ply tire, you’d see five plies worn and then the sixth ply would wear through and finally, when you saw that you were actually driving on the inner tube it was time to go home.

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12. Kids nowadays have no idea of what we used to do. I suppose that 50 years ago sounds like a long time ago to them, but 50 years ago I was already a veteran, I’d hitchhiked from Maine to California and back, and I was in Rochester, New York, studying clarinet at the Eastman School of Music evenings while making radios for the Edsel automobile during the days. Telling you about that 32 Ford coupe convertible I used to drive in 1951 is what got me thinking about those days. I can’t remember if what they said is true or not, but I do know that the cloth top on my 32 Ford leaked, and I do remember that the word was out that any girl who went riding with me in that car would do well to carry an umbrella. A year or two after that in 1953 I was driving a 1926 Model T two door sedan. I still have it. When I was a kid we used to make do with what we had. Of course there was no heat to amount to anything in old cars so in the winter I had one of those round three foot high kerosene stoves in the back. They used to use those stoves to heat bathrooms and smelt houses. What would you think today if some kid showed up at your house to take your daughter to the movies in the middle of a blizzard and he is driving a 1926 Ford that is heated with a kerosene stove? If you are an optimist I suppose you might smile at your wife and say as they drove off, “Well, there’s no back seat.”

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13. Have you ever had one of those days where nothing seems to be going right? Everything you touch seems to fall apart? No matter what you say or do, it seems to be the wrong thing? You can’t see how things could possibly get worse? That, my friend, is when you should pull your chair over to the television set and watch the Jerry Springer show.

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