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Rants March 9, 2008

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1. We hear a lot about togetherness. Families should do things together. Yesterday my wife’s oldest kid drove from Maine to Vermont with dog, kid and husband. Can you think of anything that will bond a little family quicker than riding 200 miles on icy roads in a Volvo with a large wet dog? At my age, such outings, although they sound delicious, are beyond me. In other seasons one might bundle up the little family and pass from lip to lip a hot thermos while watching a football game through lightly falling sleet and snow. --- Not my thing. Then there are the eagerly awaited four days in Orlando, where one finds unidentifiable items behind the bed, the smell of chemicals in the corridor, questionable bedding and a shower that doesn’t work. --- Been there done that. So what can an old man, with a glint in his eye, and his beautiful adventurous wife do to continue this essential, never ending bonding process? It might surprise you to hear, that every morning, the first thing my wife and I do when we wake up is take our pills together.

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2. This morning a friend directed me to a video on illegal immigration. Although illegal immigration has an unpleasant ring to some ears, our only real problem is controlling the world's population growth. If couples limited themselves to no more than one child, within 100 years we’d have a world population like our grandparents enjoyed in 1900 and an amazing number of the world’s present problems would melt away. Everyone knows that American employers need illegal immigrants who will work for low wages and no health benefits. So --- as long as the business community in America can't function without illegal immigrants, they will be permitted to slip in. To be fair, let’s remember that slavery was the enabling cornerstone in all great ancient civilizations. Do we not all benefit by lower prices every time we buy something that is produced by an underpaid illegal immigrant? How can I complain about illegal immigrants when I’m supporting the system with almost every dollar I spend? Remember that besides enjoying the Every Day Low Prices you get with illegal immigration, you can also throw back your shoulders and say, "I buy Made in America."

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3. You know all about Adam Smith, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Malthus and John Nash. They pretty well figured out how the system worked --- for their day. But each new generation has its own problems that can only be evaluated and solved by a contemporary. Take, for example, the illegal immigration “problem” that our venerable political candidates feel obligated to pay lip service to nowadays. You can be sure that as long as the powers that be know that their candidate will only whine and snivel about illegal immigration and won’t actually do something to stop it, the candidate can probably count on getting elected. A would-be economist in St. George recently told me that illegal immigration would very likely be unheard of if minimum wage were $15 an hour everywhere in the country. He is convinced that as long as they didn’t buy health insurance, go to college, get sick, or drive an American car, a single person could live pretty well on $15 an hour or $30,000 a year. At $15 an hour uneducated American citizens, who were born into welfare and stayed on welfare because it paid more than minimum wage, would suddenly discover an advantage in going to work. And with a minimum wage of $15 an hour, employers could no longer welcome illegal immigrants willing to work for less. Meat packers, owners of sprawling vacation homes and fruit farmers could no longer profit by encouraging busloads of people to sneak across the border. With all of the most unpleasant menial tasks being performed by American citizens, there would be no place in the workforce for illegal aliens. Well, it might not earn my St. George friend a Nobel Prize, but outside of reproducing Qin Shi Huang’s Great Wall and decorating it with machine guns, I haven’t heard of a practical alternate plan. What do you think?

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4. You have heard me say that I was never in my entire life able to work a regular job. When I was a little kid I went out with a crew to rake blueberries, and by 10 o’clock I gave it up and walked home. When I was 21 I worked in the Stromberg Carlson factory in Rochester, New York making Edsel radios, and at noon I passed out on the floor. When I taught school I was asleep on my desk before the last kid was on the bus to go home. So exhaustion is nothing new with me. Each day at one o’clock in the afternoon I am still suddenly overcome by exhaustion. I can’t move. I can’t think. If I try to do something I blunder. I make mistakes. I lose pages of script. I cut myself if I’m working with tools and I snap off some expensive steel part if I’m driving my tractor. Late in my middle age my doctor determined that my thyroid was dead or weak and gave me pills that are supposed to keep me in an upright position for most of the day. But I must be in the placebo group because what they tell me are thyroid pills don’t seem to make a bit of difference. They say that exercise gives you more energy than you’ve ever had before, but I can ride my bicycle 8 miles before 7 am and then hop around at exercise class from 8 until 9. And at 1 in the afternoon, I’m still exhausted. So, because I don’t have to punch a time clock, I often go to bed for a nap. Not that I awake refreshed, because even after a nap I’m still worthless until 5 the next morning. Which brings me to my point. There is no question in my mind but that coffee was invented by people who haven’t figured out a way to sleep all afternoon.

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5. Robert in Bath sent me a letter that says: Last week a so-called transient from the Brunswick, Bath area, robbed a KeyBank in Farmington. They showed the video on TV news, of him getting money from a blond bank teller. Today he walked into the Twin Bridges Regional Jail located on the line between Woolwich and Wiscasset and turned himself in. Maybe he was getting cold outside.

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6. It happened to me again. It happened to me a year ago and I told you about it then. It happened to me again today and I’m telling you about it now. I got a letter from the Maine Revenue Service. It said that my return for 2007 had not been filed. I looked in Quicken and saw that my two checks to the State of Maine for 2007 sales tax had been cashed. One account is for CD sales and the other one is for taxes collected at our Bed & Breakfast. I expected I’d get a notice for the Bed and Breakfast in tomorrow’s mail. I called my friends at the tax office in Augusta and was told that I had, indeed not filed. The B&B account, however, was ok. I filed electronically on line, so I had every reason to believe them. Then, I looked very very closely at the two pages of both tax filing transactions that I had carefully printed out and prudently saved. To the casual, untrained eye they were both the same. But, then I saw that one said Completed Sales Tax Return and the other one said, in the same green letters in the same place, Calculated Sales Tax Return. So even though I thought I had filed and printed off an official looking paper containing all the numbers, I had not pushed the final button that is equivalent to saying, “Simon Says File My Tax Return.” I think this happens because the filer is distracted by printing off the little paper that he mails in along with his check and when he does that he thinks that he has successfully completed the entire transaction. I don’t know. But --- I am going to suggest that instead of having two forms that look almost alike, The State of Maine eliminates the green letters that say, “Calculated Sales Tax Return” and prints in that space in red letters, “You ain’t done yet.”

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7. http://www.lifeinsurancehub.net/key-employee-life-insurance.html

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When I was in New Jersey someone told me that he heard of a bank that took out life insurance on its employees. It cost hardly anything and when only one employee died, it not only paid for all of the insurance on all the employees but it put a little money in the bank’s pocket as well. Of course I Googled this when I got home and there it was right on line --- a horror story about a man who lost his business because he didn’t have life insurance on one of his key employees. You might not believe this, but the web page was sponsored by the insurance industry.

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8. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, is addicted to Netflicks. Her best friend gave her a year’s subscription to Netflicks and Marsha sometimes watches two commercial-free movies every night. Marsha’s father, my buddy Bill, watched golf, so just from living in a home with him, I inadvertently learned all about the prowess of V. J. Singh, Mickelson and Tiger Woods. Now, from the next room I also get to hear scraps of screams, groans and gunshots from Netflicks. Last night as I stood and ate my evening dish of cereal I even watched Jody Foster all alone with two bad boys on a subway train. One of the bad boys walked up to Jody Foster, rubbed a knife all over her face, and with words and deeds implied that he was going to do something bad to her. She pulled out a gun and blew them both away. In another film Crocodile Dundee was also approached by a bad boy who said, “I’ve got a knife.” You will recall that one of the most unforgettable moments in modern film follows when the hero laughs and says, “That ain’t a knife. This is a knife,” and pulls out a sheet of metal that would have intimidated Spartacus. Then there was Clint Eastwood who is minding his own business, as usual, in a barber shop when not one, not two but three bullies proceed to take him on, ignorant of the gun in his hand beneath the barber’s cloth. Like the vindictive Jody Foster, Clint quickly protects himself. My question is, of course, should these three people have gone through official channels and reported the bad guys to the proper authorities, or were they justified by what some might describe as an unnecessary use of force? I’m humble at humblefarmer.com and I’d like to hear from you.

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9. Did you ever go curling? I can remember playing for dances out at the Curling Club in Belfast. The object in curling is to slide a weight along the ice so it stops at a certain place. I think there is something called shuffleboard which is about the same kind of game where you have to push an object with just enough effort so it will stop in a certain place. Now that I think of it, it could even be compared with pool. If you play, you can tell me that these are great games, I’m sure, and you even might want to join with me in another game that you will even have to admit has a practical application. I’m talking about pushing a door just hard enough so that it doesn’t slam with a wall-shaking bang, yet hard enough so it completely closes with a click. It is a skill that we should all polish. If you have ever played, you know that any draft will cause the door to slam. You can only play shut the door when there is no draft. Before you come over here and throw down the gauntlet please know that I have been practicing with our bathroom door for years --- when my wife is not home.

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10. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, and I were looking at a DVD movie on one of those little computer disks the other night. Marsha is a charter member and fanatical supporter of our local video rental store. And I read on the screen that if you copy the movie on this DVD computer disk the FBI will batter down the doors to your home, you will be fined $250,000 and you will go to jail for five years. A good friend of mine got in a drunken brawl and blew a man away. Bam. He only served three years for killing a man but I would have to serve five if I copied a movie. Years from now, people will think of our era as that transitional period when a man’s life was no longer worth as much as a plastic disk containing a Spiderman movie. 050729

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11. Do you miss the good old songs you used to hear? I don’t see any sense in these rap songs they sing nowadays, do you? Back when I was a kid they sang songs like, Chickery Chick, chala chala, chekala romy, in a bananica, bolika wollica – and they made sense. This morning I got to thinking that it had been a long time since I had heard I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas. You know you’re old when you realize that you miss the good old songs. Old people have always cried that they no longer hear the good old songs. You probably recall Aristophanes’ story about the young man who sneered at his father when the old man requested someone sing one of the good old songs called Simoides' Shearing of the Ram. The kid had to explain to his father that Simoides’ Ram was a corny old song. Do you hear the same thing from your children and grandchildren? Do they listen to music that you can’t understand or appreciate? You might have seen a TV program advertised on which they promised to play the 40 worst songs from last year. Did it make you wonder how they could be sure they got the right ones? CD Rants 2003 #1

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