Check out our B&B web page.

+

This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for September 22, 2013

+

Hello out there in radio land. Thank you for listening to The humble Farmer, your very own private radio show which I make just for you right here on Maine Private Radio, the one and only and exclusive home of No Things Considered.

+

1. As I was entering the Common Ground Fair, I was hailed by a woman who might have attended a Maine high school in 1957. After chatting a while, I waved my hand out over the fairgrounds and said that one would have to go to Cambridge, Massachusetts to find a comparable piece of ground that contained so many intelligent people. She quickly looked over her shoulder and then sniffed, “I don’t know --- I’ve seen quite a few tattoos.”

+

2. Here’s a letter from a radio friend who says, “Some of us have heated with wood for 35 years and are breathing just fine.” This can be said by most anyone in Maine. I also lived in wood smoke off and on for perhaps over 70 years. I played for hundreds of dances where the smoke was so thick you could barely see across the room. It’s when you are 77 and are treasuring every day that the lung chickens are likely to come home to roost. So you young folks who are 74 or 76 keep right on a smiling and smoking and enjoying that wonderful heat from your wood stoves while you still can. And when the day comes that you can’t make it up the hill under your own power tell yourself that, yes, it was worth it. --- Because I'm not going to be around to hear you say it.

+

3. Someone told me there was an old man running in the 5 K at the Common Ground Fair. When I asked him when he was born I discovered he lacked one day to be a year older than I am. He's a Harvard man who lives in Camden. I was at the finish line when he came in and I thrust a rolled up Maine Private Radio T-shirt into his hand as he roared by. I have no idea who he is. I can barely walk up a hill now, having lived with a wood stove in the house for so many years. Oh, in 1970 there was nothing as great as the heat from a wood stove. And, like smoking, you can enjoy that wonderful heat from a wood stove for years before you discover you can't walk up to the farmstand with a bunch of rhubarb in your arms without gasping for breath. But now in 2013, it is 75 degrees here in the solar radiant heated office/studio of Maine Private Radio, home of No Things Considered, and it is as cozy as a room heated by a wood stove. If I'd had this smokeless technology 43 years ago I could have run that 5 K on Sunday. Bob Dean, the world-class canoe paddler who also lives in Camden, told me that because he's now over 70 he can't run as fast as he once could and that now even young girls are able to pass him in road races. The first time Bob saw a taut, young body go by him he looked up at it and said to himself, "Bob, why didn't you slow down years ago?"

+

4. Here’s a political email that says: "Friends -- For years, powerful interests have done everything they can to rig Washington in their favor. Big corporate lobbyists devote extraordinary resources to creating loopholes, and big corporate lawyers devote extraordinary resources to exploiting those loopholes. Powerful interests have gotten special break after special break inserted into the tax code, and they’ve chipped away at regulations and consumer protections." Well, that’s the email. And now there is finally something you can do. Make sure your kid is one of those big corporate lawyers so you'll have a decent retirement cushion.

+

5. Remember reading about the Mayan Ball Game? "The winners of the game were treated as heroes and given a great feast. The penalty for losing a game was sometimes unusually harsh: death. The leader of the team who lost the game was sometimes killed. This fit in with the Mayan belief that human sacrifice was necessary for the continued success of the peoples' agriculture, trade, and overall health." If I had time I'd write a story about these Mayans playing and their attempts to explain the sport to outsiders. "We must win this game. We cannot fail." “Because you’ll be killed if you don’t?” “Worse. We lose our tax-exempt status.”

+

6. I updated Java on my computer today although I have no idea of what Java is or what Java does. For weeks the Java in my computer has asked to be updated so I finally gave in and updated it. Wondering what Java was, I put the question to my Facebook page, and was rewarded with this very useful bit of information from a Facebook friend: "Java is still having security problems so use it prudently." That is like coming up to me and saying, "Here's a glibbitz. Use it prudently because it bit my mother when she got one for Christmas. Jumped right out of the box." I still don't know any more than I did. Do I ever use this Java thing? When have I used it? --- Ok, I'm sorry I asked because I could have looked it up for myself. Here's what I found when I asked Wikipedia: "Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented computer programming language that is specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible." Would a man with no legs who wanted to win a blue ribbon for running on crutches be object-oriented with implementation dependencies?

+

7. My wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, was not well this morning. She said she had tremendous pain in her stomach in the middle of the night which made sleep impossible. We have talked about this before. You know, the fact that I have sat at the supper table at a friend's house and simply stared at the empty plate in front of me because there was nothing there I could eat or wanted to eat or dared to eat. My wife, however, eats everything. She even ate the black beans and salad for supper at her health-guru daughter's house last night. I couldn't have done it. It would have kept me up all night with stomach pain.

+

8. The other day I was able to chat with a good man who will be good for Maine people if he is elected governor of the State of Maine. The next morning I wrote a letter to the nice young people who created and maintain the web page of this man who wants to be Maine’s next governor. I am not going to mention his name, because I will bet you that no matter how many people run for governor in Maine, every single one of them will have this same problem. I wrote: Hello my innocent young, bright-eyed friend, Yeah, you spent a lot of money building these web pages, getting top, experienced people to design them for you. But you screwed up because you didn't get a 77-year-old Maine man to try to navigate them before you sent the computer gurus a check. You don't know if these web pages work for old people or if they don't work for old people. I tried to fill out one page and was unable to get through it. The thing fought me. I finally had to abandon it. I think it was the page where I was asked for a $14 contribution to ensure Maine’s salvation. What so many young people don't understand is that there are a few fairly intelligent old Maine people out there who do not even own a cell phone. It is too complicated a machine. Every time I use a borrowed cell phone someone has to push the magic buttons on it for me. Some of us make television programs and write for newspapers. One of the things we talk about in our newspaper columns and on our television programs is the difficulty experienced by old Maine people who have been ignored, swept aside and overwhelmed by a brave new uncompromising digital world. If you are unable to fill in box three, the ignorant machine will not permit you to advance to box four. If Mr. [x] is going to win this election for the Blaine House he is going to have to do it on his record and the force of his personality and not from any help he gets from the web page that got the better of my good intentions this morning. Snarl, snarl. Signed: The humble Farmer

+

9. I read a story in Down East Magazine while unable to get to sleep at 4 AM up at the Common Ground Fair. The story was written by a Thomaston woman who claims that Martha Stewart ruined her wedding. I thought it was very well written and should mention that she is not the first person to tackle that particular topic. There is another story in the same Down East about a man who has a restaurant in Rockland. It is near the market of Jess if I may employ the partitive genitive. They use newspapers instead of table cloths. I've been a single man for 49 of my 77 years and always used newspapers for place mats. When you finish you simply roll the thing up and stick it in the stove. Of course there is a price to be paid for having a wood stove: today I can barely breathe. Anyone who enjoys the comfort of a wood stove will tell you that the age of 70 is so far away that having a cheerful wood fire in the home is more important than having lung disease and coughing all the time sometime in the distant future that may never come. Anyway, Down East magazine impressed me. Down East magazine is different from most Maine radio stations in that it contained Maine voices.

+

10. We have come to the No Things Considered part of this program. If you’ve never studied chemistry and have never even heard the term “change of state” please pay close attention because your old buddy The humble Farmer is about to contribute to your education. Have you ever fed apples to a cow? Cows are nice people. They are no different from friendly puppy dogs with the exception of not wanting a 1500 pound puppy jumping up on you. When you pop an apple into a cow friend’s mouth you sometimes touch a foot-long tongue or some huge, juicy, salivating lips. After a while your hand gets quite sticky. And when you get home you might be surprised to discover that after you wash your hands really good with hot soapy water, a bit of that cow’s ruminating stomach acid still adheres to your hand. Just like sprayed silicon, you can’t scrub it off your hand for days. I only mention this because the next day if you should pick up a handful of grass clippings, right before your eyes the chemicals on your hand will morph that grass into the sweetest warm milk you’ve ever tasted.

+

11. The other day I was unable to stop reading a captivating article on eating bugs. There might come a day when the grocery stores shut down and the only people to survive will be those with the skills to know which roots and bugs are good to eat. In other words, you'd have to have the knowledge of a person who roamed your area of the world 10,000 years ago. If you watch NCIS, you know that Zeva has been eating bugs for years. Wouldn’t you imagine that those of us with a cosmopolitan palate could eat most anything if we didn't know what it was? I can hear my wife Marsha saying, "The only thing we have left to eat in this house is yogurt, chili and Ratatouille." I would reply, "I'm going out in the woods and eat bugs."

+