Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The humble Farmer, March 17, 2010

1. Thank you for listening to The humble Farmer. For the next 59 or so minutes you’ll be hearing old fashioned music and --- I’d like to say you will be hearing scraps and bits of 73 years of accumulated wisdom but I can’t, because instead of getting smarter, I only seem to have more questions about the peculiar things you and I see or hear every day For example --- Is it fair to categorize people by watching the way they wipe crumbs off the table with their hand? One type of person rubs the crumbs across the crack where the table leaves come together and the other type doesn’t.
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2. When I worked for Russ Thomas in the garage, there was a rubber hose out by the pump. When a car would go over it, a bell would ring. I have a rubber hose in my driveway. When anyone drives over it, a bell rings down in my cellar. This is an ideal rig for a deaf old man who doesn’t hear people knocking at the door unless he’s wearing his hearing aids. Yes, I have a doorbell, it is a cowbell and there is a sign by it that tells people to ring it, but only a few people do. Two times this month, that I know of, people have refused to drive over that bell hose in my driveway. Hear this email: “Robert, both vehicles were in the yard, looked like someone was home, but thought you might be eating and didn't want to disturb, didn't drive over the bell rubber, thought it was a power cord connected to some highpowered lectric generatin contraption and was worried bout blowin out the grid. Headed back home tomorrow and will try stoppin by again soon.” Of course I was probably eating if I was in the house. But if you have driven over my bell hose when I was eating you know that when I come out of the house I have my plate in my hand and I continue to eat. Anyway, I think I’m going to try an electronic beam bell. If I discover that hundreds of people stop by to visit each day, only then I will go back to the rubber hose.
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3. You know that scientists are held to a higher standard than the rest of us. But --- you know as well as I do that even scientists can make mistakes. You heard about the woman who had the wrong embryo implanted. Because a scientist made a mistake it warranted a spot on the national news. On the other hand, every year when millions of people make the same mistake it is accepted as an inevitable human weakness and nobody says a word.
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4. Can you live without your credit card? I can’t. The other day I bought gas in Wiscasset and instead of standing in line at the Irving station I simply poked my credit card into the pump. When I have a speaking job in Denver or South Dakota, the plane ticket goes on my credit card, too. A week or two ago I put $1670 in travel expenses on my credit card. When my bill came, that one gas purchase wasn’t on there, so I called the credit card company every day until the little mechanical voice told me that my balance included the gas and was now $1688.88. I sent them a check for that amount the same day, even though they said my minimum payment was $17. $17!. I see that the interest is 12.99 percent variable, whatever that means, and I make the interest for one month to be close to $18.28. If I were to pay $17, wouldn’t my balance for next month be more than the $1688.88 that I owe today? My question to you is, if you only pay them the amount they ask for, isn’t it possible that you’ll be paying interest on a credit card for the rest of your life? I know an old man who did that. He was a bookkeeper and a smart man and he juggled 8 or 10 credit cards one against the other, figuring that because he left no estate, when he died he’d be able to stick them for 50 or 60 grand. And he did.
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5. Usually when someone tells you a story about something that happened to a friend, if you Google you can find several different versions of the true story that happened to a friend on line. Al told me about a woman who burned out the motor in her foreign car at 60,000 miles. When she took it to the dealer she said it was her understanding that you didn’t need to change the oil in a foreign car. I didn’t find it when I Googled, so it could be true.
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6. We were sitting in traffic the other day and my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman who knows such things, said that every one of the 18 or 20 cars in line that she could see were foreign cars. What do you suppose these people who make cars in other countries are doing that they are not doing in Detroit? Perhaps they are making a car that people want. My little Japanese truck has 278,000 miles on it. It will be a long time before some of us forget how General Motors crushed their wonderful little electric car. The people who test drove the little electric cars wanted to keep them. But when General Motors found out how great these electric cars were, they recalled them all and crushed them. You can see a movie about it called, Who Killed the Electric Car. But don’t give up. Before long you are going to see electric cars that were made in China on American roads. You can be sure an electric car that working people want and can afford won’t be made in America.
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7. You will recall my hypothesis for the origin of language which I call The Itch Theory. That is, that language evolved out of necessity when a man wanted to tell his wife where to scratch his back. Now, even if you are not an anthropologist, you may want to have your name go down in history and grab credit for publishing the most plausible theory anyone has ever come up with to explain the invention of the wheel. With only a little imagination we might credit the invention of the wheel to a Sumerian bridge player who had a tournament in Akkad. It could have happened like this. Please listen closely. I was needed when some friends came in to play bridge. I have never even played Whist but was the only member of the household who was strong enough to pick up the table and lug it into the other room where they were going to play. I strained and sweat and finally managed to lug the table in there. But after the game, while taking the table back, I flipped it over on edge so I could get a better grip on it so I could lug it through the door, but, because it was a round table, I discovered that I could very easily roll it back out onto the porch.
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8. Did you know that Santa Claus is richer than Daddy Warbucks? I’d really never given it any thought until I Googled Daddy Warbucks, Asp, Punjab, just to see what they’d been up to lately and learned that Daddy Warbucks is worth 27.3 billion. I was also surprised to see that this once aged icon is now only 52 and young enough to be my son. Would you be surprised to hear that Lex Luthor is only worth 10.1 billion although he went to MIT? Daddy Warbucks has a BS from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, so you might want to keep that in mind should you ever be pressed to help one of yours with an educational decision. You don’t even know who Charles Montgomery Burns is so I’ll tell you. He owns the nuclear power plant where Homer Simpson works. He went to Yale, according to this web site I found, he is worth 8.4 billion and he bought the Frank Gehny-designed Springfield Concert Hall from the city and turned it into a prison. Oh, Santa Claus is the world’s richest fictional person and if you want to consult my source to get the website so you can read more you can ask to get my weekly newsletter, The Whine & Snivel, and read about it there, or you can Google Daddy Warbucks Punjab Asp. You might be interested to know that Santa Claus is richer than Daddy Warbucks because being immortal, the elf employees don’t require health insurance.
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9. From time to time I hear things that I have never heard before --- and I like to pass them along to you for your consideration. Tell me what you think. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com You might remember that a while back I mentioned to a friend, who employs several hundred people, that some of our friends don’t earn enough money to enable them to go to the dentist. And he said that if people couldn’t afford to go to the dentist they could have all their teeth yanked out like everyone did years ago. Now I’d never thought of that solution before, but it is obviously the way that some of our wealthier friends see things. I only mention this because it is in line with something else that happened a couple of days ago. I was told by someone who was there that a waitress in a restaurant had a seizure. I don’t know what a seizure is, but this waitress fell back against the soda refrigerator and down to the floor. The woman who told me about this sat on the floor and held this shaking woman’s head in her lap. She said that the waitress’s hands were shaking and she turned bright red and her pulse was throbbing in her neck. And she said that this waitress who had the seizure was scared. She’d fallen on the floor. Her hands were shaking. She was bright red and her pulse was throbbing, throbbing in her throat. But that wasn’t why she was scared. When she could finally talk the first thing this woman did was to beg her friends to not let the ambulance medics take her to the hospital because she knew there was no way she could pay for it.
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10. A while ago I ran into a man who told me that he enjoyed something I said years ago. I’m sorry that I can’t remember who it was so I could give him credit, but it had to do with the way a Maine man deals with trash. Even monks who live in mountain top caves in Tibet generate trash --- things that have to be burned in the stove or hauled to the dump to be recycled. Some people generate more rubbish than others. But any dump keeper in Maine will tell you that there is a basic difference between the Maine native and people from away. For example, if someone from away hires a carpenter to remodel his house, he will instruct that person to haul all of the left over doors, planks and boards to the dump. And if you happen to be on hand when a truck full of these goodies shows up at the dump, you can do rather well. But Maine men feel that they have to age their trash before they haul it away. They’ll tear out the cracked old 1790 doors and put in nice new sliding glass ones. Or they might put in doors made of laminated fiberboard. But even though they know those old 1790 doors are worthless they can’t throw them away --- until they’re properly aged. So they pile them out beside the barn. Fifteen or 20 years later, they’ll load the rotted remains onto a truck and it down to the burn pile at the dump. A Maine man will do the same thing with old iron. Look behind any native’s barn and you’ll see a pile of twisted, rusty iron. Junk men don’t buy iron any more, and you might need a piece sometime to weld onto your bush hog to hold it together, so that old iron has to lay right there until grass grows over it. Only after you’ve ground it up with the bush hog for 20 or so summers do you haul it away. The Maine universe is governed by inviolate natural laws, and a Maine man’s inability to haul off trash without first aging it is one of them. If you ever see a native hauling load after load of trash to the dump before it has been properly aged, you can bet your bottom dollar that he just married a beautiful young widow from Connecticut.
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11. I’ve been reading a lot about a 78-year-old millionaire lawyer in the news lately and I don’t like it. Anyone who has studied the English language for years knows that 78-year-old millionaire lawyer is redundant.
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12. We all have things that we can do. And there are other things that we cannot do. Perhaps an adult might be defined as: “a person who knows what he can do and what he can’t do --- and isn’t afraid to admit it.” The email I recently received said, “humble, Don't you remember what I thought of as Plan A?” Of course I don’t remember anything about Plan A. Because I’d like you to learn a little more about me, you might listen closely to the reply I sent to this person: “Please realize that I don’t remember much of anything. My talent is not in remembering, but in synthesizing that which I have recently heard and presenting it to my friends as original material.”
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13. Scientists have discovered that chewing gum helps you remember. The experts found that of the people tested, 35% who were given gum to chew found it easier to remember words. They hypothesized that it might be because chewing increases the speed of your heartbeat, so more oxygen is pumped round your body. Or it could be because chewing gum helps your body make insulin because it thinks food is coming. Even more plausible is the fact that because many of us can’t walk and chew gum at the same time the chewing keeps our mind from wandering and forces us to focus our attention on whatever it is we are trying to remember.