Buying the Farm

Let’s begin today’s story with a quiz.

Q:  What do Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews, have in common?

A:  They all tried to rally America against Donald Trump during the 2016 election.

Yes, they all fought hard and said some nasty things about our Commander-in-Chief.  Why?

Because Mr. Trump said he wanted to repeal the ever punitive “Estate Tax.”

In case you don’t know what the Estate Tax is, it is otherwise known as the “death tax,” which is imposed by the greedy among us on people who die.

Indeed, we all will die, and this is just another easy way to make money.  Not unlike taking a large insurance policy out on someone, then killing them for it, the estate tax is something that benefits some of us while punishing the rest.

How can we, as Americans, lose if the dead must pay-up for the right to die?

Let’s examine this simple question.

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews, are also performing at this year’s annual Farm Aid concert.  Yep, Farm Aid.

Farm Aid is one of those inane feel-good efforts used by The Left to make sensible Americans feel stupid.  Allow me to explain.

In 1985, this benefit for the egos of Willie and John began to counteract the perpetually greedy banks from “stealing” farms and their equipment from multi-generational farmers.

You see, some farms are pretty large and require updated, reliable machinery to till, plant, spray, harvest, shuck, dig, sort, and perform a multitude of other necessary tasks, to keep their homesteads operational and efficient.

Unfortunately, many of these farming families often find themselves in financial straights, with buying some of these tractors and harvesters on credit, with the farm itself as collateral.

The problems arise when the farmer dies before the loan is paid off in-full.

The banks then foreclose on the farm because the family must sell it to pay for the loan.  Or, they must allow their new equipment to be repossessed, for lack of payment.  Where did the money go?

Remember that estate tax?  Democrats have been killing hard-working Americans for years with the ‘death-by-a-thousand-cuts’ method.

Tax the land, tax the machinery, tax the fuel, tax tires twice, and now, tax the inevitable – death.

It aides Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews, to sanctimoniously appear to help these down-trodden farmers who suffer from one major loss of life, then their homes, then their livelihoods, and eventually their dignity.

This is all for money to take from the hard working farmers, to redistribute it to the lazy among us.  And now the Farm Aid egoists want you to feel bad about this situation.

“Keep the family farms in the family,” could be the motto of these simple-minded musicians.  It must be the fault of the banks.  Wrong.

It is the fault of the greedy Democrats who need more of your money to keep the sloths languid.  If Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews, really want to help, they would personally petition their Democratic representatives to repeal that over-burdensome tax.

Incidentally, Donald Trump expressed an interest in repealing the Estate Tax, much to the chagrin of his Democratic opponents.  I’m just saying.

Ribbit. Ribbit.

People uninitiated about The Eastern Shore all make the same common mistake: they don’t think about our mosquitoes.

They come alone, in caravans, with kids and pets, and they schlep swim suits, beach toys, chairs, and sunscreen, but they rarely bring along bug repellent.

It must be understood that we live on a marsh that borders on a bay and an ocean.  It’s the marsh that gives us fits.

Stagnant water creates an ideal site for mosquitoes to lay their eggs, only to later become tools for exsanguination.  Look it up; I’ll wait for you.

Faced with possibly developing all sorts of nasty diseases, tourists should take extra precautions with not only their sun intake, but also their blood-born health.

And with a combination of our uninformed youth, and modern times, rediscovering methods of yore, we should know there are several “natural” methods available to aid in the eradication of those little pests.

Yarrow, a yellow flowered plant, is said to be more powerful than DEET in repelling mosquitoes.  Armed with that information I bought three plants and placed them next to our front door.  Two days later, I caught a swarm of mosquitoes carrying off one of them.

Bats, the flying mammals, are alleged to be able to consume 1,000 mosquitoes per hour, per bat.  But in all the decades I have been visiting and living on The Shore, I have never seen a bat other than in the hands of a Delmarva Shorebird.

Let us not overlook the humble green tree frog, though.  Only a few inches long, the diminutive green tree frog is a relative of the giant tree frog.  Go figure!

One morning last summer brought the realization that a tree frog was residing in

a garden bed adjacent to our front door.  With frigid winter weather approaching, I bid adieu to Señor Sapo.  FYI, that is Spanish for Mr. Frog.  You’re welcome.

In any case, warmer spring temps this year revived Señor Sapo who, when I was exiting to retrieve the morning newspaper, was neatly tucked inside our storm door.  He appeared to still be in a state of semi-hibernation.

To that end, I am trying to keep him alive so that he may eat copious amounts of mosquitoes au natural.  We carefully open the door to prevent a smushing mishap, and close it the same way.  We make guests use the back door so as to avoid any amphibian catastrophe, too.

In any case, I’ve got my eye on Señor Sapo, along with his weight.  I’m using this as a barometer to measure Señor Sapo’s eating habits.  If things go as I expect them to, he will soon weigh a modest seven pounds.

Until then, Smokey the Cat is forced to patiently wait by the door and listen to Señor Sapo croak, lest he become a toy for Smokey.

By the way, if you’re thinking to yourself how I know Señor Sapo is not a Señorita Sapo, it is pretty simple.  Male frogs make noise, while females don’t produce much sound at all.  That’s exactly the opposite of humans.  I’m just saying…

Save the Trees

It’s been a few years now since my sainted wife and I received Christmas cards, or since I got a birthday card.  Forget about those “thank you” cards altogether.

Rather, my incoming e-mail box often contains a rather generic e-card which is supposed to suffice for a paper card.  Be it for a birthday, Easter, Thanksgiving, Arbor Day, or everyone’s favorite – Ramadan – they are rarely in hard form.

I, too, am guilty of sending those spiffy e-cards.  You know the ones I’m talking about; those cards are the ones, for example, that you click on the window to activate it.  Then colorful flowers pop up from the window boxes, attracting flying birds and bees.  All the while, serene violin music is played.  The occasional Yellow Labrador is smartly seated nearby, awestruck by all the animated activity.

Those cards are cute but, they are too easy.  You are not expected to simply have a thought to send a card to someone else.  Instead, you are expected to climb into the SUV, schlep yourself to the nearest store to pay $7.95 for a piece of printed cardboard, then dash off to the United States Post Office location, to find a stamp.  I refuse to pay that much for a pound of steak!

Honestly, I have no idea how much a postage stamp costs today.  I fact, the last time I purchased a stamp, it cost me 38 ¢.  Having to deal with anyone at the Post Office is akin to waterboarding, to me. 

Most of those USPS creatures are arrogant, snotty, and ignorant; don’t get me started on the bad ones.  Hence, the reason the USPS loses billions and billions of dollars each year.  But I digress.

So, for a dear friend I consider to be like a son to me, I went on an arduous trek to the store to buy a paper birthday card.  This promised to be relatively easy because I intended to personally hand the card – along with the greatest gift ever – to him without the benefit of postal employees.

At the local Tallmart, my sainted wife, in an effort to expedite our visit, directed me to find a card.  She needed to do other shopping, after which she would meet me in the produce department.

A quick 27-minutes later, I was still attempting to find a category of card that suited him.  You see, I came across cards for Father from Son, Father from Daughter, Daughter from Uncle, Mother from Out-of-wedlock-baby, Aunt from Milkman, and even Donald Trump from Illegal Alien.  None, however, were from one male buddy to another.

They even had cards from one gay person to another, transsexuals to straights, and one from a Republican to a Democrat.

Suddenly, I realized why it was so difficult to send paper cards over e-cards.

All the hoopla had the earmarks of a part-time job making small rocks out of big ones. 

So it was that my pal got his eight buck paper card and greatest gift ever, for his birthday.  Perhaps he should save that card because, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, those cards will soon become extinct.  And for good reasons.

I’ve Got a Spell on You

If you’ve been a regular visitor to this site, you know that I’m not a very good speller.  In fact, even with Spell Check, I spell poorly. “From” is often automatically changed to “form,” while “Libertarian” is involuntarily changed to “Democrat.”  But I digress.

I tried to learn using those drills in grammar school – incidentally, I just misspelled “grammar” using an ‘e’ – all to no avail.  I had paperback school spelling books that prompted me into spelling words, most of which wound up being spelled incorrectly, much to the chagrin to my father.

When writing, I still must use that drill “i before e except after c, when it’s a Tuesday after a full moon.”

Dad was a great speller, but he regularly read the morning newspaper which is chock full of words.  I, too, perused the paper, but never thought of memorizing the correct placement of letters therein.  Hence, my inability to spell.

So it was with great interest that I closely followed the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was recently held for kids who are good guessers at spelling words.

Please keep in mind that I am well into retirement, my age dictating close to two full boxes of thirty-six birthday candles.  As an aside, my cakes are often brought to the tables raw, and are easily thoroughly cooked by those burning candles.

This year’s Scripps spelling champion was Ananya Vinay, a 12-year old from California, who correctly spelled the word “marocain.”  Yep, marocain.  No, it’s not some narcotic your local high school senior sells you in a Ziplock baggie in a fast food parking lot, rather it is another word for dress fabric of ribbed crepe.

This begs the question, “Why not simply use the words ‘dress fabric of ribbed crepe’?”

Clearly someone felt it imperative to create a special word for this niche cloth.

This is where I felt compelled to dig deeper into past Scripps Spelling Bees for more unnecessary words.

It seems that 2012 was another historic time for those wordsmiths in dire need of more words, one of them being “guetapens.”  No kidding.  That’s a real word correctly spelled by Snigdha Nandipati.

Guetapens is a French-derived word that means an ambush or a trap.  Once again, I don’t recall, in any of my six-plus decades, anyone asking me for another word – in French – for an ambush of trap.  Still, it exists.  Yeah!

Kavya Shivashankar spelled laodicean in 2009 to win, while in 2005, Anurag Kashyap won with the word appoggiatura.

Just in case you are wondering, as I am writing this story, that über effective Spell Check has been neatly placing red, squiggly lines beneath all those winning words.  You see, they are not even in the computer’s dictionary so, how legitimate are they?

Something else needs to be pointed out.  Obviously, these winners have been blessed with names that are just as challenging as the bee words themselves.  In fact, the spelling bee words actually seem easier to spell than their family surnames.

I’m still never going to use the word laodicean in a sentence, or otherwise.  Look it up like I had to.