Farmers Are Lunatics
October 13th, 2006 Posted in 2006, Essays
I can’t imagine it’s that cheap to mail free books all over the country. You’d think they’d at least research the publications on the address label a bit first. The magazine I work for is a comedy magazine, and in fact we review humor books in every issue; to date I have not been sent any by these firms. (My theory is that the brain matter needed to conduct three seconds worth of research as to the content a magazine called Cracked: The Comedy Magazine might publish was clearly detonated to moist nuggets after leafing through A Bowler For Mr. Paws.) Every time I’m sent a complimentary advance copy of The Complete Essays of Bass Fishing Digest, I envision some similarly confused editor at a fishing magazine somewhere opening a collection of humorous essays by Steve Martin and wondering what the Rothman, Hypetard & Idiot Agency assumed he’d be able to do with it. *
Two weeks after receiving and promptly forgetting about it, I’ll get a phone call from an enthusiastic agent asking if I enjoyed reading An Exhaustive History of Canteens, and when they might expect to see me gushing praise upon it in our magazine. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being confronted by someone who’s given me a book I didn’t ask for and didn’t want, and is now curious about what I intend to do about it (not least because by the time they call, the literature in question has long since been either wedged under a filing cabinet to balance it, tossed carelessly onto a large, perilously leaning pile of similarly unsolicited crap or thrown unread into the trash).
One of the more recent pieces of flotsam washed up against my desk was The Old Farmer’s 2007 Almanac, a book I hadn’t been aware was even published anymore. Leafing through an impenetrable 256 pages of charts, graphs and lunar cycles, I unearthed more staggeringly useless factoids than I even knew existed. Page after page of the Almanac tries sincerely to induce a coma on an unsuspecting reader: the three days in April that Saturn is most visible; when Mercury is in retrograde; the length of twilight from May 26 to July 22; when to celebrate St. Eustace’s Day; how to determine the time of moonrise in Lansing, Michigan; and literally thousands of other monumentally unhelpful facts that, if you lived to be 10,000 years old and knew St. Eustace personally, would never remotely come in handy. The Almanac also gives you a frankly disconcerting overview of how and when to inseminate a cow—something you’d think would be redundant, given its target audience (old farmers). I mean to say, if you’re an elderly farmer standing around with a cow and an allotment of bull semen and waiting for your copy of the Almanac to arrive so you can figure out what to do next, chances are you probably should have conducted more conclusive research on this beforehand.
One could certainly make the case, of course, that crop-planting farmers need to have a more intimate understanding of the seasons than city-dwelling idiots like myself (my knowledge on the subject begins and ends with “It’s very hot out” and “Now it isn’t”). That said, I’m having a hard time imagining how knowing the precise date and time when the altitude of the Aldebaran star in the Taurus constellation has reached its highest elevation in the horizon has anything the hell to do with growing beets. I can wrap my head around a farmer needing to know roughly when to plant and harvest crops; where I start to have trouble is why they’d need to calculate the precise time to the second when the sun rises and sets on April 16th. Whose day is this busy? Jesus Christ, Old Macdonald, set the alarm for 5am. We’re talking about a few minutes of daylight here: keep the cows waiting for thirty fucking seconds and enjoy a cup of coffee. They’re cows, they’ll get over it.
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* If I’ve received a hundred useless books, I’ve easily received well over a thousand useless press releases, all of them from the agents of enterprising young idiots (coincidentally enough with an album or book coming out) announcing their intention to do something stupid, dangerous and embarrassing in public in the near future.
These things are so shame-facedly and blatantly a grab for publicity that it makes me want to launch an anti-publicity blackout campaign out of spite. Several times I’ve contemplated going down to the subway stop where Ass Halfwit has announced his plans to delay the trains for half an hour by streaking around in his underwear to promote a CD and coaching everyone to simply ignore and walk around the poor idiot like the spectacle was commonplace and boring. Failing that, I would push him into the path of a subway car.
One ad that struck me as funny featured Ed McMahon beaming at you like he was made of candy, alongside the inspiring quote “A relaxing bath is something we all have a right to” and a coupon for a free bathtub brochure. It’s comforting to know that Ed’s spending his twilight years crusading for such worthy causes—if your next bath is less than relaxing, be sure to write the United Nations about this egregious human rights violation and tell them Ed “A Bath Salt in Every Tub” McMahon’s got your back on this. I present it here for your mean-spirited derision:
The Astrology section alone takes up fully two thirds of the Almanac. On one page is a chart entitled “Best Times”, which helpfully explains to the reader which days of the month you should accomplish tasks like going camping or getting a haircut based on where orbiting planets happen to be in the galaxy at any given time. It’s pure undiluted lunacy, in other words, though you have to admire its specificity. If your resolution for the coming year involves “dieting to lose weight,” for instance, the planets urge you to start on January 6th or 11th. If you’re “dieting to gain weight,” on the other hand, aim for the 20th or 24th. (As long as you’re jotting this down on the calendar anyway, maybe pencil in a day to consider why you felt it wise to diet so you could gain weight.) Old farmers eager to breed with old farmers of the opposite sex (or perhaps breed animals, it’s unclear) should do so on January 12th or 13th, according to the Almanac; whereas castrating animals on any day other than the 19th or 20th would be, I’m sure you’ll agree, utter madness.
The “Best Times” chart goes so far as to forecast ideal dates for all 12 months of 2007—an accommodation that’d doubtlessly come in handy when nailing down a year’s worth of haircuts and weight-gain diets but seems a little unnecessary for deciding when to “harvest above-ground crops,” which it also includes. Possibly I’m showing my ignorance here, but I’m going to disagree with the astrological passage of the moon that January 26th is the ideal date to plant corn. Let that sink in: The Old Farmer’s Almanac isn’t capable of accurately providing the one piece of information that would be remotely useful to farmers. Taking cues from it would have you planting beans under snowdrifts before racing off to go camping while you’ve still got Capricorn’s blessing to pitch a tent and make s’mores.
Another chart entitled “Time Corrections” offers an intimidatingly thorough breakdown, by latitude and longitude, of precisely how many minutes you should add or subtract from the clock based on your exact location on the planet—the upshot being that you’ll be able to calculate to the minute when the moon will rise on any given day. I can’t for the life of me conceive of why anyone would need to know this; but if you were so inclined, you could spend the entire day crunching numbers with a protractor, calculator and the Almanac, adjusting your watch accordingly, to the extent that you’ll be able to make the exact same forecast I make every time I look out a window and say “It looks like the moon’s just risen.”
All of this nonsense should make one thing unsettlingly clear: old farmers clearly don’t have enough to do, and they’re in all likelihood dangerous individuals who should not be approached alone. Interrupt them while they’re puzzling out when Neptune thinks they should cut the balls off of a farm animal and they’ll claw at you like a cornered raccoon.
I’d always assumed that the life of a farmer was incredibly busy—one that involved getting up at 4am to plant seeds and club sheep and whatnot. Evidently I was misinformed; the sort of man who subscribes to the Old Farmer’s Almanac is clearly so bereft of anything meaningful with which to occupy his time that the prospect of calculating how many months it takes a tree to grow a new layer of bark must sound like bungee jumping nude out of a helicopter to him.
Can we round up these people some books and board games or something? This sort of behavior is barely one ladder rung above staring at a mirror and cutting yourself to pass the time. Plus, frankly, I enjoy corn on the cob. I don’t want behavior this disturbingly obsessive getting in the way of potatoes and steaks being available for my easy purchase at a supermarket.
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