On the sixth day, God turned to the Archangel Gabriel and said: “Today I am going to create a land called Maine. It will be a land of outstanding natural beauty. It shall have tall, abundant mountains full of pine trees and eagles, beautiful sparkling lakes bountiful with bass and trout, forests full of deer and moose, high cliffs overlooking sandy beaches with an abundance of sea life, and rivers stocked with salmon”. God continued, “I shall make the land rich in resources so as to make the inhabitants prosper, I shall call these inhabitants Mainers, and they shall be known as the most friendly people on the earth.”

“But Lord,” asked Gabriel, “don’t you think you are being too generous to these Mainers?”

“Not really,” replied God, “just wait and see the winters I am going to give them.”

Posted by Mainard True

There is one thing for sure. Mainahs know a cow when they see it. After all, a cow is a cow is a cow. But what is it that a real live Mainah sees when under stress? They say that stress can cause a lot of bad things to happen to someone if they can’t get control over it. Now we wouldn’t want any fellow Mainahs dying or anything like that, so here’s a stress test. Scroll down to the photo of two cows jumping over the moon. If you see something other than two cows jumping over the moon, you might want to see a doctor immediately and be treated for a bad case of stress.
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Ooooh, aaaaaah, I’ll go easy. This photo I put together in response to an article that appeared online recently touted fears that moose’s burping and farting were contributing to global warming.

Many years ago when Bruce had teenage girls running around his house, one of the girl’s fiance came to visit. Bruce was determined to find out more about this young man as he had intended to marry his eldest daughter. After supper, he invited the man into his study. Once in there, Bruce gave him the third degree.

“What are your plans for the future?” Bruce asked.

“Well,” he responded. “I am a deeply religious man and am currently in college studying theology. I plan to study hard and I believe that God will provide for us.”

“Studying is important,” said Bruce. “But how will you provide for a nice home for my daughter?”

“My studies and constant prayer will insure that God will provide for our housing,” answered the young man.

“How do you plan to buy my daughter a nice engagement ring?” asked Bruce.

“Surely, God will provide!” answered once again the young man.

“And what about children? How will you provide for them?” questioned Bruce.

Once again the young replied, “God will provide!”

Bruce was frustrated to say the least and got up and left the room. As he entered the kitchen he came face to face with his wife.

“What did you find out about the young boy?” asked the mother.

“Well,” replied Bruce. “The kid’s got no job and no plans but if there’s anything good about him, he at least thinks I’m God!”

This is a true story, with an unfortunate ending – for the cat – and one I’m sure will tick off a few people.

We had a cat back several years ago. The cat was a pretty good cat, as far as cats go. She had a lot of personality and for the most part a pretty good disposition, except for one slight problem.

In our kitchen of an old farmhouse that dated back to the mid 1800s, there was a lot of old Wainscoting throughout. We had hung some coat hooks on the chair rail just inside the door. Being country people and all, it was the simplest solution to finding a jacket when it was time to go outside.

Over a period of time, my wife and I began noticing what couldn’t be anything else but a smell of cat pee coming from some of the clothing hanging on the coat hooks. What was puzzling was that at times it would appear that the pee was showing up near the tops of the coats as they hung.

We remained perplexed until one day we decided to go for a walk down back toward the river. We were about half way across the field when we heard a noise behind us. I turned to look just in time to see the cat come bounding up behind us. She ran about 10 feet past us, stopped, made an odd sound, kind of throaty, did a little jig with her rear legs, then commenced to pee a stream that shot about four feet into the air and out a distance that would have made some high school shot-putters envious.

I had never seen anything like it in my life before, especially coming from a female cat.

We paid the local veterinary a call and told him the story. He half smiled and said, “Well, my guess is she either has some kind of bladder infection or needs an attitude adjustment.

I bagged the old feline piss pot into a pillow case one day and took her to the vets. He checked her all out and said she was healthy as a clam, whatever the heck that means. How would anyone know………never mind.

He prescribed Valium. He said to give her a half pill in the morning and a half at night. It would calm her down and hopefully she’d stop peeing on everything.

Initially it was quite a chore to shove this tiny pill down her throat. I placed her in the kitchen chair and first tried butter, then peanut butter but as time went on, the damned cat fell in love with Valium. She would wait patiently for me outside my bedroom door. As soon as she would hear me get out of bed in the morning, she would run to the chair and wait for me. I got tired of doing this twice a day so I just gave her a whole pill first thing in the morning.

She was happy and stopped peeing everywhere. If you’re like me, there’s not much worse than rotten old cat piss!

End of story? Naw! We were moving to New Hampshire. My wife’s sister and boyfriend came to our house to get the piano we were giving them. Before they left, we had filled the back of their truck with anything we could shove in it.

As we loaded what seemed to be the last possible item one could squeeze in, I told my sister-in-law she had one more thing – the cat. She objected and said the cat wouldn’t ride good in the truck. Any excuse she could find she tried.

I said, “Don’t worry! I have just the answer for that cat.”

I took her to the kitchen and somehow that cat knew she was in for a treat, so she hopped up on the chair and waited. I grabbed a pill, popped it into the back of her throat and she swallowed.

I took the cat out and put her into the cab of the truck and said goodbye…….and good riddance.

Later, when we talked to the sister, we found out the cat never made it home. She said half-way, of the one-hour car ride, the cat began acting really strange. They stopped the truck to try to get the cat calmed down and in the process the cat bolted out the door and was never seen again.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I figured out what happened. My wife takes a prescription drug called Synthroid for a hyperactive thyroid. She had moved bottles around so I ended up giving the cat a dose of synthroid instead of Valium.

No my wife didn’t take the Valium.

A man is driving down Rt. 5 heading toward Bethel from Andover. He’s barely out of town when he meets a woman driving quite slowly coming toward him. As she gets near his car, she yells as loud as she can, “PIG!”

The man immediately yells back at the woman, “BITCH!”

The man navigates the next turn in the road and immediately hits and kills a pig standing in the middle of the road.

Yikes!

A lawyer was driving down the road one day on the way home when he looked out his window and he saw a father, mother and two children sitting in a large grassy field eating grass because they were hungry. The lawyer asked his driver to stop and invite the hungry family to his house to eat.

The driver went into the field and returned shortly with the family. The lawyer opened his door and invited the family to sit in the back of his limo with him for the ride.

They all squeezed in and headed for the lawyer’s home, when the father says to the lawyer, “It is really nice of you to take us to your home to feed us. We are very poor and have no money to eat.”

“Oh, that’s quite alright,” exclaimed the lawyer. “My lawn needs mowing anyway.”

It was a pleasant day. Otis and Gabby were doing their thing wasting time away sitting on the Andover Town Common bandstand hoping against all hope something would happen. Generally these two guys never get bored as it’s difficult to bore a simpleton.

As they sat twiddling their thumbs, little Freddie Emerson came wandering by on his way home from school. Freddie was only 10 and he attended the Andover Elementary School. If he was lucky he had Mr. Emery for a teacher because Mr. Emery is “smaht”.

Oddly enough, Freddie stopped for a second and gazed up into the gazebo at Otis and Gabby. Next thing you know, Freddie was sitting on the bench between Otis and Gabby looking at Otis as if he was some freak show entertainment at the Fryeburg Fair.

Otis of course was bored, so he said to little Freddie, “You want to talk?”

“Sure!” says Freddie. “What you want to talk about?”

“Well,” Otis hesitated a bit. “We could talk about nuclear science.”

“Yeah, we could,” replied Freddie. “But before we do let me ask you a question.”

That certainly perked Otis right up because he loves to be asked questions. He thinks he’s so smart and all and most of the time he can be quite successful in pulling the wool over the eyes of many people – especially the Andover Town Selectmen.

“What’s your question young man?” asked Otis all snuffy and puffed up like.

“You know deer, cows and horses eat the same thing, grass” declared Freddie. “Deer excrete tiny little hard pebbles, cows lay out a big flat patty and horses make a pile of big round lumps full of hay. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Well, geez,” replied Otis. “I can’t say that I rightly know why that is.”

“If that’s the case then mister,” began Freddie. “I can’t see talking to you about nuclear science when you don’t know shit.”

I don’t think that I can honestly say that Andover is a town of much diversification unless you’re discussing the diverse ways to get a skunk out of your shed or better yet, discovering different ways to bitch and complain about the weather.

Andover is lacking in cultural diversification and seldom do the locals, who almost never leave town, see someone from “away”, even from a foreign country.

Many, many years ago a very handsome and smooth talking man from a relatively remote small village of Northern Italy, traveled to the United States looking for that “American Dream”. I would have to say that this particular Italian had a very lousy sense of direction because somehow he ended up in Andover, Maine looking for work.

He was a married man and left his wife and two children at home. He intended to send his money home to care for his family and once settled in, he would send for them.

With no place else left to go, Guido looked for work and a place to live in Andover. During his search, he met up with Gladys Forkinham, a single woman whom many in Andover thought to be nothing but an old “school marm”.

Needless to say, Gladys found “work” for the very handsome and debonair Mr. Guido Italiano. Guido lived with Gladys for several months and decided that he had better head back to Italy once he discovered that Ms. Forkinham was pregnant with his child.

Before leaving he told his mistress to send him a letter in the mail once the birth had arrived and he would begin sending her money to support the child but he had one request.

“Don’t tell me exactly about the baby,” he explained to Gladys. “I don’t want my wife to know about this, so send me a letter and once the baby is born just tell me you have cooked some spaghetti and it’s ready to eat.”

Guido headed back to Italy and within a couple of months Gladys delivered. Much to Guido’s surprise, he opened a letter one day from his darling mistress. This is what the letter said:

Dear Guido,

I have been cooking some spaghetti just as you taught me how to do. I found the learning process quite enjoyable and wish I could see you again to learn more about cooking. You wanted me to tell you when I had cooked my first batch of spaghetti and so I thought I would tell you that it is all done. You should also know there ended up being 3 batches of spaghetti, two with meatballs and one without.

Sincerely,

Your friend and fellow spaghetti cook, Gladys.

Virgil was out working in the field not too far from the road, when he heard a loud crash. Thinking he better go and investigate, he walked out the path to where he parked his old pickup truck. Seeing that his truck was okay, he looked around and spotted a big fancy bus that had crashed into a big pine tree down at the corner of the road.

He approached the bus and saw the writing on the side which read, “Maine Politicians Information Tour”. Virgil knew what he had to do, so he went back to his tool shed and returned with a shovel and began burying all the bodies.

About the time he got the last one covered over, the sheriff arrived on the scene.

“What happened here?” asked the sheriff.

“Well,” replied Virgil. “This bus crashed and I buried everyone.”

“Were they all dead?” asked the sheriff.

“Most of them,” answered Virgil. “A few of them said they weren’t but you can’t ever believe a politician.”

Otis and Gabby were walking down Main Street the other day and happened to notice Asher Peabody sitting in front of the living room window playing chess with his dog. Otis couldn’t believe what he was seeing, so he stopped to watch for a while. Gabby was more interested in what Asher was eating that about any dang old dog playing chess.

After a few minutes, Otis walked up on the piazza and spoke through an open window, “It couldn’t help but notice Mr. Peabody. That’s some smart dog you got there being able to play chess and all.”

“Oh, he ain’t so damned smart!” exclaimed Asher. “I’ve beat him 3 out of 5 so far.”

After leaving old man Peabody’s place, Otis and Gabby continued on heading for a stop at Mills’ Market to pick up a cold Moxie before taking up a fixed position at the town bandstand. On the way, they passed by Bruce Simmons’ house and once again noticed Bruce sitting in front of the television with his dog Topsy. They were watching Old Yella.

During the few light and somewhat comical parts of the movie, Otis noticed the dog laughing quite gleefully and during the sad parts, Topsy cried like a baby.

Otis couldn’t help it so he walked up to the front door and yelled in through the screen, “Hey, Bruce! I ain’t never seen no dog laugh and cry like that before. What’s up with that?”

Bruce replied, “Yeah, it surprises the heck out of me. Topsy hated the book.”

Before Otis and Gabby could get from Mills’ Market over to the bandstand, they first had to pass by Fox’s Barber Shop. Otis and Gabby went in just in time to see some out of town guy trying to weasel a haircut out of Foxy.

With his Tennessee walker hound at his side, the out of towner says to Fox, “I’ll be you a haircut my dog can talk.”

“Dogs can’t talk!” exclaimed Fox. “You’re on.”

So the guy says to his dog, “What’s on top of a house?”

The dog says, “Roof!”

The out of towner asks his dog, “What does sandpaper feel like?”

The dog says, “Rough.”

“Now, who was the greatest baseball hitter of all time?” the dog’s owner said.

The dog looked for a second and then said, “Ruth.”

Fox had heard enough of this foolishness, so he threw the both of them out. Once outside the barber shop, the dog looked at his master and said, “Or was it Mantle?”

Enough of this I guess!

Young Bruce went off to school at the Andover Elementary School one day. During the day his teacher, Ms. Meisner told the class that she wanted everyone to go home that night and think of a story they could tell that had a moral to it. They had been discussing morals and she thought a good way to teach the kids was to have them create their own.

The next day Bruce headed off to school again not really sure what his story would be. He was lucky that he didn’t get called on first. The first to go was Meghan. She stood up in front of the class and told everyone that her family lives on a farm and every Saturday they take some of their products to town to sell at the farmer’s market.

Last Saturday, she put all the eggs from the families laying hens in one big basket. “On the way to the market, my father hit a big bump in the road. The basket fell over and all the eggs broke!”

“And what is the moral of your story, Meghan?” asked Ms. Meisner.

“The moral to my story is don’t put your eggs all in one basket,” said Meghan.

Next it was Alston’s turn. “My family also lives on a farm. We took 20 eggs and we were going to hatch them all out so we would have 20 new chickens around the farm. Once they all hatched, only 12 chickens lived!”

“And what’s the moral to your story, Alston?” asked Ms. Meisner.

“That’s easy,” stated Alston. “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

Next came Bruce’s turn. He was quite nervous and was unsure what story to tell but he finally made up his mind and went ever so slowly up to the front of the class and began his tale. “My uncle was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War. His plane got shot down over enemy territory. When he bailed out with a parachute, he took a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun and a machete with him. On the way down he drank the bottle of whiskey. He landed in the middle of 100 North Vietnamese soldiers. As soon as he landed he took his machine gun and killed 69 of the enemy until he ran out of bullets. He then took his machete and killed 21 more but the machete broke in half, so he had to kill the rest with his bare hands.”

Shocked at listening to this story, Ms. Meisner nervously said to Bruce, “That’s an incredible story! I can’t imagine though what the moral to such a story could be.”

“Oh that’s easy,” said Bruce. “The moral to the story is, don’t mess with my uncle when he’s been drinking.”

We’ve all had at least some taste of how smaht (smart) Billy the dog is. In case you missed it, he applied for a job a while back at Mills’ Market and got shot down because he couldn’t speak two languages. If you want to get to know Billy better, you can over the the main site at Laugh Maine and scroll down this page a little ways and read all about the wicked good smahts of a real Maine dog.

Roger was hard at work, as usual, in his store. Otis and Gabby was sitting in their usual spots out front the store when Billy came around the corner with a purse tied around his neck. Once inside the store, Billy waited politely until the gentleman (er, uh, ahem) from Massachusetts was finished his purchase. Once he had, Billy headed straight for the meat counter.

He put his front paws up on the front of the meat counter. Roger said to Billy, “What cha need today boy?”

Well, you know that flatlandah was kinda amused at this escapade, so he decided to hang around and watch. Billy pointed his paw at the hamburger. Roger asked, “How much?”

Billy barked two times, so Roger measured out 2 pounds of ground beef and put it in a nice neat package. The flatlander became impressed.

“Anything else?” inquired Roger again.

Billy then pointed at the pork chops. “How many of them, Billy?” asked Roger.

Billy barked four times, so Roger packaged up four chops.

“Anything else?” asked Roger.

With that Billy got down and went around behind the counter. Roger took out the right amount of money and made changed, tied the package of meat around Billy’s neck and sent him on his way.

The flatlander’s curiosity was going to kill him, so he decided to follow the dog. Billy ran fast and the flatlander followed him all the way to Virgil and Florena’s house at the end of the Sawyer Brook Road.

When Billy got to the house, he began scratching at the front door. The flatlandah watched but nobody came, so he walked over to the front door and began knocking loudly. Soon Florena came to the door. When she opened it Billy went right inside. The flatlandah said to Florena, “That’s some smart dog you got there, ma’am!”

“Oh, he ain’t that smaht!” retorted crabby ole Florena. “The dumb bastard keeps forgetting his key!”