﻿WEAK BATTERIES, EH? 
 
St. Paul Press is of the “opinion” that folks are agitated over drinking more so than thinking because they are more accustomed to drinking. 
People do not wax excited over that to which they are accustomed—that’s- why, I suppose, the Press is agitated about thinking — not being practiced in “using the noodle.” 
How do you get that way? 

Now, on the other hand, I, T-bone Slim, the great thresherman, find that I am called upon, increasingly, to do the thinking for the citizens of our brave republic. Just now I’m obliged to use my abundant and punctilious brains on the behalf of the farmers of our fair united soil. 
I am glad to do this—no matter how many “turns” I miss. 
It has come to my notice that our fellow countrymen are adverse to taking advantage of modern inventions and much prefer to take advantage of their fellow workers working with, them; with the result that our kind-hearted author has been grieved sorely. . . . 
An inventor goes to the trouble of inventing a telephone—does the farmer use it? 
No! He “mushes” over to his neighbor on foot, in his stockingless shoes, (soxless because of the sand ballast in his ever-leaks) and carries the message by hand. 
An inventor invents a bathtub—the farmer bathes in a watering-trough. Electric light? The farmer still uses the good old reliable moon—except in rainy weather. 
And so on. 
Invention after invention has come, but the farmer appears to be prejudiced against innovations. 
For years the harvest hands have been trying to get the farmers to adopt a dock, or a time-piece of some kind—all to no avail. He absolutely refuses to have anything to do with those “goldang new-fangled contraptions” and places his faith in daybreak and nightfall. . . 
Absolutely rediculous! — Because, sometimes when night falls on Tuesday the day breaks on Wednesday. 
They can’t be blamed, though, because their editors say: “Those that have been successful were obliged to work long days.” Hm! Then, in order for all to be successful, all have only to work longer and those that are already, successful can be still more successful by working still longer. 
They actually believe that! 
Lookit the long hours John D. works— 
I understand he works about 831 years every day except Sunday. No; you can’t get the farmer to crank up an Ingersol; the best he’ll do is adopt the radio and listen to the “mousey” squealing, a cracked klaxon clattering, gears stripping, steampipes hissing, joints creaking, asthma, catarrh and a bedlam of scrap - iron smothered in a see-saw suffocation of morbid static. God help us!—and the bartender reciting “The Mothers Prayer:” 
We’re lost! We’re sunk! 
Pass the life preservers! 
What terrible things they inflict on the air that we must breathe. Ach! “Go Feather Your Nest” frontward and backward (at same time) along with genuine death-rattle and consumptive cough in the last stages. 

Shortsightedness is one of the greatest weaknesses of the human family. 
As an illustration I will offer the auspicious occasion of the sad and untimely demise, in an automobile wreck, of an able banker in “the Granite City country:” Soon as the county commissioners heard about the wreck, they sent working men to put up a guard-rail on that dangerous spot . . .and flowers to the funeral. 
“There!” says a citizen, “if it had been a poor man that got killed, the commissioners would have paid no atttention—and would not have put up a guard-rail.” “Of course not,” agrees the town gloomerist. What would be the sense of putting up a guardrail before they got the banker?” 
One of these men was shortsighted. 

A mistake has been made in reporting that the buffalo is almost extinct— it is raisin pie that is extinct. 
In New York City there is a great demand for raisin pie insofar as the people imagine that it would be better than corn-starch pie with raisins running it. 
We doubt it; for we happen to know that raisins won’t even make good moonshine—that is, it makes the worst moonshine. There is no good moonshine I 

Literary Digest in the late years threw a literary fit about sugar—as to how certain things are more sugary than sugar and leaves a longing with us that these sweet things should be called sugar. 
According to that, this author ain’t glucose, lactose—but sugar. 
The Digest further justly points out that if glucose and other substitutes are not marked “sugar” it works a hardship on the people that love to use them. 
Good, by God! 
Now I would like to ask The Literary Digest if SOAP made from asphalt should be called tar-soap?