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The week of April 7 marked 35 years that humble has made this radio program for you. --- Around 1820 shows. He was a kid of 42 when he started driving to Orono every week to make this program.

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Rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 5, 2013

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1. You might have read in the newspaper that the police have determined that bullying was not the cause of a 13-year-old girl’s suicide. If bullying were the cause of suicide, how many married men would be left in the world today?

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2. I don’t have much to say about the Boston Marathon Bombing. But aren’t you frightened by people who back up everything they say and do with the name of God?

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3. I’ve had a lot of pop up ads appear on my computer lately and I asked my Facebook friends for help. Several replied but I think I got the most help from what John wrote. John said, "The origin of 'pop-up ads' can be almost anything. Merely stating that you are getting them would be akin to telling an auto mechanic over the phone that there is a clicking noise coming from your engine compartment. The solution may be something terribly simple, such as a checkbox that one fails to 'uncheck' while installing a perfectly safe program, or, some nefarious little program (called viruses/adware/etc) which manage to bypass a computer's security measures and exists solely to hide and serve ads. Those can be harder to deal with. Much like a car's windows should be closed when parked in the middle of a busy city (as to not let bugs or criminals in), a computer connected to the Internet MUST be properly protected. It is easier to get caught breaking a car window than sneaking annoying programs into people's computers, so tech-savvy criminals do rejoice. This is not a problem that is going away anytime soon. To make matters worse, there are programs and websites out there that purport to help but are really tricking you into installing even more bad stuff. If you want to give a shot at 'cleaning' your computer yourself, it is imperative that you source your info and tools from a trusted source. If your have a Windows PC, Microsoft's free tools would be a good start, and may be all you need:http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/spyware-remove.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/malware-removal.aspx If your own attempts fail, a local tech-savvy computer person may need to see your computer. A person with the right skills can sometimes solve these issues in minutes. Such a person would also be able to make sure that your PC had all the proper security measures up and running. A properly setup computer can run for many years without the slightest hassle." Thank goodness that there are people out there who can tell us these things. I installed the program John suggested and it told me that my computer was clean, so I’m going to have to keep looking.

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4. There was an article in the newspaper about the age limit being lowered on Mormons who were going on missions. A lot of people wrote in that they wouldn’t let a Mormon in the house. You know that my hobby is studying languages and that I’ve always envied anyone who could live in another country for a year and learn another language. So what do you suppose I’d say if, given a choice, I could have my nephew in South America learning Spanish for two years or carrying a weapon in Afghanistan? I’m sorry if this makes me a disagreeable person but I always welcome Moonies or Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. When my friends are seated comfortably I give them a lecture on the blessings of solar radiant heat in my cellar floor. I point out the pipes and let them feel the heat in the floor. I talk about saving money. Even a kid can build the thing. Why aren't more Maine people told about how much money they can save by building their own solar hot water heaters? You don't have to be rich to do it. I get right wound up because I’m quite religious about saving money with solar energy. Some friends get up and leave before I even get to the great part about pouring the cement on top of the pex pipe. I used to think leaving while I was begging them to stay wasn't a nice thing to do until I realized they were probably rushing home to build their own solar collectors. When I mentioned this to one of my radio friends in Palmyra who will soon be 80 years old, she said that Mormons were very intelligent and that she could talk with them, but when she saw Jehovah's Witnesses coming she always met them at the door in the nude. I told her I was glad she had found a use for them.

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5. One morning I read an article by a professor at The University of Maine in Orono and Googled to learn more about him. I found him on a “rate my professors” chart and saw that some hated him. Some loved him. Unfortunately, not all professors are for all students. Professors are like students in that it might take society 20 or more years before it can accurately determine if what they taught or what they learned was of any value. A student who learned in school to be a good neighbor is appreciated more in his community than one who got high marks in geometry and you can’t measure that on a test. Which is why you probably won’t learn anything about the things that really matter if you grade students or professors. And when you grade an entire school are you really measuring any more than the levels of income and education of the adults who live in that particular community? You remember the story about the woman who thought her son was brilliant although tests determined that he was severely retarded. They discovered that she was comparing the child with his father. You've heard me say this before, but here it is again. Some of the most famous and effective teachers were burned at the stake or crucified or asked to drink poison just to shut them up. Whenever you read of a professor who is kicked out of a University, aren’t you tempted to believe that he is saying something that people need to hear?

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6. In response to a newspaper article about the noise generated by a building inhabited by college freshmen, a reader writes, “Now you're actually seeing what your little angels actually do in college and HUGE SURPRISE, everyone wants to blame the town, the cops, the facility........how about someone blame the undisciplined kids (adults technically) and the parents that raised these maniacs.” You're right about the parents. Parents really don't know how to raise children until they are grandparents. And then they wring their hands and worry because their children don't know how to raise children. I was a teetotaling wimp when I started college so I was able to stand back in the shadows and simply observe the usual first-year-away-from-mama madness. It is a right of passage any way you want to spell rite. Anthropologists have spent years in jungles and deserts and Chicago studying the phenomenon of coming of age. May I confess that several years of bravely fighting for my country in the Coast Guard were well behind me when I started college, and that I lived in lonely rooms rented out by quiet elderly folk in their 30's and never in a college dorm? Because I was supporting myself, most of my time out of class was spent grubbing for food and rent money. I don't mean to tell you that I haven't spent many, many nights in a frat house where there was hollering and drinking and who knows who was doing what to whom upstairs or in the cellar, but I was in the band that was making most of the noise.

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7. For years I thought it was Evelyn Waugh who was responsible for one of my favorite quotes. But in checking it out the other day I discovered it was P. G. Woodhouse. Here’s the quote. How could I have been confused? "Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."

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8. We read that a bipartisan group of 11 lawmakers unveiled a proposal to overhaul Maine’s tax code by lowering individual and corporate income taxes and eliminating the estate tax. To make up for the loss of a lot of money that would be the result of doing this, a sales tax is slapped on nearly all products and services and nearly all exemptions would be eliminated. Pretty scary stuff. Is it not yet another example of the rich trying to unload the cost of running the government onto the poor? One way to get people to be suckered into voting for a higher sales tax on almost everything is to point out that it will hammer the tourists who visit Maine in the summer. If you are a proud Maine person who doesn’t think about it too much, you can be convinced by the proponents of a high sales tax that you are striking a blow against the thousands of wealthy travelers who clog our inns and roads every summer. What you are not supposed to think about when you support this bill is that a tourist might only be here paying that sales tax for two weeks at most but that you as a resident will be stuck with shouldering most of the burden 52 weeks out of the year. It is never called to your attention that a higher sales tax is one that is naturally supported by people who are very rich because poor people have to pay most of it. There was the usual squabble and attempt to spread misinformation over this sales tax bill that was recently considered by the Maine State Legislature. To reduce a lot of confusing verbiage to elementary terms, we could now ask Tarzan to explain this bill to Cheetah: “Rich man like sales tax on bananas and other food that Cheetah eat. Rich man like low tax on huge rich man income.” “Cheetah have no clothes on back but eat bananas so Cheetah like low tax on food.” “Explained like this even monkey understand difference between regressive and progressive taxes. Let’s turn in, Jane.”

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