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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 12, 2013

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1. I am addicted to the comments in the blog of our local newspaper. I have to read these comments every day. They are the voice of a huge class of Maine people that you are likely to encounter only on your local fairgrounds after 10 P. M. on warm summer nights as they eat fried dough and slurp chocolate shakes. For example, one of them writes: "I have four piercings, a tattoo, and often dye my hair." It is only a matter of time before any Maine blog morphs into a Maine dating agency.

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2. If you read your newspaper’s daily blog, much of what you read in the letters is name calling. Although I’ve never researched name calling and found out the reason people do it, I’ve always thought that name calling was indicative of a feeling of inferiority. It’s pretty hard to hate the drunk sleeping on the street because he’s on the bottom of the social ladder, but some people might dislike anyone who has more snowmobiles or a bigger house or more education than they do. I’m going to think about this. You can help us here. Why do people call other people names?

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3. We read in the paper about some little kids who were going to --- well, I think they were going to bless some boats. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about toy boats or real boats. Please forgive me for talking about taboo topics but when I was a kid we had a Bible in the desk and every morning we were inspected to see that we had a fresh handkerchief and clean fingernails. The other day I saw a governor on television who seemed to be suffering from a runny nose and didn’t seem to know what to do about it, so I don’t know as I’m any the worse for my elementary education. Many people look at the Bible as nothing more than world class literature. Not all who have spent many hours perusing its valuable pages take it literally. Who among us have not read parallels to the Bible (if not its very sources) in the epic of the god-man Gilgamesh or Aesop's Fables? So why not suggest that the kids sprinkle some water on the fleet in the name of Zeus or Enkidu and let it go.

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4. You might have watched Governor LePage on television the other day. I listened to him while I was eating an early supper. He said he’d been to Communist China where he picked up some good ideas about education. He thought they should be implemented here in our schools. You might agree that there is no better education than travel and that The Man has taken a step in the right direction. Let’s hope he'll now go to Socialist Sweden so he can come home with some ideas that should be implemented here by our government.

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5. Here’s a newspaper headline that says, "Olympic gold medalist killed when Swedish boat capsizes on San Francisco Bay" Poor men perish when their snowmobile goes through the ice or their ATV hits a tree. Rich men perish when their catamaran flips. Smart men stay home and read about it in the newspaper.

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6. Here's a letter that was posted in our local paper by a member of Maine's intellectual community. It says, "OKAY - now that they've wasted so much time with this stupid junk - maybe they can figure out how to get some jobs in Maine, do something about the drug trafficking, make some laws for serial domestic abusers, control the child molesters and figure out a way to heat besides heating oil (which is driving people out of Maine) - just little things like that." I quickly reply: Wow --- figure out a way to heat besides heating oil. I finally get a chance to tell my Maine friends something that a few obviously don't already know. There is a new thing called solar energy that some of us have discovered and are presently using to slash our oil and electric bills. Although I appeared in Maine's first solar energy commercials that Sandra Dickson produced in 1987, I didn't really understand the money saving power of solar energy at the time. I thought you had to be rich to have solar hot water heaters. I didn't know that you could build them in your own barn. I needed someone to tell me that it could be done and how to do it. When George W. Bush started his Iraq war I knew the price of gasoline and heating oil was going to skyrocket, and it was then I asked my learned friends to show me how to build solar hot water heaters and PV panels. I now spend most of my working day in my office in my solar radiant heated cellar. Yes. It is possible to build your own solar collectors which heat your home. Or your cellar. It is so simple that an 8th grade student with two thumbs can do it. You just have to have someone who has done it show you how easy it is. On the side of my house I have 8 solar panels which I made. The glass came from old doors I got on the dump. My cellar floor is an insulated slab of concrete with pipes in it. The sun heats the liquid in the solar collectors outside. When the liquid in the solar collectors gets hot enough, a thermostat starts the pump which circulates the hot liquid through the pipes in the cellar floor. My solar hot water heaters heat my domestic hot water as well as my office in the cellar. Why doesn't everyone in Maine jump on this money saving solar energy bandwagon? Well, many patriotic Americans would rather pay $2,000 a winter for oil than put up solar hot water heaters and look like a whining liberal.

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7. For over 35 years many people listened to my radio program, not for the music but for the occasional scraps of wisdom that I would unleash in some of my better moments and I am about to unleash some wisdom now. One morning, before cutting down some birch trees, I put some gas and some oil in my chainsaw. There is a hole on the front where you pour the gas and a hole on the back where you pour the oil. It is impossible to get confused and mix them up because you have been chain sawing wood for over 60 years and there is a picture of an oil can beside the oil hole and a picture of a gas pump beside the gas hole. But one day I put the gas in the oil hole and the oil in the gas hole and when I got over to the birch trees and started my chainsaw it very quickly stopped. Which is when I stuck my finger in the oil hole and saw that, sure enough, I’d put gas in the oil tank. If you have never had this happen to you, sooner or later it probably will when you get old. There is nothing unusual about a man getting confused like this when he gets old and you should not be ashamed when it happens to you. And now the wisdom part you’ve been waiting for. Don’t tell your wife about it unless you want to sleep alone out in the garage.

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8. I am weak. It is not a pleasant thing to say, but I have to admit it. I am one of the unfortunates who functions better after an infusion of mind altering drugs. Why don’t I fight it? I do, for the first four or so hours of every day, but around 10 A. M. when I pass through the kitchen I cast a sidelong glance at the stainless steel pot with the inviting black top. And all too often, I stand there and curse my weakness as I pour the life-giving liquid into a cup decorated with sheep playing musical instruments. It takes a while for the dope to do its thing, but suddenly --- without knowing why, I’m looking at the expensive Rockport loafers on my feet and I feel good about myself because I’m wearing a nice looking pair of rich-kid shoes. My heart swells with gratitude to Helen Hier who, upon her husband’s passing, gave me hundreds of dollars worth of his warm jackets and fancy rich-kid shoes. Because my shoes will outlast me, as will most everything else I’m wearing unless an exasperated wife cuts it up for rags, I think to myself that I’ll be grateful to Helen Hier for the rest of my life. But then I realize that even though I’m suddenly motivated to hang up the light by the shower that my wife Marsha has been wanting for two years, I’m still me, and that nothing has changed except the molecules of the drug drink that have somehow lit a bonfire in my brain. And I am once again reminded why every employer wanting to turn a profit keeps a boiling pot of coffee in the employees’ lounge.

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9. My friend Heather Grills says, "I have 4800 messages in my in box. 1800 unread" As Vito Corleone asked, "How did things ever get so far?" I just had to dump over 4,000 messages out of my other email program before I could mail out my weekly Whine and Snivel newsletter. Of course I abandoned sifting through them long ago and told friends that I only saw letters addressed to me at the humble farmer at gmail dot com. Only half a dozen junk emails get through there in a day and I tell the machine to delete anything else that comes from that address. The gmail is what tells me that you have posted things on my Facebook page. Don't ask me how it knows. We have the ability to communicate with friends quickly and economically but the thing gets so jammed up with email from people trying to sell us something that it becomes unusable --- just like the roads in Los Angeles.

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