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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for January 19, 2014

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1. Remember how they used to tar the roads in the good old days? A truck would back up to a machine and dump the gravel or tar into it and the machine would press it into the road. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com and you might tell us what you know about it. A friend of mine who drove one of those trucks was on his way to a grange meeting when his wife said, “Admit it. You’re lost. I don’t know how you can be lost. You drove every bit of this road when you helped tar it last summer.” And he said, “That’s true, but you want to remember that I was always backing up.”

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2. A woman I met down in Portland airport told me that her father traveled a lot. The night before he’d go anywhere he’d put out a pile of the clothes he figured he’d need to take with him. In another pile he put all the money he figured he’d need to take. The next morning he’d take half the clothes in the pile and twice the amount of money in the other pile, and it always came out just right.

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3. While I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times, that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next.

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4. Have you ever noticed how ominous the call letters of some radio stations sound? A knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open it a crack and see standing out there two VTPR men in shiny boots. Or, even worse, you might hear, “We’re from KUNV and we’d like a few words with you.”

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5. You are what you eat. You've heard that over and over. Are you also what you read? Every morning I start off the day by opening a psychology I text at random and reading as I meditate before my shower. So I start off my day by reading about an almost infinite number of shades of personality traits or mental disorders. But what would happen if I were to start off the day by reading instead the Bible or the morning newspaper? Yeah. You're right. I probably wouldn't notice the difference.

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6. When our government shuts down a military base in this country, people have meetings and show up with posters to protest. And when our government builds a military base in another country, people have meetings and show up with suicide bombs to protest. This would seem to indicate that either our government is incredibly insensitive or that people are impossible to please.

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7. (090517) If you are clumsy with hand tools --- if you handle lumber or rocks with your bare uncalloused hands, you might be missing some skin here and there. I brought some nice painted pine boards home from the dump and that paint on the corner of the board was as sharp as a saw blade. Have you ever noticed what happens when you cut your hand or knock the skin off a knuckle? There is a vast amount of living tissue on your body --- I mean you must carry several square feet of skin. But no matter how much solid, happy skin there is on your body, you hit that same teeny tiny sore spot on your hand that you hit two days before. My friend Al who works in a hardware store says this is called the Law of Inverted Averages. A great crowd of people might come in the door at the same time and every one of them will go into the same corner to look at the same box of screws.

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8. Speaking of the law of inverted averages, have you noticed that every day there seems to be more and more famous people that nobody has ever heard of? You can’t turn on your TV but what they are interviewing some famous baseball player or movie star or singer that seems to have materialized already famous like Venus on the half shell. Thousands of people show up to see these famous unknown people perform outside in blizzards or in theaters that collapse or in other venues where people carry guns to protect themselves and end up shooting two or three of their neighbors who throw popcorn or make too much noise texting. We now live in an unfamiliar world where every day going to bed when the sun goes down looks more and more attractive.

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9. The headline in USA Today said "LOSING IRAQ." "The population once freed by the U.S.-Iraqi alliance has now watched those same jihadist insurgents return to command the streets and impose their will." The terms "liberated" or "insurgency beaten and humiliated" only have meaning in context: Are they talking about Sherman's march through Georgia or the Russians taking Berlin? We read that: "When the last U.S. combat troops departed Iraq in December 2011, they left behind a defeated al-Qaeda" How do you defeat an idea? If in 1945 Eisenhower’s army "defeated" a way of thinking that banned unions, how is it possible that that way of thinking has gained such a strong foothold here? All we can really know is that the Iraq war and the Vietnam war both served their intended purpose: A very few people are much richer now than they were when either of those wars started. Look for more money-making wars soon.

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