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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for February 16, 2014

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1. I just realized that this is not next week.

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2. The other morning on the news we heard that a charter school is accused of stealing taxpayer dollars. The way I understand it, they either got more of the taxpayer’s dollars than they should have, or didn’t return a surplus of the taxpayer’s dollars like they were supposed to do, or else they suddenly went out of business and disappeared with all of the taxpayers’ money. And now a charter school is in the news for stealing money from taxpayers. Well, what’s a charter school for?

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3. Professor William, who lives up Searsport way, writes to tell us that his great-grandmother, who was wounded as a toddler in a Civil War battle that destroyed their newly-purchased Virginia farm, kept driving an automobile after she was over 90 and legally blind. There is no doubt in my mind but what, were that aged and legally blind woman still alive today, she would be texting in a Yankee school zone. Can anyone hearing this doubt but what the South will rise again?

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4. And now, the No Things Considered part of today’s Maine Private Radio show, if you are ready: Radio friend Tesa says, “When the road got tarred, my long-haired dog laid down on the fresh tar because it was so nice and warm. After that he was a short-haired dog.”

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5. Do you believe that one’s image is everything? You have seen pictures of neo-Nazi skinheads. Swastikas tattooed on arms or neck, boots, shaved heads. Here’s a question for you. Should a skinhead decide to grow and groom his hair, cover his tattoos, wear expensive Italian shoes and a Brooks Brothers suit, without changing his philosophy, could he be elected governor of the State of Maine?

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6. Please permit me to paraphrase a letter from a radio friend who writes, “At my son's high school graduation, the new school superintendent spoke” to the class using Polonious' speech as his text. The man obviously did not realize that Polonious was a buffoon who said that brevity was the soul of wit. The superintendent then talked for quite some time.

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7. Here’s an interesting quote radio friend Steve sent me. It says that “The liberal left is defined by their belief in the persuasiveness of the rational argument." Let me read that again. “The liberal left is defined by their belief in the persuasiveness of the rational argument." Isn’t that silly? Think about this. In a disagreement on any issue, who do you think would win? Big Money or Rational Argument?

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8. You know that I am always trying to learn things. While drinking my breakfast rolled oats out of the pan the other morning I heard a woman on TV use the word enchilada. I realized that although I had heard the word enchilada before, to the best of my knowledge it was in the same category as black holes in that I had never seen one and wouldn’t know one if I met it face to face. So I took out my notebook and wrote down enchilada so I’d remember to look it up. Later, I asked my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, if she could tell me what an enchilada was. Por supuesto. It is some kind of food. Marsha has lived in Chile and even spent time in Guatemala so there isn’t much she doesn’t know about the exotic foods eaten by our friends with cast-iron guts in far-away lands down under. I’m afraid to ask her if she knows anything about Black Holes. I’m afraid she’ll say, “In 1968 I learned about central singularity while dating Stephen Hawking.”

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9. You have heard their plaintive cry, “Those women are oppressed,” and you are shown pictures of women wearing veils. Is it possible that some women might like to wear veils? I will not pause here to give you examples of veil wearing from the world’s great literature. Back around 1943 my grandmother had a hat with a black veil on it. She wore it to church back in the days when you walked half a mile to church. Is it possible that in other countries women wearing veils might think, “Those women are oppressed” when they see their American counterparts destroying their feet by wearing pointy high-heeled shoes? The next time you’re in front of the tube, look and see if Jane Pauley, who is at her advanced age, sometimes guest-hosting the Today show, is wearing comfortable, sensible, flat shoes. Having spoken at hundreds of banquets, I have observed that the first thing many women do when they sit down at a table to eat is kick off their uncomfortable high-heeled shoes. For years you might have also marveled how some women are willing to inflict pain and irreversible damage to their bodies just because everyone else is doing it. Did you see the news program that covered the Hollywood awards? One woman on stage in front of cameras, and therefore the world, took off her shoes and threw them over her shoulder. I applauded as it was the most sensible thing I’d seen on television in months.

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10. Do you get more worked up over little insignificant things than you used to? I seem to. A while back I went to the store to buy some CD envelopes. They were $9.99 per box and I took two. When I got home I noticed that I’d been charged $10.99 for each one. I have the feeling that I was overcharged $2. Even more recently I went to the store to buy a gallon of milk and a $2.29 pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol. At the register I was charged $4 plus for the Pepto-Bismol. I said, “I looked at the price tag on the shelf long and hard before I picked up this bottle, because your pricing was very confusing and hard to read, but I think it was $2.29.” So four people behind me in the less than 10 items lane had to wait while the very nice check out woman went up to see for herself. I said to the people who were waiting behind me in the line, “We’ll see what comes of this.” The check out woman came back and said, “You were right. Because we made a mistake, we’re going to give it to you free.” I said, “Ma dam, if it weren’t for this kind of thing happening to me, I wouldn’t NEED Pepto-Bismol.”

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