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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for February 23, 2014

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1. You've heard about body language --- that you can tell what a person is thinking by the way they stand. The body language experts will tell you that anyone who has his arms folded across his chest is aloof and uncommunicative. That might be true in Boston, but on the street in Rockland, Maine it could mean that you slopped clam chowder on your sweater.

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2. When you are talking with someone on the phone and you ask them for their number or address, do they say, “Do you have a pen?” I suppose I could reply with, “Yes, I do have a pen. But I don’t seem to have a piece of paper so I guess I’ll write your number on my hand.” You might sneer and say, “Pen? Why does a person with total recall need a pen?” Anyway, I once made the mistake of telling my brother that nothing enraged me like someone on the phone saying, “Do you have a pen?” Because now every time I ask him a question, he says, “Do you have a pen?”

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3. It is not uncommon to go out in the woods in the town of St. George, Maine and see a little wooden platform twenty feet up in a tree. I think they call this a tree stand. My friends who are hunters climb up the tree and sit or stand on this tiny wooden platform, sometimes for hours, until an animal comes close enough for them to shoot it. By that time, the hunter is so stiff from just sitting that he can barely climb down the tree. This is why there is hardly a hunter alive who has used one of these tree stands who has not fallen off the thing and dropped kerplunk on the ground. Perhaps you have chanced upon those wipeout television programs where people crash snowmobiles and skateboards and water skis. But if you have never seen a hunter fall out of a tree stand you realize that Maine’s number one sport has been denied valuable promotional coverage. Are not producers of Wipeout shows remiss in not adding footage of falling Maine hunters to prime time television?

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4. A very smart and witty girl once said to me, “I know it’s true, but I don’t want to believe it. She was in good company. Robert Millikan, an American physicist who got a Nobel Prize in 1923, said, “I spent ten years of my life testing that 1905 equation of Einstein’s and contrary to all my expectations I was compelled to assert its unambiguous verification in spite of its unreasonableness, since it seemed to violate everything we knew.” Others, who checked out Einstein’s several papers, said approximately the same thing. “My experiments and observations say Einstein is correct, but I don’t want to believe it.” You know that a couple of months ago I paid a quarter for a mint condition copy of “Quantum” and since then I’ve read it over and over. What I’ve got out of it so far is the understanding that Einstein came up with several theories about time and space and matter that violated much of what scientists thought that they “knew.” Being scientists, they put Einstein’s theories to the test. And although observation and experimentation proved to Nobel Prize winners that Einstein was right, even these extremely brilliant scientists had difficulty coming to grips with facts that contradicted much of what they’d been brought up to believe. Have you ever stopped to consider how difficult it must be for millions of intelligent Americans to believe much of what they see on the news and get in their emails? Every day their friends bombard them with letters saying that President Obama is not an American citizen. Or that Al Gore is a hustler and a fraud who has made millions of dollars spreading false information about climate change. Or that unions have brought America down. The friends who send these emails are good people. They earned their millions raising corn or speculating in real estate, or perhaps they inherited their money. They dress well and smile at you over evening cocktails and go to church and are --- well, they are good people. But yet these millionaires send you emails that say that illegal aliens and lazy people who won’t work are why we see boarded up store windows and empty foreclosed homes --- When everyone knows that about half of their and your tax dollars go to pay for past, present and future wars. These must be confusing times for elderly conservatives who can think. Because there are a lot of things out there that they know are true, but they don’t want to believe it.

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5. Last Thursday the sheriff responded to a 911 call from a housewife in St. George who was being crushed up against her wall phone by an oven that had overflowed with Fudge Brownie Mix. It seems that the woman was confused by the directions on the back of the box, which were in the metric system. That is, the pan is supposed to be 33 by 23 by 5 cm’s and you will need 110 ml of water and 55 ml of Vegetable oil. The only thing she found in common with the metric system was the 1 egg. It took the sheriff and a deputy several extra hours to free the woman because, according to the directions on the box, the brownies had to be cut into 4 by 5 cm squares before eating.

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6. Bill Dickey told me about one of the local Camden characters who always used to walk around with a paper bag full of whatever he thought he’d be needing to get through the day. And every time this character would come in to visit one of the local businessmen who owned a store, the businessman would grab the paper bag and empty it on the counter to see what was in it --- just trying to be funny. Well, you don’t have to know too much about characters in Camden or anywhere else in Maine to figure out what was going to happen – sooner or later. And it did. One warm spring day this character walked into the store with his paper bag, like he did every day, and the merchant grabbed it, like he did every day, and tipped it upside down on the scale on his counter. And he looked at what he had dumped on that scale, and he looked up at his friend, and he looked back at the scale and said, “It looks like.....” And then he said, “It smells like....” And then he said, “It is....”

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7. If you’re old enough you might remember the good old let boys play with dolls and girls play with trucks. They found out that that program was a hoax and a fraud. It seems that boys and girls are pre-wired and the environmental and cultural factors are negligible. I thought I was a very destructive child, but discovered on a web site that by taking an axe to old cast iron parlor stoves, and concrete steps, I was manifesting normal little boy behavior. The next level of difference between boys and girls has to do with gender-specific personality traits which affect how children learn. First, a word about gender-specific personality traits. In the 1960's and 1970's, it was fashionable to assume that gender differences in personality were "culturally constructed." Back then, psychologists thought that if we raised Johnny to play with dolls and Sally to play with trucks -- then many of these gender differences would vanish. However, cross-cultural studies over the past 40 years have provided little support for this hypothesis. Here is one of the most challenges teachers face: the girl who gets straight A's but thinks she's stupid and feels discouraged, and the boy who's barely getting B's but thinks he's brilliant. Consequently, the most basic difference in teaching style for girls vs. boys is that you want to encourage the girls, build them up, while you give the boys a reality check: make them realize they're not as brilliant as they think they are, and challenge them to do better. --- For all the good it will do, I might add. -- If you want to get 8th-grade girls interested in chemistry, show the girls how chemistry can be used to improve the world. Let them build natural biochemical filters to clean dirty water, so they can see how the water becomes fresh and clean. If you want to get 8th-grade boys interested in chemistry, teach them about dynamite. Can’t you see yourself standing before the schoolboard the following week saying, “How was I to know…”

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8. Here is some news that was emailed to me by my wife, Marsha’s aunt. Keep a watch out for people standing near you at retail stores, restaurants, grocery stores, etc., if they have a cell phone in hand. With the new camera cell phones, they can take a picture of your credit card, which gives them your name, number, and expiration date. Identification theft is one of the fastest growing scams today, and this is just another example of the means that are being used. So... be aware of your surroundings. Now, do you think that the media should broadcast warnings about these scams? Does it put people on their guard, or does it outline in detail exciting new opportunities for scammers who aren’t bright enough to think up techno-crimes on their own?

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