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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for March 9, 2014

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1. One morning I heard the people on the news talking about a football game that they called the super bowl that had been played the day before. I called my friend Julian and asked him if he watched it and he said he did. When I asked him what happened, I was not surprised to hear him say that he fell asleep. This is good. What else is television for?

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2. Here’s a question for the No Things Considered part of this Maine Private Radio program. "Imagine you’re on your way to work and you come across a child drowning in a shallow pond. You’re tall enough that you can run in and rescue him, but if you do so you’ll ruin your new suit. Should you save the child?" It depends on where you are on the corporate ladder or where you want to be on the corporate ladder. Have you ever heard of anyone who got to the top by worrying about the health and welfare of anyone but himself?

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3. If I were rich. Ever think of what you’d do if you were rich? Some people would buy everyone a pump so there’d be no water in the cellar. Others would simply plug the leak so there’d be no need of a pump. Here are some hypothetical examples. You can think of many more. A. If I were rich I’d start a hospital for children with head injuries. B. If I were rich I’d give little kids a free bike helmet so there would be no head injuries. 1. If I were rich I’d give everyone gold plated dishes to catch the water that drips on the table on rainy days. 2. If I were rich, I’d patch all the leaky roofs. Yes, we all have a different idea of what we’d do if we were rich. A. If I were rich I’d see that poor kids didn’t go hungry. B. If I were rich I’d have a clinic for free vasectomies and I’d triple the size of Maine Family planning and in a very few years there would be no hungry children. A. If I were rich I’d double the amount of welfare payments. B. If I were rich I’d give everyone a free college education so there would be no need of welfare. Isn’t this an interesting concept? Some people would buy everyone a pump so there’d be no water in the cellar. Others would simply plug the leak so there’d be no need of a pump.

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4. An email that came today says: "... welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job in 35 states and the District of Columbia. Even worse, welfare pays more than $15 per hour in 13 states. According to the study, welfare benefits have increased faster than minimum wage. It’s now more profitable to sit at home than it is to earn an honest day’s pay." I have heard my wife Marsha tell about this. It is nothing new. When she was in college at UConn over 40 years ago she took a course in which one of the assignments was to try to live on welfare or minimum wage. She (and probably the other students) discovered that the viable option was to live on welfare, because minimum wage did not pay them anywhere near enough to get by. The lesson Marsha and her classmates learned? We can get people off welfare by paying them a living wage. Minimum wage doesn't do the job. --- And wouldn't you believe that it is much more difficult to live on minimum wage now than it was 40 years ago? One of the reasons the very rich do not want poor children to go to college is because they learn things like Marsha learned: Unless you want a dysfunctional society, everyone who works in a factory or in your back yard must be paid a living wage. Yes, a college graduate would be contributing more to our social system by paying much more in taxes than an uneducated person. But on the down side, educated people are much more likely to vote for a Democratic congress which would vote to raise the minimum wage. It is a vicious upward spiral: more education results in higher wages which results in even more education which results in even higher wages, and we can’t have that. What percentage of the population do you think would want to live on welfare if they could earn a living wage? You'll never know, because it's not going to happen in your lifetime in this country.

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5. Do you get emails from your friends at MoveOn asking you to sign this petition or that petition? You are assured that your signature will help keep a few greedy rich people from seizing even more of your tax dollars and sending your tax dollars off to a secret account on the Cayman Islands. But then. After you have signed, another page pops up asking you to contribute $13 in seed money. Or 133 dollars in seed money. Or 1333 dollars in seed money. If you do not plant seeds you are not going to raise a crop. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself if the purpose of sending you that MoveOn petition was to get your signature? Or to get seed money? Only cynical old Maine men wonder what is done with all that seed money.

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6. My wife Marsha’s youngest child teaches school so I was surprised to hear from her the other day. I asked my wife. “Why isn’t she in school?” She said, “It’s Sunday.”

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7. One day a radio friend asked me in an email why I had something on my Facebook page that would indicate to even a casual observer that I wasn’t very clever. Of course anyone who spent any time at all on my web pages would be likely to find more than one of these little items. Although I didn’t say that, I did write back that I’m not afraid to admit that there are many things I don’t know. For years on my radio show I talked about all the incredibly stupid things I have done. Doing numb things makes one human, and although 49 percent of the people might not want a person who does stupid things to be the president of their country, they might enjoy reading about numb people in a Mark Twain or O. Henry story. And they might enjoy hearing this person tell stories about himself and his friends on the radio. Years ago long before computers my newspaper column was carried in over 50 newspapers in the US and Canada, and for years when I submitted my newspaper column it always had one misspelled word in it. It gave people a feeling of superiority to find that error in my writing. It made them feel good. I am in the business of helping people feel good about themselves. I often do it at the expense of doing or saying things that let them feel superior to me. You can really dislike someone who knows more than you do but it is hard to dislike someone you think is stupid.

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8. The email I got said, “Our newest DVD: Girls Gone Wild, Wildest Bar in America is a coast to coast search for the craziest clubs loaded with the hottest girls.” Wouldn’t it be fun to travel Fort Myers looking for the Wildest Trailer Park South of Georgia? There are many parks in Florida that would take honorable mention. I have seen 80-year-old women lie by the pool until their wrinkled skin was black and crusted. I have seen retired doctors and bankers, octogenarians all, sneak out an hour before sunrise to illegally water their parched lawns. I have seen a woman go back north in April with one aged husband, only to return in November with a different one --- and he didn’t last out the season. I have seen with my own eyes, four people with a combined age of 368 playing bridge until 9:30 pm. I have seen seniors gone wild.

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9. Years ago an airplane was getting ready to leave the airforce base up at Limestone, Maine, and my friend Winky was waiting for the truck to arrive to pump out the aircraft's sewage holding tank. The captain of the airplane was in a hurry, but the truck was late in arriving, and there was so much snow and ice around it took a long time for Winky to hook up the hose to pump out the tank. When the captain of the plane said that he was going to see that that Winky was punished for being so slow, Winky said, "Sir, I have no stripes, it is 20 below zero, I am stationed in Limestone, Maine and I am pumping sewage out of an airplane. What could you do to punish me?" The captain said, “There’s always recess duty.”

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