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

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1. In checking out the weather for St. George, Maine for the month of March, I see that it was 10 or so degrees colder this year than usual. This is nothing new. In recent years it has always been 10 or 15 degrees colder than usual in St. George, Maine. Did you realize that there are some forces of nature that have been distorted by the mindless tinkering of man? I blame all this cold weather on daylight saving.

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2. While eating dinner I watched part of a documentary on Africa. I don’t know much about Africa. I’ve only been there once. Africa is very big and contains many countries that constantly change their names. Some of these countries are more dangerous than our Wild West as people are stealing their neighbor’s cattle and fighting over water holes. One thing the narrator said on the program stuck with me. He was, he said, five miles from a neighboring country. Old men, women and children had recently been massacred in the spot on which he was standing. He showed a hut where 5 children lived. Their parents had been killed by the raiders. In talking about the country five miles away, he said, "They have no government. Everyone is armed to the teeth." Sound like Tea Party heaven?

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3. We all know what we know. And what we know is probably of no interest to anyone else. Yesterday I got to thinking that I am probably one of only three people in St. George, Maine who knows the difference between J. J. Thompson and J. J. Johnson and can tell you what they did. (If I say I am the only one, I risk getting a call from David Mumford.) --- Or what Stottlemeyer, Japp and Lestrade all have in common. Have you ever stopped to think that the only things we know are the things that matter to us? Last night I climbed up into bed and reviewed 1,000 Italian flash cards. I missed about 200 of them, but before I went to sleep probably knew all but 5. Many would not consider this an exciting way to spend an evening. But 100 years from now will it matter if you smiled at the greengrocer's apostrophe?

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4. Did you see the picture of the giraffe and the sick zoo keeper? The caption said, “A terminally ill zoo worker got a goodbye kiss from a giraffe.” Here's an example of how things can be misconstrued. Any animal sniffs or bites objects to see if it is good to eat. The other day when Marsha's car broke down on the road, a dozen or so cows with long horns came over to the fence to see what was going on. Had I stuck my hand out to the cow, you know what would have happened. The caption could have read, "Sympathetic cow kisses hand of man with broken-down car" --- in possibly the most heartbreaking human-cow interaction ever.

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5. Someone in California sent me an audio tape touting the benefits of eating algae, which I listened to on my way to the dump. You eat this algae and drink 15 glasses of water every day and, according to the testimonials, you lose weight and you feel good. I probably would have tried it if they had stopped there, but then they said you’d have the same amount of pep and energy as you had when you were 20. And that killed it for me right there because I was just as tired when I was 20 as I am today. I’ve heard that a friend of mine is on one of these algae and water diets and that he has lost 30 pounds. You can see how that could happen. No matter what you eat, if you put it down on top of 15 glasses of water every day, you’re going to lose weight.

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6. Spring Break always floods Southern Florida with tens of thousands of college students who went there for the irresistible call of melanoma and alcohol induced coma. One morning during Spring Break the reporter on TV said it took him an hour to navigate the bumper-to-bumper traffic to get out to the beach and an hour to get back, but he said “It was worth it.” I wouldn’t know. There is nothing on a beach that would interest me, unless it would be a shady spot where I could study Italian. North of the Carolinas, in February blizzards are the order of the day so it is understandable that rich college kids ---- redundancy there --- so it is understandable that college kids will hop a flight to Fort Myers’s SW International for a week of “fun in the sun.”

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7. There are no snowmobiles in Florida or Arizona. So what’s to do for young people who live there who are bent on destruction? Just as sure as snowmobiles go through the ice in Maine, during spring break a girl or two will “go missing” never to return to her books again. We will be told that “She had been at Googin’s Bar until 2 A. M. and told her friends that she was going to crawl back to their room.” One or two of the jocks on spring break will drown or die from alcohol poisoning. It is a statistical fact that if tens of thousands of kids get drunk for five nights in a row, too many of them will not survive. As far as I know, I was the only student at Potsdam State Teachers College to go south during winter break in 1959. Back then, at a state college, it wasn’t the thing to do. But I hated the cold. With next to no money and a lot of unread books in my $5 a week off-campus room, early one morning I stood out on the road and hitchhiked to Florida. I had no place to stay when I got there and a night in a motel was an unthinkable luxury. Hitchhiking was easier 60 years ago. A veteran could put on one’s white sailor hat and a pea coat and go most anywhere there were roads. I can’t remember what I did when I got to Florida although it is probably recorded in my diary for that year. I do know that I didn’t drink and I didn’t go to the beach. If you figure 48 sleepless hours to get down, I probably had just time enough to turn around and came back. Reading my diaries for the years between 1955 and 1965 gives me very little hope for the survival of the animals we call the human race.

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8. You have to be very careful about what you write in newspapers or say on the radio. One day I wrote, “Have you ever gone out to start your tractor that has been idle for two weeks and discovered that some bird friends have built a nest on the seat and hatched out some little birdies?” Had I let that stand, how many of the orthonologically oriented cognoscenti would have sneered and pointed out that only the red peckered jargon could have built a nest and hatched out chicks in the allotted time period? And because the red peckered jargon only infests caves in east-central Tibet, the likelihood of finding a pair nesting on a Maine tractor seat was highly unlikely --- and I’d better get my facts straight. It is nice to have a discriminating crowd of friends because it keeps one on one’s toes. Thank you.

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9. When ants build a home in your driveway, you drive right over them without giving Mother Nature’s ignorant little creatures a thought. But can you bring yourself to dispatch the little bird friends on your tractor seat just so you can dig your garden? Does thinking about this type of thing make you smile with indulgence at the ignorance of Mother Nature’s little creatures? Their behavior is dictated by an innate force that cannot be compared with a human being’s ability to reason. --- You are able to see the relationship between cause and effect. But then you turn on the news and see that neighborhoods in California have been evacuated because people built homes contiguous to mud mountains which dissolve in the rain every hundred years or so. A minute later you see people digging out some unfortunates who built a home beneath a mountain that shrugs off an avalanche of snow every other generation. How long ago was it that you saw a dozen or so homes go up in flames because they were built in the middle of a tinderbox of a forest? And then there are the hundreds of people living so close to the riverbank that every year you see pictures of them stepping off the remains of a roof into a neighbor’s boat. Uncle Jack has written pages about the houses that continue to be built and washed away on the rapidly eroding sands of his beloved Outer Banks. These inevitable, predictable and very expensive natural disasters in themselves are nothing to marvel at. It is human to make foolish mistakes, but because we walk upright and have opposable thumbs (combined with a modicum of reasoning ability), we are better off than the ants who continue to build and be crushed every day in the driveway. The depredations of Mother Nature paraded on the daily news are really nothing to cause concern. It is the follow-up on the next day that makes your jaw drop because, when interviewed, the survivors inevitably say, “Yeah, as soon as we bury grandma we plan to rebuild.”

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