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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for March 30, 2014

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1. A woman once knocked at my door. When I opened it, I saw her standing there with her small dog. I said, "Hi doggie." After thinking about that for a couple of seconds, I said, "How does it feel to have someone ignore you and greet your dog?" She said, "It's like living with my husband."

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2. Perhaps the first thought man had upon climbing down from trees was “Why am I here?” Because, at the time, man had no scientific way of answering this question, he had to fantasize. And, as time passed, although man learned new ways to make tools, after thousands of years of scientific and technical advancement, he was unable to shake off innumerable versions of his original fantasy. When man began to live in villages, fear of his marauding neighbors in the next valley necessitated the need of social organization. Almost immediately, and ever since then, two of the most powerful tools employed by those who would lead us about by a ring in the nose are good old primeval fear and fantasy. The best thing that can happen to any governing body is to be attacked. Does not an attack prove that we require a firm but benevolent hand that will protect us from our enemies? Unfortunately, to do that some of our freedoms must be curtailed. Show your driver’s license before you can buy a Rockland-Boston bus ticket. No shampoo on the plane. Alas, our communist friends in China are quietly helping corporate America to bring a once powerful country to its knees. Without communist China, Walmart would have to close its doors. If I had been born a year earlier, I could have shot at Chinese soldiers in Korea. Twenty years ago Nicholson said, “you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” Today the same words from Michelle Obama mean something entirely different. How soon so many of us forget. Although the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is still generating potential “terrorists” every day, the extreme religious conservatives in those countries have been quiet for too long. So what’s to do without an Axis of Evil Boogeyman? What’s to fear? Can you believe that we have resurrected Russia? Whew. Just in time.

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3. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.

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4. Someone said that Miami was only 90 miles from Cuba. Because you'd save a lot of money in shipping, wouldn't it be cheaper for people in Miami to buy things from communist factories in Cuba than communist factories in China? Please tell me why this is not happening. When you stop to think about it, you realize that there isn't that much difference between China and Cuba. They both begin with a C and end with an a.

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5. Planned obsolescence used to be what kept our country up and running. Every year the shape and size of automobiles changed. For years you could tell how well your neighbor was doing by looking at the year, make and model of the car in his dooryard. Nowadays anyone who can scrape together $129 a month for 8 years can have something new and shiny parked in the yard. So the number of miles on your car doesn’t mean all that much anymore. And you know one or two old-fashioned Maine people who enjoy being rich but looking poor, so you can’t tell much of anything about them by the car they drive or the clothes they wear anyway. It’s getting more and more difficult to sort your friends and neighbors into their proper categories and it’s just not fair.

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6. If you are ready to hear this, let me tell you that what you are about to hear is perhaps the most profound thing I’ve heard about computers in a long time. If any children are listening, please take them into the next room because our topic has to do with uncontrolled rage, violence and destruction. You know how Bill Gates keeps making new computer programs and discontinuing old ones, just so you have to throw away something that you’re comfortable with and pay him lots of money to get a new one. It is being smart enough to do this that has made Bill Gates one of the richest men in the world. Bill Gates has got us addicted to using his computers, which are indeed wonderful and which I couldn’t live without, but that has given him the power to terminate anything we like and force us to buy something new that we not only don’t want but do not understand. My Facebook friend Tesa says, “Windows 8 drove my friend Jenn to punch her computer and destroy it.”

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7. There is a new way of thinking in this country today and I think we should talk about it. An 80-year-old man who walks with a slight limp is married to a very athletic 50-year-old woman. Some leaves have accumulated on the roof. Which one of them should climb the ladder and crawl across the roof with a rake in hand to remove those leaves? In most industrialized countries in the world today, the woman would scramble up there like a monkey and have those leaves on the ground before you could say broken leg. However, in the United States the old man has to risk his neck --- because --- if she should fall off the roof, she is unemployable. But if he falls off the roof, he still has his pension.

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8. Winky has given up his five-mile morning run because of the cold fall weather and is now getting most of his exercise by attending square dances. Winky claims he gets more than three times the workout of an average aerobics class because the caller stutters.

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9. A Thomaston man, who was trying to chop down the door to his ex wife’s house with an axe, cut himself and had to have 20 stitches taken. Although he was unavailable for comment, his ex-wife said, “He never could do nothing right.”

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10. Perhaps you remember seeing on the news, the rather plain looking woman who was walking down the crowded city street. There was someone behind her with a TV camera who filmed men who happened to look at her. Now, one might argue that it is not unusual to sit by the sidewalk and look at people on the street. There are fat people out there who wish that they were skinny and there are skinny people who wish that they were fat and there are young boys and there are old women. And if you are interested in people, like I am, you look everybody right up and down. So this rather plain woman is walking down the street, hoping that men will look at her so she can catch them on a TV camera, and they can show it on the national news. And the part you never saw on the national news was the one nice looking man that she came up to and snarled, “What are you looking at?” And the man laughed and laughed, and finally said, “I’m blind. I’m not looking at you.” And she said, “Nyah, but you would if you could.”

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11. Google is a wonderful thing. How else would I have learned that some scientists have discovered how to make teeth fillings out of the same polyethylene fibers used in bullet proof vests? If you are old enough, you can remember seeing superman catch bullets in his teeth and spitting them back at the bad guys. Now, because of her enhanced technological prowess, your average great-grandmother will be required to have her jaws licensed as a lethal weapon.

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12. If you are in business, you might have clever little answers for those predictable questions your customers ask four or five times a week. Nobody knows that you've said it a thousand times and it gives people the impression that you can think pretty fast on your feet. Here's an example. When a local antique dealer is asked if he buys antiques, he always says, "Gosh, I've got to. I can't steal enough to keep the place going."

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