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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for April 27, 2014

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1. If tiny flies are attracted by your breath, you might be eating too much fruit.

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2. I went into the Rockland post office and found myself at the end of a long line of people. The man in front of me turned around and whispered, “If you think this line is long, wait until they privatize it.”

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3. The name of the book I paid 50 cents for the other day is Everyday Life Through The Ages. On page 17 I see a picture of the Venus of Willendorf which was carved in Austria 24,000 years ago. --- Perhaps from a deer antler. You might not remember the name --- Venus of Willendorf --- but I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of her in books. Beneath the picture of this grotesquely fat representation of a woman, we read, “The swollen breasts, buttocks and abdomen…may represent a mother goddess worshipped by Stone Age people.” It might just as well indicate that fast food restaurants predated the pyramids by 19,000 years.

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4. You might remember seeing me put up a staging on one warm summer day so my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, could scrape and paint the house. I do not mention this to boast and brag about what a thoughtful helpmate I am but to enrich your marriage by suggesting to you that a truly creative husband can manifest his love in many unique and wonderful ways.

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5. One day I turned on the TV. It was my plan to watch the evening news. But the evening news had been put on hold. There was a football or baseball game on television instead of the evening news. What kind of a country do we live in, when a sporting event can take precedence over an important news program that is going to tell me in detail about the latest celebrity to say something that wasn’t politically correct, have an affair, go to jail, or die of a drug overdose? Only when it has been taken away do we realize how much we count on our national news service to inform and educate.

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6. You’ve heard people say it: “I’m losing my grip.” Of course you are more likely to hear someone say, “He’s losing his grip,” because people don’t want to admit that they are losing their grip. Radio friend George, who graduated from Potsdam the same time I was flunking out, sent me this: “The older you become, the more you need to exercise. … men squeezed a machine that measured the force that they could exert. They lost 20 percent of their grip strength in seven years. The older they were, the more they lost. Those who lost the most height or weight,… and those who took in the most caffeine had greater losses of strength. … No explanation was offered for the association of caffeine with loss of muscle strength.” End of quote. I can remember years ago hearing my friend Julian saying, “Yup, a cup of coffee and a cigarette will get you where you want to go --- as long as you aren’t going too far.”

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7. Dress to look slim. That’s what the ad in the magazine said. V necklines will draw eyes away from fuller faces. That’s what it said, and added that V necklines will make shoulders seem wider and waists slimmer. Why do women articulate these disingenuous complaints about their weight? How can they say they are concerned about their weight even as they wolf down cookies, chips or chocolate? You know someone who will do anything to lose weight or look slimmer --- except stop eating those sweet things that are loaded with salt or calories. True, some of our friends have given up and just don’t care anymore. Yesterday at a birthday party I saw a woman who was built like an apple. She was walking away from the goodies table with a heaping plate of cake and ice cream. A V neckline would have simply made her look like a cracked egg. You can imagine what her husband will have for an obituary: “John Smith died quietly at his home yesterday, surrounded by his wife.” But I want to thank that woman for looking like an apple. The world would be an incredibly uninteresting place if every woman looked like my beautiful wife or Sandra Bullock.

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8. It can be statistically proven that people come in three sizes: large, average and small. Because most of the women used in television commercials are no more than skin stretched on very small bones, the American woman has been conditioned to place herself in the large category. You can't look at a television commercial without realizing that someone is trying to make women dissatisfied with the way they look, smell or feel. This is why even the most sensible woman might be tempted to lose weight --- to diet. Have you ever lived with a person who eats nothing but salad? After a week you beg them to wolf brownies or at least put enough chocolate sauce on their lettuce to make them sociable. A man who lives on the coast of Maine tells me that his wife dieted faithfully for three weeks without losing a pound. She got so cranky that he started avoiding her --- he even fell asleep drinking his nightly hot chocolate in front of the TV and stayed on the couch all night. And then, night after night, his wife lost weight. It was two or three weeks before a doctor figured out why. The television ads for weight loss had made her so sensitive to calories that she'd been gaining half a pound every night just by smelling the hot chocolate on his breath.

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