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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 18, 2014

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1. You might have read that when a woman wears a leather dress, a man's heart beats quicker, his throat gets dry, he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally. Some say it is because she smells like a new truck.

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2. You have heard me invite you to visit me in my solar radiant heated cellar/office many times. I am doing so now. If you have ever visited, you know that the first thing I ask you to do is sit in my rolley chair before my computer screen and look up at the ceiling. Hanging from the ceiling are mirrors. Even though you are far below ground level, both of those mirrors enable you to see out through the tiny windows that are at ground level in all cellar walls. Looking in one mirror, you are likely to see apple trees, cows walking about in the back yard or crows flying by. Another mirror is angled so you can see anyone driving into the driveway. Although you can’t see who it is, you can also see legs walking up the doorstep and into the house. I think it was a testimony to the caliber of you and my other friends when one woman looked up and gasped, “Nothing of this magnitude has been attempted since the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887.”

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3. Two of the small grandchildren were in a car between Fort Knox and Verona Island when one saw some men painting high up on some scaffolding. She very excitedly pointed at them and cried, “Piano players. Papa said he knew two or three who got hung on the bridge.”

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4. When my friend Winky was very young, he went to the senior class prom with a Rockland girl who was wearing a low, low-cut off the shoulder dress. And after a while curiosity got the best of him and Winky said, “What is keeping that dress on you?” She said, “Only the onions on your breath.”

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5. When I went into the Maine State Automobile Registration office to get a paper for a friend, I was somewhat taken back by the large crowd of people waiting there. There was a sign that said, "Take a number." Then you wait for them to get around to you. This is a result of downsizing. You've heard about downsizing. Downsizing means getting rid of useless bureaucrats to save the taxpayers money. Most people feel good when they hear about it. But now we are downsized to the extent that when you call a government office to try to find out about something, you get an answering machine which refers you to yet another answering machine. So it is now virtually impossible to find out about anything, and when you go in to register a car you take a number and you wait. Perhaps you're not old enough to remember when it was fashionable to laugh at the long waiting lines they had in Russia. We always saw pictures of the people waiting in long lines, and underneath it would say, "This is what it's like to live under Communism." The next time you have to stand and wait, remember that it is downsizing, with the hopes that you can destroy a government agency so that the agency can be privatized, that has advanced our country to the kind of lines that the Russians were complaining about 40 years ago.

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6. One morning I got dressed, went outside, fed the bee friends some sugar water and put 8 bunches of rhubarb on the chrome farmstand. Nice sunny day but blowing hard out of the NNE. And while I was picking the rhubarb with that coastal Maine breeze whipping around my ears, I said to myself, "Robert, it's June 14th in Maine, old people all over the United States are dying from the oppressive heat, summer will be just about over in 60 days, and you are still wearing your snowmobile suit."

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7. Even years after the discovery of some economic or scientific principle, some of your friends in your community will still not believe it. Some examples might be the evolution of living beings, global warming or the existence of bacteria. My neighbor Captain Freddy didn’t believe in germs. Captain Freddy, who was born around 1880, had never seen a germ and therefore had no reason to believe in them. It took hundreds of generations to discover that invisible little things could cause disease. Before then sickness was often blamed on witchcraft. And, as incredible as this seems today, today there are still many people who have not yet discovered that the manipulation of laws and regulations by powerful corporate entities are responsible for depressions, recessions and the economic woes of working people in general. Much as their ancestors blamed the plague on witches some people blame their economic hardships on crooked legislators or the government. This is understandable because this is what they are told over and over by a corporate controlled media and their friends at work down on the loading dock. Somebody has to take the blame. Let it be crooked legislators and the government. Although today very few of your friends would blame sickness on witchcraft, couldn’t you see it making a comeback today if it were seriously promoted on talk radio?

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8. Did you read that in just one year 22 percent of former students defaulted on their government student loans? Looks like some young people have promising futures as Wall Street bankers.

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9. Years ago while speaking at a convention --- where I've forgotten --- in a state far from here, I met a man who was married to a wonderful woman cut from the same cloth as mine. We discovered this while chatting and while comparing notes laughed and immediately bonded when we discovered that we could answer the questions asked by the other. Are you allowed in the kitchen? No. Even though you can cook your own tasty and nutritious three meals, does she tell your friends that when she’s gone you can’t cook for yourself? Yes. Why? Because she doesn’t consider making a pan of rolled oats three times a day cooking. Are you able to put the clothes in the washing machine correctly? No. Are you allowed to do so without specific instructions? No. Why? Because she thinks it makes a difference if you put the soap in the soap or the bleach receptacle. Have you ever been able to make the bed properly? No. What does she do when you try? She tears it apart and makes it over with what she calls “hospitable corners.” And what does she do when you try to help by hanging out the wash? She takes it down and hangs it properly. There was much more but this will give you a taste of what was said. This man and I have ideal marriages. An ideal marriage is a marriage in which all of the parties involved in it are very happy and wouldn’t have it any other way. Are you lucky enough to have an ideal marriage?

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10. I tell this story only because it is about the funeral of a neighbor and friend of over 60 years who was a great storyteller. And I tell you this story because it is the kind of story he liked to tell and he would laugh if he heard it. The other day I and dozens of other friends attended this friend’s funeral. It was certainly the biggest funeral and one of the saddest funerals I had ever seen in town. It was so big that the parade of mourners who slowly walked out seemed to be endless and seemed to take forever. I was seated on the aisle, and, as a long time radio friend paused beside me in the endless line of slowly egressing mourners, he leaned over, shook my hand, and said, “Why wasn’t your column in the Portland Press Herald yesterday?”

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