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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for August 10, 2014

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1. I don’t remember who sent me this email, but I am grateful and I hope you’ll send me more. The email says, You ain't lived till you tasted salt cod dried on the roof of Dennis Browns camper next to the now defunct St.George dump.

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2. A woman was wearing an Amelia Island shirt to the grange supper the other night, so I asked her where it was. It's on the Florida coast right by the Georgia border. People from Maine, who still enjoy the frost and cold during the winter months, but not the snow, winter on Amelia Island. It's like having a condo in Myrtle Beach, which is an excellent place to be when it's too cold in Maine but still unbearably hot in Fort Denaud. But Amelia Island is not a place you'd want to be at any other time of the year. Like South Carolina, Amelia Island is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Cold is on my mind because, although we now have fuzzy sheets on the bed, it is already time for the electric blanket. Last night I had to wrap my feet in a woolly bathrobe when I went to bed to keep from being uncomfortably cold. Around the first of September, within a week it goes from so hot in the bedroom (80 degrees) that we have to run the fan for the first hour after sunset to cool the room down, to so cold that we have to wrap our feet in sweaters when we go to bed. I've already been wearing a sweater over my pajamas for a week or so now. Every day the sun shines for the next two months I'll have to divert the solar heated hot liquid into my cellar floor. Any other time of the year, as you know, our solar system simply pre-heats water before it goes into the electric hot water heater. My cellar office will be the only really comfortable room in the house. You understand that turning on the solar radiant heat during the summer months would drive the temperature down here up to an unbearable 80. But when it's cold everywhere else, it's nice to come into a room that is a pleasant and constant 76.

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3. You might have heard on the news that a Utah elementary school teacher, who was carrying a concealed firearm at school, shot herself in the leg when the weapon discharged in a faculty bathroom. We would assume that it was an accident. Could it have happened while, thinking she was alone, she was trying to improve her lightning-fast draw? Or could the incident been the result of something much more intimate and personal? The school spokesman says the gun went off shortly before class started. The media weren't given any details about the woman or what she taught, but she was carrying the weapon legally with a concealed firearm permit. Utah law allows teachers, and anyone else licensed to carry concealed weapons, to wear a gun in a public school. Officials are still investigating how the gun discharged. May we therefore postulate that there are two categories of nuts in Utah?: the one that comes into a classroom intending to shoot students and the one that carries a concealed gun while teaching a class, thinking that he or she can out draw --- and actually hit --- the intruder who enters the room while spraying bullets from an automatic weapon. One learns from this: if you're planning to wipe out a classroom of children in Utah, get the teacher first, as she might have a gun. I wonder if anyone knows how difficult it is to hit a person at 20 feet --- even a person standing still --- with a pistol that fires only one bullet at a time. You've seen YouTube or news video of store clerks and robbers exchanging a hail of gunfire without either one of them scoring a hit. Anyone who thinks it is easy to intentionally shoot a robber has watched too many cowboy movies. It is much easier to shoot yourself --- or someone else --- by accident. I remember seeing a comic strip of a real western gunfight in a Mad Magazine some 50 years ago. The point of the strip was, This is What Really Happened In a Gunfight: Two men facing each other on the street. One whips out his piece and blasts away, hitting nothing. The other, a seedy looking character calmly removes his gun from the holster, spits tobacco juice two or three times, lifts the pistol up to eye level so he can take careful aim, and finally shoots the other guy dead --- all this time being surrounded by a hail of bullets. Should we now help the Utah officials who are scratching their heads, trying to figure out how the teacher's gun discharged? Someone stuck a hand down into some dark, secret place and pulled the trigger. If my kid were in that teacher's class, she'd get no perfume from this parent at Christmas time, but a tube of Maximum Strength Hydrocortisone Anti-Itch Cream.

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4. Here’s something that might help you grow a better garden next year. It has to do with irrigation and I call it: The Elimination of Inter-Plant Trickle. My squash crop is a failure this year because I didn't water it on a regular basis. My brother plants around the Fourth of July, his garden is watered 24-7 from a hose that runs down the hill from great-great grandfather's spring, and his crops reach for the sky while mine are brown and dead. But this morning, writhing in bed like a sluggard until 0702, I conceived a new watering system for my garden. My trickle hose always leaks and breaks, but I think I can beat it. I first thought of having a long hose with a couple dozen Ts that would feed individual hills. I couldn't figure out how to control the flow. And the Ts would be expensive. But now I know what I'm going to do. My squash hills might be 6 feet apart, or the length of a long handled shovel. I will cover the trickle hose with five foot lengths of larger pipe and only permit a foot or so of the trickle part to be exposed over the hill. Actually, I plant in valleys. The larger pipe is available for free at one of the 10 Best Dumps in the United States. By covering most of the trickle hose with a larger pipe I will only be irrigating the 12 inches over the plant, and the water that is in the 5-foot length of larger pipe in between the plants will even run out on one end or the other, thus not irrigating weeds that would thrive from the water trickled between the plants. You might want to give this way of doing things some serious thought. It is yours as a gift from me.

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5. When I say we had a crop failure, I mean that I might only get 20 or 30 buttercup squash for Marsha to freeze up to last us all year. We usually have 200 or more squash and sell or give away most of them. Looks like this year we will only have enough for our own use. In early September I helped Marsha pick beans. We only had three poles. The deer ate most of the middle part out of them. But she says she got 8 quarts or so (as I recall) that she put in the freezer. Now that I think of it, I'll put down the same irrigation system on my rhubarb before it comes up next spring. What I conceive should rival the heating system in the baths of Pompeii. By just watering the plants, it should cut down on weeds that thrive when you sprinkle the entire garden. What do you think of that, deah?

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6. Craig says, “I had a teacher once who had the theory that the reason it was so hard to get people to stop driving to work and commute on mass transit, was because for many people it was the only "quiet alone time" they had in the cacophony of their daily lives, and we absolutely needed that. That seems to be changing in the short term, as we populate our car with gizmos, but once the robots take over the driving responsibilities, maybe we will be able to return to our peace and quiet.” This is an interesting observation by Craig. Nowadays you see so many cars go by with people talking on cell phones, have you ever wondered who or what might be driving? And would you want to meet it in the woods at night?

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7. While out for my morning walk I noticed that Jimmy Parker is shingling his north roof. He's also replacing all the boards first so he'll have something to nail to. Jimmy saw me pick up a nickle bottle some Port Clyde native had thrown on his lawn the night before, so I figured I'd better stop and garner some gossip. He tells me that his daughter is still lawyering in Washington, DC. When I mentioned that I drive 100 extra miles on my way south just to avoid sitting for an hour in DC gridlock, Jimmy said I should get a TV screen for my car. He says a German man told him that Americans do everything in their cars except drive them. Americans have cup holders so they can drink and phones so they can talk and TV screens which they watch during the hours they are stuck in traffic. The German man said, "In Germany we drive our cars." What do you do in your car? I can barely remember what I used to do in mine.

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8. The problem with getting information from any web page is that you first must know the source. Knowing nothing about the source of a web page about student debt, I have no idea if this page on Student Debt was written by the banking industry or a person who actually wants to educate us. Knowing the source of your information is the first and most important thing about becoming informed on any topic. For example, when you see thousands of red signs along the highway that say, "Vote No on #1" you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be to your advantage to vote Yes on #1. And this is without even knowing what the issue is. When corporate America is willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on huge green or blue signs to sway your vote, and even have trailer trucks out by the road with huge messages on them, you can be sure that those signs are there to help you vote against your own economic interests.

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9. You remember back when I made some shelves in my new office? They were all a fraction of an inch too small. Nothing worth putting on a shelf will fit on any of them. Why does this happen? My boat building neighbor, Jimmy Parker, claims it has to do with the Puritan Ethic of Economy. That means that people in New England can’t bring themselves to waste any space. This is why a barn is always just large enough to hold everything you own. Richard Hill tore his barn down because he knew that was the only way he could get rid of what was in it. Whenever anyone in Maine builds a box or a shelf, they measure what they want to put into the box or on the shelf, and then make them just that size so that there is an exact fit. But when you do that, the shelf or box is always an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch too small. Jimmy Parker claims that this problem will be eliminated when we convert to the metric system, because a meter will give us three extra inches for every yard.

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10. One morning I saw something that made me holler and laugh out loud. It said that former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife were convicted of taking bribes to promote a dietary supplement in a corruption case. Taking bribes seemingly temporarily derailed the career of the onetime rising Republican star and told us more than we wanted to know about the couple's broken marriage. We have to assume that they fought and bickered all the time. Only greed for more money kept them together. Do you remember when this handsome smiling man was considered a possible running mate for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign? Now we read that he and his wife face up to 20 years in prison for each conspiracy, fraud and bribery conviction. Do you know what this man said when the cell door was about to close in on him for taking bribes? They say he turned and quietly said, "All I can say is that my trust remains in the Lord." And that is when my next door neighbor probably wondered where the raucous laughter was coming from. Do you remember when Jim Bakker was locked up with Lyndon LaRouche? The humble Farmer question for the week is, "Who would be an appropriate cell mate for Bob McDonnell?" Perhaps his wife?

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