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

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1. Your car is German. Your vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your letters Latin. And your days are numbered.

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2. Here’s a letter from radio friend Peter down in Buxton. He is obviously commenting on the show where we discussed the demise of the Maine outhouse. Peter says, “I'm right here, of course! Right here in the City of Buxton, Maine, that is. I married into a Maine family, up in Baldwin, who lived in a huge white farmhouse with attached shed and barn (they didn't call it an "ell," but then they speak with a different Maine dialect from you. Their 'flush' was built into the shed, right where the outhouse had been, because it was near the leach field for the kitchen, so you had to excuse yourself from the living room, wander through the dining room/kitchen room and then out into the (heated!) outhouse to use the flush. For a boy from away, this was a lesson in geography. Pete (known by my Maine family as "Pee'-tuh") . . . but of course they've all moved to Florida now and I've remarried. Took me a long time to find the world's finest woman; sorry I got to her first. We’d like to thank Peter for writing and we’d like to hear from you, too. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com

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3. Here’s another letter. Can it be from the same Pete? I don’t think so. This one says, Deah Humble, In your excitement to tell us "away" people about the sagging of barns, you flittingly mentioned "the ell." A much more important reason our barns have stood up so well here in Maine is that -- not only to feed the cows -- it was MUCH more convenient to visit the outhouse when it was in the ell. Only recently has the "indoor flush" come to Maine, and simply because of it, we've now begun to visit the barns less and less. Hence the decay. Pete (born in Brooklyn, NY; assigned by the Navy to NAS Brunswick in 1968; Maine native ever since)

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4. My hearing aids now enable me to hear a mosquito scratch his ear on the other side of the room. My friend Julian said he didn't know why that information would be of interest to anyone unless you were a bird who ate flies.

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5. Someone called television a vast wasteland. Can this be true when we can watch educational shows like Hoarder, Cops and Repossessing Cars? What do you think about the programs that are offered up on the screen in your living room? I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com.

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6. Do you find this to be interesting? I wrote on my Facebook page that I stopped in to see a friend yesterday and her son said she'd been dead 17 months." And, putting herself in my shoes, my friend wrote: “Most people (including yourself) lead busy lives and it's customary to make a quick phone call before planning a visit to make sure your friend will be home and that the day and time will be convenient. A call like that would have saved you that awkward moment, Robert.” Well, let me say that for years I've made a habit of dropping in on these people. They are on a road that I sometimes travel and when I go by, I stop in. It is not customary for me to call people before I drop in. In the first place, I don't know when I'm going to be there. And in the second place, if I don't get there they have waited in vain and tell me later how I wasted their day because all they did was sit around and wait for me. And as far as being awkward, I don't do awkward. You might see awkward when you look at me and you might feel awkward when you look at me --- but having been on stage making a fool of myself before hundreds of audiences for 30 years, I can't think of anything that would make me feel awkward. However, I can remember what it was like as a beginner on stage and I can feel your pain.

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7. Marsha read something to me about Trekkers. I said I'd never heard of Trekkers. Marsha didn't believe it. You have never heard of Trekkers, either. Nobody has ever head of Trekkers. As an example of how everyone doesn't know everything I recited the following limerick for her. There was a young man from St. BeesWho was stung on the arm by a wasp.When asked, "Does it hurt?" He replied, "No it doesn't I'm so glad that it wasn't a hornet." Marsha had never heard that limerick that we all learned as children. I guess all I'm saying is, "So there." Oh, this was brought to mind by this email that said: dBpoweramp Major Update Hello Robert Skoglund, This year has seen dBpoweramp updated to R15. dBpoweramp R15 is a native 64 bit application, it is faster, as well as removing the 4GB memory limitation. I have no idea of what this means. Please don't tell me, because, unless it will help me put 5 clapboards from Robbins Lumber on my house, I really don't want to know.

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8. Do you eat bacon bits? I don’t even know what they are, unless it refers to bits of bacon. Somewhere I read: for the "bacon bits..."...if you crave bacon flavor try a teaspoonful of water, salt, and artificial smoke flavoring...and spare yourself the "fat"...unless it is the fat that you are really craving...then go for it!” My nutrition expert read this and said, “wholesome fat is good for you. The human body evolved as a fat burner, not a carb burner. Enjoy your [organic] bacon! One of the things that contributes to the happiness in my life is not knowing the difference between a carb and a protein.

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9. Did you hear about the Maine kid who managed to graduate from high school and went to college in the fall? After only a week he quit in disgust and came home. When the kid's father finished unloading trucks for the day and came home for supper, the kid met him at the door, hung his head and admitted to his father that his father was right. Them professors warn't nothing but a bunch of smug elitists who thought they could tell him something he didn't already know.

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10. You have read that radiant floor heating is widely regarded as the most comfortable, healthiest, and most natural heating process available. Floor drafts, cold spots, and dry air are eliminated. Low humidity levels, dust, air contaminants, mold, fungi, bacterium and all problems associated with forced-air heating, are either greatly reduced or eliminated altogether. When Jim Kinney poured the concrete on top of the 300 feet of pex pipe Mr. Libby and I had tied down over the 2 inches of blue board in my cellar floor, I went over to --- I believe it was --- Jim's daughter's house in Cushing. I wanted to see their radiant heated concrete floor. The difference being, I was planning to heat my cellar room with the free energy from the sun. She and her husband heat theirs with gas or oil, I think. Anyway, I was very excited when I learned they had such a system and I rushed right over to see it. --- Just to see what it looked like and to be able to ask them questions. I was also very interested in seeing the system of solar radiant heat that young Mr. Daggett has in his big barn. As you might know, he has 4 or so huge boughten glass tube liquid heaters on the south side of his barn. He's a very smart plumber so his system has all the expensive technical bells and whistles that my simple system lacks. If I were 20 years younger, I'd put a solar snow-melter in my driveway. I know exactly how to do it. Once installed, you'd never have to shovel snow again. The thing would melt the snow in your driveway for the price of running a small electric pump until the glass in your collectors rotted away. Only a few years ago I first saw the solar radiant heated bathroom floor and sunporch floor of a wealthy woman (naturally from away). She had boughten solar water heaters on her roof. I was very excited to learn that you could run little pipes in the concrete tile floor of your shower and heat that floor --- and the floor in your sunporch --- with the rays from the sun. Now I wonder if I'm the only person in town with a solar radiant heated cellar floor. Like Mr. Ewell who is still remembered as the man who had the first car in St. George, I wonder if someday I'll be remembered as the first man in town to have solar radiant heat in his cellar floor.

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11. Remember the old radio program called What’s My Line? They would have people with strange jobs on the show and the panel of experts would try to guess what that person did. I’ll bet that they would never have been able to guess what Grammy Bragg’s father did for a living. I heard that Grammy Bragg’s father Skillings worked in a logging camp in northern Maine. His job was to get up before anyone else and put his thumb on the bottom of the thermometer to warm it up to 20 below. Because if it was colder than 20 below, it was too cold to chop wood.

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Any recording or verbal errors in this program will be corrected when the sound track is converted into The humble Farmer's television show, which runs in towns in the United States where it has been requested by viewers.

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