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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for January 18, 2015.

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1. Facebook friend Craig down in Washington says, “ I used to think the World Wide Web was a network, but now, after being graced with membership in humble's FB clan, I'm beginning to think it is really just a giant Farmer's Almanac, with more advertising.”

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2. You might have seen that some of our animal rights friends want to return a killer whale to the ocean. Do you think that an animal that has lived in captivity for 30 years would survive if returned to the wild? Please give this some serious consideration. Would the poor creature be in the same position as a man who was happily married for 60 years, when his wife dies?

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3. I don’t want to do it, controversy does not become me, but because of what my friends are telling me and what you’ve been seeing on the news, I’ve got to talk about the economy. What you want to bet that the billionaire Warren Buffett could get along on my Social Security income better than many 35 year old kids could. I don’t make enough to pay an income tax and I’m very well off compared to what my parents had. These unemployed people, who are young enough to be my grandchildren, were brought up in a rich kid lifestyle. They pay to go skiing and they go out to restaurants to eat. They buy clothes that they don’t need and they have more than one pair of shoes. You might not believe this, but while buying a dollar chicken sandwich in McDonald’s, I heard the clerk say to a man, “That will be twenty dollars” and something. Twenty dollars to take your wife and a couple of kids into McDonald’s? I couldn’t believe that working class people had that kind of money to throw around. What are people thinking? The fact that a working family can come up with $20 for four plastic containers that contain mostly ice indicates to me that the economy can’t be all that bad. Please remember that you are listening to a man who went to school with cardboard and metal covering the holes in the soles of his shoes. It would seem that hard economic times is a relative term. Kendall Morse said that down in Washington County the depression wouldn’t have been so bad had it not come right on top of such hard times.

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4. Wow. Is it true that people in Maine pay more for electricity than just about every other state in the Union? Why don’t we hear about this kind of thing on the news? According to the chart I saw, Maine people pay about twice as much for electricity as they pay in seven other states: we’re talking Idaho, Washington, Nebraska, North Dakota, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. In looking at the chart quickly, it seems that only Vermont and New York pay more than Maine. What better reason to throw up a few solar panels on the side of your house. Of course, if you think that your power company is all set to slash your electric bill by a third just to bring it into line with most of the United States, you wouldn’t think that generating your own power with the sun is even worth investigation. And while I have your attention, if you think your power company is ever going to cut your electric bill, you might be interested in hearing about a little private hedge fund that is paying returns in the double digits.

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5. You heard about the coffee shop with topless waitresses that someone wanted to open in Vassalboro. The question that came to my mind is the same question that is in your mind right now. Would their health insurance pay for any colds caught during working hours? What do you want to bet that any waitress submitting such a claim would get a form letter back from the insurance company, saying that she wasn’t covered?

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6. Cosmologist philosophers tell us that among the billions of inhabited worlds that have reached the adolescent crisis, the inhabitants on the vast majority of these worlds lack the wisdom and restraint to avoid the population overshoot and resource exhaustion that we're gunning for. I've given this some thought. Seeing as the earth may be burnt to a crisp in four or five billion years, and seeing as the earth is only a collection of jumbled atoms in a meaningless and endless universe, if nothing really matters why, for the past 8 years, have I deprived myself of butterscotch sundaes?

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7. You might have seen those silly little articles in magazines about dogs and their owners. The premise is that people buy pets that not only reflect their personalities but their physical features. We have also heard that people who live together for 20, 40 or 60 years also tend to resemble each other. I don’t know if this is true, because, wouldn’t you agree that an evaluation of the data would be subjective --- as long as we are talking about outward appearance? But could we not prove that, after a few years of marriage, man and wife do seem to approximate each other in their observable habits? I invite you to participate in the following experiment. To confine the experiment within the parameters of solid science, you will be asked to keep a written record of your bathroom habits for a month. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com and if you are truly in love and 100 percent compatible I would be surprised if your results differ from mine. Every time over the past 25 years that I have moved toward the bathroom, day or night, for any reason, I have had to stand by the door and wait --- because my wife had the same intentions two seconds before.

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8. Here’s another junk email that got my attention. If you are a social commentator, you should be grateful for junk email because you will never run out of topics. This one says: “Your wife need your attention? Solve all your problems with IT.” I don’t know why IT needs to advertise. You and I have friends who no sooner left for work, when IT came in the back door.

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9. Let’s talk about our unfortunate friends who have all of their things stolen. They call us or send us an email from Turkey asking us to send them money so the hotel owner will let them leave their hotel. My sister said she got a call like that a couple of years ago. She said, The person called me "Gram" and said he was in Mexico to attend a friend's wedding and needed money sent to him as he had been in an auto accident and didn't have the funds to pay for the damage to the car and also his trip back home. She said, When I asked him what happened to his "Maine accent" he hung up. Well. Let me tell you what I’d do if I got a call like that from a fictitious grandson. I would say, "Look, you went through the last million I gave you in two months. You ain’t getting another cent until your birthday."

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10. One day my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, came home with a pretty jacket that cost her a pretty penny at the Salvation Army thrift store. We have been invited to a swanky (that's a Gramp Wiley word --- he was always talking about something swanky) --- We have been invited to a swanky private art show somewhat south of here and Marsha says she plans to wear this jacket along with black pants. It is really quite a bit south of here, so there's not much chance that someone will come up to her at that swanky art show, look at her pretty jacket, and say, "I was hoping that someone would find a use for that..."

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11. I built my own solar water heaters, and I also have 5300 watts of solar electricity generating panels. Because this should benefit you, will you permit me to mention the following? I paid my Time-Warner monthly Internet cable bill. $39.99 Just paid my CMP monthly power bill. $9.36 Just paid my monthly telephone bill. Ooma $3.82 Next year there should be next to no heating oil bill because we will use electric heat. I make it $53.17 for our electricity, computer cable/Roku commercial-free television and telephone bills for a month, which, unless you sit in a lotus position and dispense wisdom from the mouth of your mountain cave, must sound to you like a fairly small amount in this day and age. There might be people in Maine who pay more than $53.17 for any one of the services I mentioned: electricity, cable and telephone. With commercial-free Roku television thrown in for good measure. I know there was a time when my bill for the three was several hundreds of dollars. Although you can't be mentioned by name, may I thank the persons who introduced me to Ooma, Roku and solar energy? And, should you ever decide to take me seriously and save more money than your neighbors by going this route, it doesn't matter to me if you forget that it was your buddy humble who encouraged you on your way. I'm just happy to see you get ahead.

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12. Good thing about the cold wind in Maine. It helps you discover the places where your windows don’t fit tight.

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