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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for March 1, 2015.

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1. If you are anywhere near my age, you know what we’re talking about here. One of my friends, who plays senior softball, said, “Sixty years ago I played to win. I now play in a manner that will enable me to walk into the house when I get home.”

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2. I’m sure you can find many books and articles on how to save energy in your home by simply changing your habits. We have a nice electric stove with a smooth flat top. It is one of the few rich-kid items we have in our 1811 home and we have it because the flat top is easier for Marsha to clean. As I dropped a hotdog into the water that was being boiled on that electric stove one day, I wondered if it would be cheaper to cook the hotdog in the micro. And then --- I asked myself why I was cooking only one hotdog when it would probably take just as much electricity to cook two hotdogs in the same water. It would be more energy efficient to eat two hotdogs. And if you think about it, wouldn’t a person who is really serious about conserving energy probably cook and eat four or six hotdogs? I don’t think I should say any more because what I’m saying seems to make sense and, if you slather it with our home-made pickles, one hotdog is about all I can handle.

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3. What would you do with illegal aliens? Do illegal aliens bring to your mind a poem by Emma Lazarus that is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty?: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" For years many good Americans have subscribed to these powerful words and refugees have always been welcomed --- with the possible exception of a boatload of Jewish refugees who were turned away and sent back to be exterminated in Hitler’s Germany. When some of my ancestors first arrived here, yearning to breathe free, they were not welcomed by the legal residents. But my earliest ancestors shot the natives that complained and, even if I'll never be fully accepted in this country by the natives, so far, outside of one or two friends from a tribe in Delaware, the natives have pretty well ignored me.

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4. Even before recorded history, man celebrated the winter solstice to the best of his ability. And every culture in each and every age produced a symbol that attempted to adequately commemorate this important event. The Druids are still whooping it up at Stonehenge. And what a work of art Stonehenge is with its carefully aligned 50-ton stones. For the first couple of centuries of Christianity, several dates were given for the birth of Christ, but --- perhaps to encourage people to forget the good old pagan solstice feasts --- December 25th was the date finally adopted by some branches of the church. Churches and mosques, symbols of faith (and also aligned with the winter solstice sun), were built of wood and stone. And for centuries Stonehenge and countless magnificent churches bore witness to mankind’s need to honor and celebrate the coming of a new life. But the art of a truly civilized society will always transcend the endeavors of any previous age. If you checked out your neighbor’s lawn last December you might have noticed that nowadays the most popular symbol to herald the winter solstice is an inflated three-foot yellow plastic duck.

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5. As you well know, everyone perceives the world through his or her own eyes and can, only with an effort, comprehend that each one of us has our druthers. Sharon, a Facebook friend, writes: "Now I know why Marsha is the Almost Perfect Woman....she allows you to leave dishes in the sink." Allows? Marsha insists that I leave my dishes in the sink. If she sees me even rinsing them off so they'll be easier to wash, she says, "Leave those. I'll take care of that." You’ve heard me say this over and over. We have a happy marriage because many years ago I learned to stand back and get out of her way.

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6. My wife Marsha enjoys scrubbing floors on her hands and knees and doing the wash and doing dishes and cleaning up the mess after a meal. It is very difficult for an actualized woman to understand this. This is perhaps why Marsha is happily married and many actualized women aren't.

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7. For fifty cents each I was able to buy at lawnsales fairly recent introductory textbooks in anthropology, sociology, psychology and oceanography. I have read quite a bit in all of them and when I mentioned that I am presently reading anthropology from cover to cover, Facebook friend Anthony said, “Turning from a social science textbook to a newspaper or news show is usually a step down in candor, realism, and maturity.” May I repeat that? Turning from a social science textbook to a newspaper or news show is usually a step down in candor, realism, and maturity. It is getting so that the only thing I believe nowadays on the morning news is the report on the number of people who were shot with handguns the night before.

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8. On day while I was in the Atlanta airport, I chanced to see on the front page of a NY Times that swabbing out someone’s mouth to get a DNA sample has been ruled unusual search and seizure. Ordinarily, I’d say that they could swab out my mouth any time they want, because I don’t mind if they poke around in my mouth. But --- I’m going to oppose this mouth searching business, because --- if they find they can legally poke around in your mouth, and they don’t find anything, it don’t take much imagination to figure out where they’ll be looking next.

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9. You hear me talking about email and how it provides almost as much material for No Things Considered commentary as my daily reading in my anthropology textbook. Listen to this email that came in one morning. All is says is, “Lets get naked.” To begin with, Let’s get naked is not spelled correctly. In the second place, I have never seen anyone, young or old, male or female, who didn’t look better with clothes on. And, finally, you might wonder if the sender has invested heavily in aspirin or cough drops because it was 20 below zero out there this morning.

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10. You will be glad to hear that the last time baseball players went out on strike, it did not affect the price of lobsters. Elsewhere in sports, I read in the expletive newspaper that some basketball teams hire a lot of the good players just so they won’t have to play against them. Then they keep them sitting on the expletive bench so they won’t have to play with them. In preparing this program for you, I learned that if you’re a really good basketball player, you can’t talk unless you use a lot of expletives. I quote, “Too expletive bad.” Expletives will probably soon find their way into Maine speech, because here in Maine we could really use them. For example, the weather is pretty expletive nasty for 9 months out of the year. The old expleters who hold up summer traffic between Belfast and Bath drive me out of my expletive mind. You can follow one of those expletive out of state campers and creep along until you find yourself pounding the steering wheel and shouting, "expletive, expletive, expletive. If you can't drive it, get it off the expletive road." In the summer you can’t get out of your expletive driveway because of all the expletive cars going by. But now that the weather’s so expletive bad that you don’t want to get out and go anywhere anyway, the expleters are all gone. Expletive.

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