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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for April 19, 2015.

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1. You might have read that a Florida man and woman might get 15 years in prison for being overtly intimate on the beach. But as far as I know, not one of the financial geniuses who robbed the country back around 2008 was ever incarcerated. My Facebook friend Jamie says, “If the goal is to maximize prison population, it doesn't make demographic sense to go after 1%ers.”

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2. The letter that I have in my hand comes from Brooke, who is a long time radio friend. She says, “I began listening to your show as a teenybopper. My family is from Christmas Cove (South Bristol area), and I spent summers in Maine and four years at Bates College in Lewiston. I have fond memories of listening to your show with my father - it was quite a ritual for us. I enjoy streaming radio shows and podcasts at the office, and the other day I thought I would see if I could track you down, since I no longer reside in Maine and can't listen to public radio the old fashioned way (over the radio). I was delighted to find your website and have really enjoyed listening to old episodes. Hope they keep coming! Hope you are having a great spring after such a long winter...things are finally blooming here in New York, and I am looking forward to three weddings in Maine this summer! Can't wait to dust off the city grit! Yours Sincerely, Brooke” How nice to hear from you. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com and I’d like to know if you’ve put your garden in yet.

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3. I mentioned that I don’t get invited to all that many local art gallery openings anymore because instead of talking with people while drinking wine and eating cheese, I walk around and look at the pictures on the walls. I told Raymond that my behavior was considered kind of weird. Raymond said, “Too weird for a Tenants Harbor art show? That's like being too fat for the weight watchers meeting.”

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4. You have heard me say that my wife Marsha and I have long realized that ours is a symbiotic relationship. I was driving home until almost 1 AM after doing a show in Auburn this morning. --- (I couldn’t find a nursing home in Auburn with reasonable overnight rates.) And now I can't remember why I’ve always said that we have a symbiotic relationship. Old age makes your mind all foggy. But when I carried the wash into the cellar so Marsha could put some of it into the washer I realized that our relationship can also be compared to a maidenform bra. I lift. She separates.

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5. You can easily find many books and articles on how to save energy in your home by simply changing your habits. Although most of the chairs and tables in our home were broken in by my distant relatives over 100 years ago, we have a nice electric stove with a smooth flat top. It is one of the few rich-kid store-bought-new items we have in our 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 the other 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 I don’t like the way it is heading.

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6. One morning I heard from Roger Long who has a picture of a little sailboat on his Facebook page. It made me realize something that had escaped my attention for over 40 years: Like Hoggy's great-great-great-great grandfather, Captain Albion, who lived three houses down from me 105 years ago, I got my wife off a boat. I heard that Captain Albion said he got his German wife when he reached down into the hold of his ship and pulled her out by the hair. My boat came from Greenwich and anchored in Tenants Harbor, Maine. When the unsuspecting maiden came ashore, I picked her up in my 1919 Model T Ford while she was walking by Lowell Brothers garage with her siblings. When the boat left, she stayed. --- Until six or so years later she fell in love with and ran off with the president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association. For over forty years I had never stopped to realize the poetry in my fortune and misfortune: the sea took her back.

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7. Our good friend, 91-year-old Alden Bent, came down from Dover-Foxcroft and spent a few days with us. And yesterday we got from him a rich-kid toilet paper holder for our upstairs bathroom. He said he got it at a lawn sale and had had it in storage for a while. You know that I am not one to read directions for such a simple chore. I simply emptied the box on the kitchen counter and screwed three of the four parts together. But there was one more part that didn’t seem to fit. It was a little metal dowel with a spring on it and I couldn’t figure out where it went. It was obviously part of the roller mechanism but I couldn’t make it fit in anywhere. So, like any normal husband who can't figure out how to do complicated things, I asked my wife for help. She said "Oh, I left that on the counter. It's part of the coffee pot."

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8. Anyone who has listened to the lectures of Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsky knows that an awful lot of what we think, do and say is biologically determined. It is my understanding that we already have the capability to examine the chemicals/elements in a 16-year-old boy and be able to predict whether or not he will, at the time of what is called a "midlife crisis" be likely to run off with the babysitter, quit his job, or shoot people in a movie theater. We are all old enough to have friends who have done more than one of these things. Outside of one or two unpleasant behaviors, the people doing these things can be dynamic and very successful in their fields. As you know, I would welcome having my impressions corrected or embellished by any neurologist who is an expert on the behavior of human beings --- or other animals.

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9. Once a year, here in St. George, Maine, 100 or so of us gather in the Tenants Harbor Oddfellow’s hall for the St. George Alumni Banquet. An articulate and concise announcement arrived in the mail today and I quickly replied to say I plan to attend. It is my understanding that my mother's cousin, "Aunt Gert," was in the first graduating class in 1901. I graduated in 1953, which was only 52 years later. So I've now been out of school 62 years or 10 years longer than Aunt Gert had in 1953. Aunt Gert was born around 1885 so it is not pleasant to think of these things. In some progressive Maine towns, the alumni association displays a bottle of Irish Whisky every year and the last person to show up to the reunion gets to drink it. Which probably finishes him or her on the spot. It is called The Last Man Bottle Club or something like that. WWI veterans who had fought in France probably started it. I think The Last Man Bottle Club is an institution that could easily be incorporated into our own program and I will have to ask Reggie, who runs the whole show, if he thinks it is feasible. The only problem with our group might be in deciding who would have possession of the bottle for the other 364 days of the year. It would not surprise many to learn that at the last reunion, when two members showed up empty-handed, the one from Port Clyde would feign surprise and say, "I heard you died so I drank it."

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10. I’d like to thank a radio friend for sending me this silly story which I am about to repeat. Years ago my friend Winky was at a tent revival meeting where there was laying on of hands. It was one of those times when people were throwing away their crutches and their eye glasses. And when Winky got to the head of the line and was asked what he needed help with, he said, “My hearing.” And there was a hand placed on his head and a finger stuck in his ear and he stood there for a whole minute with the energy of the whole crowd 100 percent behind him. And at the end of the minute he was asked if his hearing was better. And Winky said, “I don’t know. It’s not until next week.” +

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