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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 17, 2015.

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1. Have you ever been invited over to a friend’s house where they walk the food right to you? Have another piece of pie. Have another piece of cake. Have some more coffee. My friend Winky has an answer for these people. He gives them a wistful look and says, “If it’s all right with you, I’ll take the rest in money.” (Theodore Hook)

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2. How do you make up your mind on bond issues or tax issues when they come up for a vote? You’ve heard me say this before. I follow the money. I like to see who is for or against this bond or tax issue. So when I saw hundreds of signs that say, “Fed Up With Taxes” I knew there was big money out there looking out for its own greedy needs. They aren’t thinking about you and they aren’t thinking about me. And one day I found the answer on the front page of the newspaper. Which way would you vote if you saw that Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola had put up over a million dollars on one side, and the Maine Medical Association had put up $40,000 on the other side?

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3. Not many women do it, but Winky told me that on the day before their marriage his bride-to-be told him about all of her previous affairs. I said, “That took a lot of courage.” Winky said, “It took a lot of memory.” (Samuel Foote)

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4. I don’t know if you ever go to the farm trade show in Augusta every January, but it’s a good show and if the roads are clear you should try to make it up there this year. Winky had a booth there last year like he always does but last winter was special because the governor stopped by Winky’s booth. He looked at a machine Winky had made and it was obvious to one and all that the machine didn’t seem to do much of anything. The governor didn’t want to say anything bad to a voter so he only scratched his head and asked Winky what good anybody could find in this machine that was on display. And Winky said, “Poor people have a lot of them. You can tax it.” (Michael Faraday)

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5. If there is a better way to help out in your community than coaching pee-wee baseball I don’t know what it is. But when my friend, Coach Winky, replaced the best pitcher with another boy, some of the parents wanted to know why. Winky said, “Well, that boy who was striking out all the batters was throwing a curve ball. A curve ball is thrown with the deliberate attempt to deceive, and I don’t think that is an ability we should encourage in young people.”

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6. One of my favorite poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes contains the line, “I only ask that Fortune send A little more than I shall spend.” And it is true. No matter how much we have, it is human nature to want more. I have 14 Model T Ford engines, but one day someone asked me if I’d like two more and I couldn’t say no. Drive down the road in any town or village and you will see row after row of storage sheds where people proudly pile possessions --- little alliteration there like you hear in Beowulf --- people proudly pile possessions that they obviously don’t need. For years I’ve coveted my next door neighbor’s old green garage. It sagged on both sides and I knew that some day soon he’d tear it down and build a new one. Before that happened I planned to offer him a couple of hundred bucks for it and drag it home behind my tractor. But I went away for a day and when I came home I discovered he’d burned it down. A couple of hundred? If he’d said to me, “Robert, I’ll let it go for four,” I would have given him as much as $400 for that great storage building. What he did was tantamount to putting a match to 40 ten dollar bills. Remember that no matter how wretched something looks to you, one of your neighbors probably wants it. You might want to keep this in mind if your wife suddenly takes an interest in bowling three times a week.

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7. When my friend Winky was a senior in high school, he went to the senior class prom with a girl who was wearing a low, low-cut off the shoulder dress. And after a while curiosity got the best of him and Winky said, “What is keeping that dress on you?” She said, “Only the onions on your breath.”

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8. Have you ever been fumbling around with some project, not really knowing what you were doing, or simply wondering why what you were trying to do was not happening? Just about that time one of the Lemme Show Ya boys looks over your shoulder, and if you are not careful, you will be elbowed aside and someone who thinks he knows more about the project than you do will be digging you deeper into the hole. To be sure, there are some very clever people like my brother who intentionally fumble just so the person looking over their shoulder will finally scream, “For heaven’s sake --- give me that wrench and let me do that for you.” For over 50 years my brother has polished this skill and long ago mastered the art of standing back while some hapless dubber of a Lemme Show Ya Boy sweats himself deeper and deeper into some inextricable mess. You know as well as I do that it is hard not to want to get right in there when someone asks you how to fix the catch on the dishwashing machine so it won’t unhook itself and shut off half way through the rinse cycle, but this evening we are going to salute those who are strong enough to turn their backs and walk away. I recently witnessed an example of the powerful IQ and maturity it takes to do this. Please listen closely. I handed my digital camera to Steve, who was sitting next to me at the breakfast table, said that there were 172 pictures in that camera that I’d like to erase and asked if he knew how to do it. Steve, who has a PhD, proved that he is also brilliant, because he handed the camera back to me and said, “I don’t know a thing about it.”

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9. My friend Winky bought a mess of hens and told me he was going into the chicken business. I said he didn’t know nothing about breeding chickens and he said, “No, but the chickens do.”

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10. My wife Marsha has a friend who looks at movies before they are released to make sure an actor isn’t wearing green socks in one shot and white socks in the next. But what would happen if someone born in 1840 saw a modern movie about the life of Abraham Lincoln? If you lived through that era, you would certainly see many simple little things in the movie that didn’t ring true --- items of clothing, the language, the way the harness fit the horse. This is brought to mind every time I see Clint, for the umpteenth time, in High Plains Drifter. The people who made the movie made sure that all car tracks were brushed out of the two wheel ruts in the road that led into town. And he rides through high grass with only two wheel tracks in it. When I was a kid, some of my neighbors were using horses and wagons and the old dirt road back of my house had three ruts. Wouldn’t you think that movie makers would realize that every time a wagon went over their road something must have been pulling it?

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11. My friend Winky was all set to check out of the store with a can of coffee when he looked in his wallet and found it to be empty. But when he looked up he saw his neighbor and said, “Loan me $20 so I can buy this can of coffee.” But, as so often happens with many of us when we don’t write things down, Winky forgot to pay his neighbor the $20. --- Until weeks later when his neighbor called him and asked if there was anything he could get for him while he was in town. Winky said, “Yes, buy me a can of coffee and take it out of that 20 I owe ya.”

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12. Here’s your wisdom for today: The journey of a thousand miles starts with going back in the house to look for the keys to your truck.

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