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This is a rough draft of Rants for your Maine Private Radio show for May 24, 2015.

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1. My friend Winky is a packrat. He has every receipt anyone has ever given him for the past 40 years. You have to turn sideways to walk into his office. It took him a long time to come around to it but he finally told his wife it would be ok to throw out every paper over 12 years old --- as long as she kept copies.

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2. I once saw a commercial on television that said that my brain might be undernourished. Then, to drive home the argument, it gave a printed quote on the screen from some medical association that said that the problem was ubiquitous. And after ubiquitous they had written the word “widespread” in brackets. I suppose they defined ubiquitous just in case someone with an undernourished brain was watching.

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3. And now, No Things Considered. It took American workers many years to establish labor unions. Corporate American hired thugs to crush unions. Of course that was back before the days when they could crush unions with newspaper articles and television commercials. The original purpose of unions was to give workers a living wage, safe working conditions and job security. Nowadays, with the wisdom that always comes with hindsight, we wonder why employers bothered to pay thugs and police to beat up workers who tried to establish unions --- or stand outside company gates on strike. What a big ado about nothing that was. Why in the world should any employer provide safe working conditions or pay profit-eating wages, when all they had to do was move their operation to some other country? This is, of course, what they have now done. Can you bring yourself to believe that the companies that haven’t already moved out of this land of the free are presently working on it? A few years back you paid higher prices in your mom and pop stores, but back then your dollars also circulated in your community and you got your dollars back. The higher prices were also a reflection of good wages paid to American workers in union shops. Now, big box stores compound our economic problems by not only selling us foreign goods, but by sucking the dollars you spend out of your area. A casino couldn't clean the money out an area any quicker than a big box store. American consumers are now in a lose-lose downward spiral. What are you going to do about it? It’s none of my business.

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4. Every few months or so they have a husband's marriage seminar out to our grange. At the session last week, the councilor asked Winky’s father, who was approaching his 50th wedding anniversary, to tell everyone how he had managed to stay happily married to the same woman for 50 years. Winky’s father said, "Well, the best thing I ever did was take her out to Monhegan for our first wedding anniversary. You know, for our 50th anniversary I think I’ll go out there and bring her back."

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5. It had just started to sprinkle when I drove into the dooryard so I jumped out of the truck and was yanking the clothes off the line when a squall hit. A fitted sheet was yanked off the line and disappeared over the top of a garage 200 feet away. I’d never seen anything like it. Later in the day, when I mentioned it to my friend Richard, I asked him if he’d ever seen a tornado. He said he had seen a tornado only once. It was doubly memorable because it was on the day when he divorced his wife. They split their estate between them. Among other things, he got one house and she got another house located a few hundred feet away. Because this was a friendly divorce they had gone out for dinner with a mutual friend and had just returned to the house that now belonged to him, when they heard a noise like a freight train approaching. They knew that something bad was about to happen so they ran down cellar. Whoom. The tornado went by, and when they came out a few shingles had been ripped off his house. But they could see that his ex wife’s house was gone. She said, “Oh Richard, what are we going to do?” And Richard said, “What do you mean, we?”

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6. St. George, Maine is right infested with artists so I was only mildly surprised to hear that Winky’s daughter had posed nude for an artist all last winter. I asked Winky how he had ever happened to let her do that and he said, “Why not? He had a stove in the studio.”

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7. I’ve been making this program for you Maine people every week now for over 37 years. And some people might wonder why I haven’t retired. The answer is simple. What I do is a labor of love. To retire from anything you have to have been paid for doing it.

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8. Here’s The humble Farmer question for the week. You watch the news. You read the newspapers. So, how long do you think a society can exist when common people get only a meager living for themselves because about half of what they produce is turned over to the military? Here’s the bad news. According to my Encyclopedia Britannica, this type of feudal military organization lasted in Eastern Europe for a thousand years.

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9. The other day I thought about getting tattoos on my arms. But then I realized that I never roll up my shirtsleeves.

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