Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for September 27, 2015.

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1. It is not uncommon to go out in the woods here in the town of St. George, Maine and see a little wooden platform twenty feet up in a tree. I think they call this a tree stand. My friends who are hunters climb up the tree and sit or stand on this tiny wooden platform, sometimes for hours, until a little furry animal comes close and then they shoot it. By this time, the hunter is so stiff from just sitting quietly that he can barely climb down the tree. This is why there is hardly a hunter alive who has used one of these tree stands who has not fallen off the thing and dropped kerplunk on the ground. Perhaps you have chanced upon those wipeout television programs where people crash snowmobiles and skateboards and water skis. So, if you have ever seen a hunter fall out of a tree stand you realize that a popular Maine sport has been denied valuable promotional coverage. Are not producers of Wipeout shows remiss in not adding footage of falling Maine hunters to prime time television?

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2. While looking on line for a machine that would hold 10 hours of language tapes, I found this: It says: "Apple iPod shuffle 2 GB Black (3rd Generation) (Discontinued by Manufacturer)" Now we might be getting close to what I'd like to have. I see that this one was discontinued by manufacturer. Why was this machine discontinued by the manufacturer? Probably too many people were able to figure out how to operate it.

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3. Years ago my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, and I boarded an airplane in London and flew to Boston. There was a nice young man sitting next to Marsha, and naturally she had to ask him what he did. There was always a chance that he might ask her to do something fun and exciting like scrape and paint his house. --- Or clean out his stables. He was not a spy. We used to go to Europe on airplanes from time to time, and I think it is interesting that we never got to sit next to people who say, “I am a spy” when you ask them what they do. Statistically speaking, wouldn’t you think you’d get to meet a spy at least once in every forty or fifty international flights? If you’ve watched any spy movies at all, you know that half of every spy movie consists of a spy-infested airplane taking off in Istanbul and landing with smoking tires at JFK. You know how it always shows the tires smoking in spy movies when those planes touch down. I once mentioned to Marsha that I thought that I would make a good spy. I’m such an inconspicuous, plain looking old man that no one would ever suspect me. I could get away with anything. She said, “What are you talking about? You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of who has had a sandwich bag checked by security.” Marsha should be in the security business. You can’t get nothing by her.

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4. Have you ever noticed how ominous the call letters of some radio stations sound? WRFR sounds like a friendly pet and WFDU also has a warm and furry feeling about it, but how about KUNV? A knock on the door in the middle of the night. You open it a crack and see standing out there two VTPR men in shiny boots. Or, even worse, you might hear, “We’re from KUNV and we’d like a few words with you.”

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5. When our government shuts down a military base in this country, people have meetings and show up with posters to protest. And when our government builds a military base in another country, people have meetings and show up with suicide bombs to protest. Would this not seem to indicate that either our government is incredibly insensitive or that people are impossible to please?

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6. If you are clumsy with hand tools --- if you handle lumber or rocks with your bare uncalloused hands, you might be missing some skin here and there. I brought some nice painted pine boards home from the dump and the paint on the corner of the board was as sharp as a saw blade. Have you ever noticed what happens when you cut your hand or knock the skin off a knuckle? There is a vast amount of living tissue on your body --- I mean you must carry several square feet of skin. But no matter how much solid, happy skin there is on your body, you hit that same teeny tiny sore spot on your hand that you hit two days before. My friend Al who works in a hardware store says this is called the Law of Inverted Averages. A great crowd of people might come in the door at the same time and every one of them will go into the same corner to look at the same box of screws.

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7. Speaking of the law of inverted averages, have you noticed that every day there seems to be more and more famous people that nobody has ever heard of? You can’t turn on your TV but what they are interviewing some famous baseball player or movie star or singer that seems to have materialized already famous like Venus on the half shell. Thousands of people show up to see these famous unknown people perform outside in blizzards or in theaters that collapse or in other venues where people carry guns to protect themselves and end up shooting two or three of their neighbors who throw popcorn or make too much noise texting. Many of us older folks have discovered that we now live in an unfamiliar world where going to bed when the sun goes down looks more and more attractive.

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8. I really didn’t feel like I was wasting any time when I went to town for my annual checkup because it was a typical, cold, raw, wet day on the coast of Maine and I couldn’t work outside. But the first thing the doctor did when he came in the room and saw me waiting in the chair was open the window wide. The wind and the cold rain blew into the room, but the doctor smiled and looked refreshed and relieved. And it wasn’t until then that I realized I was wearing the same shoes that I wear when I go out in the pasture to check on the cows.

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9. Think about what kind of community you'd like to live in if you sold cars or insurance or ice cream or anything else. Would you be better off economically in a community where everyone earned around $100,000 a year, or in a community where two people who each earned $5,000,000 a year were providing employment for all of the people in that community who were happy to have jobs that paid each of your neighbors minimum wage? In which community do you think there would be more money spent in restaurants, car dealerships, hardware stores and every other business? In which community do you think there would be less crime? In which community do you think more young people would go away to any kind of college? In which community would people have more of their original teeth? I'm just asking. What do you think? I’m the humble farmer at g mail dot com.

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10. You might have read that a team of scientists has developed candy that has no sugar or fat but looks and tastes like candy. They are now working on chicken, potatoes, and gravy that contain absolutely no nutrition. Critics of the nutrition-less food program are alarmed, claiming that entire well-fed populations could actually be in the process of being starved to death by their enemies.

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11. You've heard about body language --- that you can tell what a person is thinking by the way they stand. The body language experts will tell you that anyone who has his arms folded across his chest is aloof and uncommunicative. That might be true in New York City, but on in Camden, Maine any man with his arms folded across his chest probably slopped some clam chowder on his sweater.

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