Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for October 4, 2015.

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1. Do you use Facebook? For some of us, Facebook is a valuable tool. The other morning I awoke with the first two lines of a limerick in my mind: There once was a doctor named Murray, Whose hands were incredibly furry. I posted this on my Facebook page, and within minutes Mike, who lives over in Spruce Head, posted the last three lines. I edited it a bit and came up with this:

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There once was a dentist named Murray

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Whose hands were incredibly furry

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As she fondled his chin

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She said with a grin,

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I wear rubber gloves, so don't worry.

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And now I am able to offer it up to you today as a typical example of Maine artistic endeavors. Don’t tell me that there is no use for Facebook.

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2. There is a small wastebasket beneath the sink in the upstairs bathroom. Because in 1970 I asked my father to put a bathroom in a former closet, the bathroom is small in this 1811 house and there is no room on the wall for a rack for the toilet paper. Although, now thinking of it, it could be attached to the door. But, at present, the toilet paper lives on top of the water tank of the toilet. Yesterday my wife Marsha asked me if I knew that I had thrown the roll of toilet paper into the wastebasket. Either I have reached the age where I am unaware of some of my actions, or Marsha is weaving a web of fantasy that will pave the way for my eventual premature commitment. Stay tuned. Thank you for listening.

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3. A few of my well-to-do friends have a thing they call a pellet stove. Does this not conjure up images of turbaned men roasting a goat over a smoldering fire of sheep dung? "You wanna startle that sheep again Akbar? We're running low on fuel." Have you ever considered the benefits of using animal dung for energy? They include:

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Cheaper than most modern fuels

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Efficient

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Alleviates local pressure on wood resources

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Readily available - short walking time required to collect fuel (Even less time required if your living space is shared by a sheep.)

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No cash outlays necessary for purchase (can be exchanged for other products)

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Less environmental pollution

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Safer disposal of animal dung

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Sustainable and renewable energy source

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No people from "away" in their seasonal mountaintop cottages claiming that gigantic whirling blades spoil their view of the distant hills If you use sheep droppings to heat your home --- if you cook over a fire of sheep droppings, I’d like to hear from you. I’m the humble farmer at gmail dot com.

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4. Just now, while putting off plastering a wall --- which I don't know how to do --- I looked in my quicken in my computer and discovered that 9.74% of our income goes to Walmart for food. I was surprised to see that it was that much. Walmart's biggest customer base must be people like me with the lowest incomes. I know people who are so financially secure that they can afford to pay more for their groceries and do buy them elsewhere. The really rich buy organic food at farmers' markets. There are oblique ways of boasting about your affluence. One is to casually mention that you hate to pay your income tax. Another is to let slip that you never buy food at Walmart.

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5. Do you get more worked up over little insignificant things than you used to? I seem to. A while back I went to the store to buy some CD envelopes. They were $9.99 per box and I took two. When I got home I noticed that I’d been charged $10.99 for each one. I have the feeling that I was overcharged $2. Even more recently I went to the store to buy a gallon of milk and a $2.29 pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol. At the register I was charged $4 plus for the Pepto-Bismol. I said, “I looked at the price tag on the shelf long and hard before I picked up this bottle, because your pricing was very confusing and hard to read, but I think it was $2.29.” So four people behind me in the less than 10 items lane had to wait while the very nice check out woman went up to see for herself. I said to the people who were waiting behind me in the line, “We’ll see what comes of this.” The check out woman came back and said, “You were right. Because we made a mistake, we’re going to give it to you free.” I said, “Madam, if it weren’t for this kind of thing happening to me, I wouldn’t NEED Pepto-Bismol.”

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6. Do you think in quantitative terms? One of my wife Marsha's friends replied to her letter with this: "... we live in close quarters – a 1,300 sq. ft. condo in a former church." I do understand that one gets square feet by multiplying length by width. So their place is 10 feet wide and 130 feet long? Have you ever been to our house? I have no idea of how wide our house is or how long it is. The only time you'd need to know that would be when you were going to cut down a spruce tree to saw into a 6 x 6 to replace the rotted sills on the north side. Does a 1300 square foot condo mean anything to you? When I really want to confuse people, I tell them that we live in an area about the size of the reading room at Harvard Law School.

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7. If you think about it, a lot of road rage could probably be blamed on a condition called hypoglycemia which means that some people snap quickly and get mad and do nutty things if they don’t eat on a regular basis. I was over 40 before I learned that if I ate on a regular basis the chemistry in my brain would change and I wouldn’t have these little senseless rage attacks, like a spoiled child, when things didn’t go just the way I wanted. Are there some people you don’t even dare talk to until they’ve had a good meal? They go wild over nothing. You know it. You live with it. You know that when they’re hungry no matter what you say they’ll start an argument or snap at you. You know who they are. Point at one of them right now.

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8. When my wife Marsha, The almost Perfect Woman, came home, I greeted her at the door and said, “Mike has written a movie and if, by any chance, he is able to sell it, he wants me to narrate some of it because he needs a real Maine accent.” Marsha said, “Can you fake it?”

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9. We have an elderly friend who is forgetful. One morning she called to ask if Marsha remembered that she was going to take her to the store, even though Marsha’s car was already parked in our friend’s driveway. Another day our friend spent quite a bit of time looking for a flag that she had just rolled up and put in the corner while complaining that she couldn’t understand who kept taking her things. As unfortunate as this sounds, the problem is even more acute along some sections of the Maine coast where women in their early 30s walk into a local tavern and immediately forget that they already have husbands.

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