Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for October 25, 2015.

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1. A while back I was up in Millinocket, and someone was telling about the winter of 1933 up in the St. John River Valley. The winter had been bad with sub zero temperatures and deep snow --- as usual. A very old and tiny man who had outlived his friends and family passed away, and the undertaker was charged with storing the remains until the time when spring thaw would facilitate a burial. Unfortunately, the undertaker had put up his hearse for the winter, and he didn’t want to take it out. This was a problem, because he could only legally move a body in a registered hearse. But the people of the St. John River valley are a resourceful bunch. And the undertaker said, “He was just a little fellow, so I folded him up and braced him up in the back seat of my car. I put a hat on him and a coat and a scarf. All braced up against the seat nobody could tell. But we only went a little ways when we slid right off the road into a snow bank. “Just then my cousin comes along and he helps me out of the car. And I’m standing there trying to get my breath when he opens the back door and notices that the fellow has fallen on the floor and isn’t breathing. So he gets some snow and starts rubbing it on his face. And when I see what he is doing, I say, ‘That probably won’t do no good. He’s been dead for three days.’”

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2. There are people who impress me with their dry wit and after I laugh, I write it down because I know you’d probably like to hear it, too. Gladys, who lived next door to me for years was a master when it came to irony. The process entails saying something so ridiculous – something that you know means the exact opposite of the face value of their words, that you have to laugh. Yes, there are well known people, who appear from time on the evening news, who say the exact opposite of what you and everybody else who can read knows they are actually doing, but I’m not talking about blatant equivocation. I’m talking about people who know that they are delivering up first class irony and who know that it will be appreciated. Years ago I remember telling Gladys that my wife was about to be visited by her daughter who was coming home from college for the weekend. And Gladys said, “That’s nice, she’ll have someone to help her around the house.”

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3. We were talking about my old neighbor Gladys who was a master at irony. My late friend Doris who lived to be 95 also warrants our attention. I was telling Doris about a clarinet player --- who happened to be my great uncle --- who played for dances back around 1910. But his wife didn’t like it because he was very popular like any musician in a band, and he was always going home with one of the girls. And Doris said with her very proper 93-year-old voice, “Wasn’t that nice of him. He wanted to make sure they got home safely.”

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4. There are two ways of looking at most everything. But when my wife Marsha made pickled beets, Mark said, "Too bad that she didn't can something people really like." All I could think was, "He has never had Dolly Davis's pickled beets." There are women and there are women. And there are pickled beets and there are pickled beets. So there is a chance that the reason Mark doesn't like pickled beets is because he never had any good pickled beets. Desalniettemin. desalniettemin is a dutch word that means however and it is a fun word to say. desalniettemin, However, on the other hand. I do not care for what people in this country call biscuits. I can eat a dozen yeast rolls, but I don't like biscuits. And, every once in a great while someone will say to me, "Ah you don't like biscuits because you have never had one of these biscuits" So I am pressed into taking a bite. And every biscuit i have ever been teased into eating tasted just as bad as the last one. So perhaps Mark's taste buds are such that there never can be an ideal pickled beet that he would like. I know. Biscuits taste bad.

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5. Are you ever confused by what you read on web pages? I wanted to send Aaron Robinson a message. After locating his contact page, I filled in my info and my message. And on the bottom I read, ENTER CAPTCHA. Somewhat puzzled, I typed CAPTCHA on the line. I typed in captcha two or three ways. But I was stopped dead in my tracks. Then, way over on the right, I saw a word. I typed that word, and lo, the gates opened wide. Please tell me if you have ever seen CAPTCHA or anything similar before. Why do web pages have to be so complicated?

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6. A while back a woman who does a lot of public speaking wrote me a letter asking for advice. She said she gives the people in her audiences an evaluation sheet. But no matter how wonderful they said she was in the written part of the evaluation, most of them never give here more than a seven on a scale from one to 10. I told her that if I were having that kind of trouble, I’d ask them to evaluate me on a scale from one to seven. She didn’t write back.

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7. From time to time I say something that I hope might help you and because this is one of those times, I hope you will listen carefully. For many years I was a humorous after dinner speaker and in that capacity I attended association meetings all over the United States. When I did I sat in on their seminars and I learned a little bit about their work and the financial aspects of their businesses. So, if you are a young person who is still undecided as to a career, you might want to make a note of this. There is more money to be made in burying dead people than there is in healing sick animals.

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8. One day while walking through the airport in Newark I saw something that swung me around in my tracks. It was a sign over a pile of shirts that said, “3 for $199.” Three shirts for $199? It was a slow morning so the woman in the store came over and asked if she could help me. I said I couldn’t believe that anyone would pay $199 for three shirts. She said that she sells a lot of those three for $199 shirts to bankers and lawyers and hospital presidents. Would you like to give this some thought? Could we not probably cut your interest rates as well as your health insurance in half if we could get bankers and hospital presidents to buy their shirts for a dollar at Good Will and lawn sales like you and I do?

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9. You hear a lot about togetherness. Families should do things together. One day one of my wife’s kids drove from Maine to Rutland, Vermont with dog, kid and husband. Can you think of anything that will bond a little family quicker than riding 200 miles on icy roads in a Volvo with a large wet dog? At my age, such outings, although they sound delicious, are beyond me. In other seasons one might bundle up the little family, sit for hours on a hard bench in 30 degree temperatures, and pass a hot thermos from lip to lip while watching a football game through lightly falling sleet and snow. --- Not my thing. Then there are the eagerly awaited four days in Orlando, where one finds unidentifiable items behind the bed, the smell of chemicals in the corridor, questionable bedding and a shower that doesn’t work. --- Been there done that. So what can an old man, with a glint in his eye, and his beautiful adventurous young trophy wife do to maintain this essential, never ending bonding process? It might surprise you to hear, that every morning, the first thing my wife and I do when we wake up is take our pills together.

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10. Parents. Here’s another one of those terrible things that children can be exposed to on the Internet. If your children are wandering around out there in Internet land, please be advised that this is the type of thing that they can and will be exposed to. I recently read --- on the Internet --- that ISABELLE, daughter of Charles VI of France, was only seven when she married England's 29-year-old King Richard II in 1396. Three years later, she was a widow. You know, this is unfortunate, but what else can you expect when you marry a man old enough to be your father?

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11. There are two kinds of people on this planet: those of us who get tired, and the lucky ones who don’t. It is my understanding that Gary Hyvarinen doesn’t get tired. Raol Champaign and Donald Jacobson can allegedly get by on four or five hours sleep. My Onkle Rulle in Sweden said he never got tired, and if Bernard Davis ever gets tired, he won’t admit it. If my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, were a farm girl, she’d have her day’s work done and be out in the henhouse an hour before sunrise, shining a light in the rooster’s eyes, trying to get him to crow a little earlier, just so everybody else would have to get up. It’s not fair, but I get tired in the afternoon. I can usually get through the mornings, but at 3 or 4 or even one in the afternoon, this tiredness can hit me like a sledgehammer. Bang. There are exciting things I want to do on my farm, but all of a sudden I can’t get out of my tracks. I just want to drop. The other day I says to my wife, “Why did you marry a man who is always tired?” She said, “Well, when I used to come down here to see you evenings, how was I to know you’d been sleeping all afternoon?”

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